What is Engagement Analytics and why should you care about it?
Imagine a world where your singular communications platform collects visitor behavior from across your website, earnings calls, and other digital engagements and correlates that to ownership data and stock price. In one application, you report on the impact of your strategic touchpoints with the capital markets, identify new or targeted investors evaluating your story, or accelerate your response to activism. This is the promise of engagement analytics.
What is Engagement Analytics?
Originating in the field of data science and analysis, “engagement analytics” is the current phrase used to describe the analysis of large sets of disparate data, typically involving people’s interactions with the internet, in order to predict future behavior.
Broadly, engagement analytics describes the process of extracting knowledge or insights from a variety of often difficult to reconcile data sources. It is a phenomenon uniquely related to the current “information age” spawned by the proliferation of digital communication, connection, and activity. The purpose of engagement analytics is to collect, extract, and analyze the data associated with a dizzying array of human, online behavioral and digital phenomena to extract insight previously unattainable. Those insights, in turn, have the ability to drive a wide range of financial, marketing, product, and service decisions for organizations across industries.
Q4 believes engagement analytics has the power to transform how we connect across the capital markets.
Why Does it Matter?
Since the promise of engagement analytics can feel both limitless and intangible, we thought we’d ground our assessment of this topic in a couple of concrete examples.
Have you experienced the familiar challenge of trying to accurately predict which of your current shareholders has the capacity to purchase more of your stock? Or have you been trying to understand which new or targeted investors are assessing your story? Or do you have a lack of visibility into the behavior of activists as it pertains to your security? Engagement analytics offers the promise of unlocking these mysteries by combining data on:
- The current positions of your stock holders with …
- Deep and broad data on their digital activity in relation to the content you publish digitally (your websites, and your virtual events) with …
- Their reaction to and participation in your key digital events (like the digital publication of your earnings release press release and your earnings event itself) with …
- Surveillance analysts’ estimations on an investor’s intra-quarter position and how much additional stock a desirable institution could potentially hold.
Taken in aggregate, the combination and successful analysis of these foundational data sets has the ability to drive your targeting strategy … at the institutional-investor level.
Or how about the increasing struggle to show the value of your IR program to management as the capital markets continue to transform? Here again, digital engagement analytics could be the most powerful weapon in your arsenal. By combining that same deep and rich data regarding users’ consumption of and interaction with your digital assets and events (data points like page visits to key web sites, time spend on them, event registration, attendance etc.) with same-time, aggregate data on the movement of your stock, engagement analytics can pin-point the precise effect of your IRO activities on stock performance.
Stay tuned to hear more of Q4’s thought leadership on this topic, including a recap of the 2022 NIRI presentation by our CEO, Darrell Heaps.
Want to learn more? Check out our additional blogs, eBook, infographic, and glossary on engagement analytics.
