Engagement score question for emails in a program

[Anonymous]

I understand that engagement score is calculated based on number of successes in a nurture program as opposed to actual email metrics but I am still not understanding the scores we're given in our engagement streams.

We have one nurture program that has an engagement score of 90.  It has 14 total members who are considered Success out of 2111 total members.  I still don't understand how that equates to a score of 90??  We have other programs with a much higher success rate with a larger denominator but it has a lower score.  For example, we have another program with total members of 15486 with Successes of 634 and that has an engagement score or 12.

Looking for a way to better understand this so that I can best instruct our team on how to leverage the engagement score.

[Anonymous]

Enegagement score is based on a proprietary algortihm. It takes into account opens, clicks, success and unsubscribes. I am not sure they will share anything more than they have here: https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000LAQLCA4

We have seen similar things happen in our programs. We have noticed that unsubscribes have a big negative impact on the score. Program successes are subjective so I can't imagine these would have much influence on the score. Clicks and Unsubscribes tend to dictate a higher or lower score in our experience.

Anyone successfully reverse engineer the algorithm? 🙂

[Josh_Hill13]

Nope, you have it right Joe.

[Anonymous]

But based on that link, it says that it doesn't take into consideration email metrics/interactions if we use a program in the stream so if we're completely disregarding email metrics and ONLY looking at program membership and success status, I still don't understand how we are getting the scores we are getting.

[Anonymous]

I remember a lot of tracks at summit this year recommending not using programs in streams, and instead just putting the content in there directly. Maybe try that, and run both (like an A/B engagement test)?

[Dory_Viscoglio]

I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate here... How important is the engagement score to you? I was willing to forego the proprietary Marketo algorithm and make my own decisions about the success/enagagement of our emails based on industry standards. As far as I know, Marketo just has one algorithm and it's being applied to everyone... one size doesn't always fit all, in my opinion. 

[Anonymous]

Engagement scores are great when talking to people who don't have strong understanding of email metrics. Saying an email has a great clicked to opened ratio is like speaking latin to some people.

Dory makes a great point. You need to understand that engagement score is what it is. Its a one size fits all metric for you to compare your messages in a standardized way. If programs are affecting the score or you aren't able to make decisions based on it, you may want to look at other metrics to use with your team.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all the feedback everyone!

I was already leaning towards just ignoring Engagement Score all together, just wanted to have a better understanding before I went that route.