In the heart of all advertising, the ultimate goal is to cut through the noise and hold a potential consumer’s interest long enough to bond with the brand.
There is no single factor that determines the best possible bidding tactics for your ad campaigns or grabs consumer attention. Numerous, dynamic elements are required for a consumer to interact with your brand. Visibility is no longer enough and ‘attention metrics’ are becoming increasingly popular in the industry.
Attention metrics are an evolution of engagement. As attention metrics tracked today are on the rise, a healthy industry debate has emerged in the quest to refine and define what attention measurement should look like.
As attention metrics and measures mature, brands can learn more, develop a plan aligned with key business outcomes, begin optimizing for attention, and launch their targeting and measurement tactics to capture consumer attention.
Table of Contents
Define attention metrics
Companies need to find an attention metric that resonates with the business outcomes they are pursuing and incorporate it into their marketing KPIs.
Attention metrics can be measured not only by viewability or in-view duration, but also by evaluating any combination of the following: creative size and interaction, ad position, time of day, publisher/program, audibility, cluttered pages, cross-device frequency, and eye tracking. Attention metrics can provide a high-resolution view of the impact of each impression or be evaluated in aggregate.
While viewability remains an important basic metric, it only represents the extent to which an ad can be seen and says little or nothing about whether a viewer has seen an ad. Attention, on the other hand, is a measure based on actually viewing ads.
At MediaMath, we “group” inventory into marketplaces designed to meet a specific campaign goal, run on a specific channel (CTV, native or in-game), or meet specific criteria. For example, the Visible Marketplace only contains inventory that has a high visibility score. Attention market visibility rates far outperform market averages at 91% visibility (averages are typically 60%-70%, while our visibility market averages ~80%).
Attention itself can be further divided into what can be considered proxy metrics for attention and direct measures of human attention. Proxy metrics are measures of detected engagement activity on a device that implies attention, while direct measures are the direct measurement of people paying attention to screens through visual tracking, usually through opt-in panels. Both measures are useful, but it’s important to understand the difference when exploring vendor offerings and methodologies while reviewing results.
Why attention stats
Attention metrics are available across multiple channels, but the industry has yet to decide on a universal metric that applies to all channels. This is why there are different approaches used by different parties, following the different examples provided by companies that provide attention metrics described in the POV.
Here are some examples of different terms used in the industry by different vendors. If these terms are KPIs used in evaluating attention in conjunction with each other, then any combination of these terms can be used:
