It’s About Time: The Case for Real Attention Metrics

33Across CEO Eric Wheeler argues that the industry needs to move past baseline measures of fraud and viewability, to target and test metrics like share of voice, time in view and ad position on page, that have a real impact on advertising effectiveness. 

Programmatic advertising has a quality control problem, but it’s probably not the way you think. We have an opportunity to deliver value for all parties involved — publishers, advertisers, platforms, and of course, the users — but it requires a shift in thinking that frankly, I’m not sure the industry can handle. We need to move away from triaging quality after a media transaction to optimizing deals based on quality before they ever happen.

In a market where people spend nearly six hours a day interacting with digital media, companies like Vox Media somehow miss their revenue targets despite attracting upwards of 78 million readers per month. All signs point to the need for better models for valuing and transacting against all of this time spent.

To do this, the industry needs to begin accepting attention-based metrics. And if you think we’re already doing that — after all, what’s a page view or a click, if not a measure of attention — then I’ll throw down the gauntlet and argue that we don’t transact based on attendance at all. Let’s discuss. 

Digital advertisers, publishers, and platforms currently transact based on a print standard of CPMs tied to pages. However, better devices and more bandwidth have led to content and advertising experiences comprised of rich sight, sound, and motion. And while technology is now able to value impressions based on their potential to capture attention, the measurement standards clearly haven’t kept up with growth and innovation in the space. For businesses looking to optimize their online presence, especially in e-commerce, hiring a WooCommerce SEO expert can be a game-changer in navigating these evolving standards.

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From impressions and clicks to digital time spent

The current digital media buying model is largely based on the traditional publishing business. In the nascent days of digital (think back to the first dot-com boom… if you can), there were pockets of rogue publishers cultivating “online” presence, but no rules.

We transacted based on ad impressions that offered a basic assumption that “attention” was built into the price and clicks, which were metrics that seemed to embody the “interactive” nature of the internet.

Once the IAB emerged to create standards around transacting based on impressions and clicks, the industry was on track to grow into a more than $107 billion marketplace forecasted for this year in the U.S.

But the metrics that got us here are not the metrics that will sustain us going forward.

In a mobile-first environment where endless scrolling, vertical video and other immersive content has become the norm, ad impressions and clicks need to be supplanted, or at the very least supplemented, by metrics that quantify the quality of the time users spend with both ads and content.

In an ideal world, advertisers will be able to optimize for attention before they even make an investment.

Investing based on time is NOT a new concept 

The premise for this type of attention-based buying has always existed within the traditional or “linear” TV market.

Even as advertisers, agencies and media companies follow the consumer shift away from broadcast TV toward digital video, elements of the traditional TV-buying process can be used as a framework to generate metrics that better represent the value of all digital content and the time users spend with it.

When you buy a 15 to 30 second TV or radio ad, you are buying the opportunity for attention. That’s the nature of a commercial during a programming break. So why don’t we adopt this model for the web?

The explosion of all things ad tech means that we’re in a position to deliver clear, actionable insights based on a combination of time spent and some measure of the quality of that time. It’s essentially taking the premium nature of the TV advertising experience and merging it with all of the data around context, viewability and engagement to create a new, heightened benchmark for quality.

The challenge now, is that our platforms, standards and even buying models aren’t set up to accept or value that.

We need new standards to optimize for time and quality

The push for viewability is a welcome step toward optimizing for attention versus an arbitrary million page views or below-the-fold click, but most advertisers have been vocal about how insufficient the standard for guaranteeing a “viewable” ad actually is.

Beyond raising the bar for viewability, true attention-based buying requires performance and attribution models that aren’t tied to post-view or post-click behaviors.

That means being able to measure inventory quality before making a bid, or even being able to offer advertisers the option to pay more for ads that are in view for longer, along with the metrics that prove those ads will deliver greater performance -- in advance.

Also Read: Social Media Ad Targeting and Measurement Tools for Performance Marketers

While individual publishers like The Telegraph and The Economist have been offering time-based buys, and the walled gardens have offered various flavors of engagement-based metrics, there aren’t yet any industry-wide standards around attention-based optimization.

Advances in programmatic are making minimum time-in-view buys a scalable reality for advertisers, but until there’s a consensus around how to measure and charge for attention, we’ll continue to see both established and emerging media properties struggle in the pursuit of sustainable monetization — all while creating subpar user (and advertiser) experiences in the process.

Time is the first of what should be many attention metrics that need be applied to media. It also drives alignment with the publisher for doing what they’ve always done -- bringing engaged readers back to their content and spending time with advertiser messages alongside it. 

Now that we can measure some of these metrics, how are we as an industry going to lean into testing and adding them to our valuation models? Can we let go of the click-based attribution models of a bygone era? It’s about time.