SECONDS OF ATTENTION: A NEW METRIC?
The measurement of advertising effectiveness continues to advance rapidly, yet we keep asking the same question:
WHERE DOES MY AD PERFORM BEST?
Today’s average consumer navigates across apps, websites, and social channels at high speed. Moreover, they often switch from one device to another or use multiple devices simultaneously. Despite high-quality advertising campaigns, consumers are easily distracted. Furthermore, only one in five people remembers a brand after seeing an ad. According to Lumen Research, which specializes in attention measurement, only 30% of ads are actually seen. To improve visibility, advertisers typically focus on optimizing viewability, but visibility alone does not ensure audience attention—it merely indicates that ads are appearing on a website. There’s no way to know if a “visible” ad has genuinely been seen.
What if it were possible to optimize campaigns based on actual viewing time, rather than just viewability?
A New Stage in Campaign Optimization
Some platforms are moving beyond traditional metrics to assess the quality of impacts, advancing to the next level: attention paid to our campaigns. Companies that have begun implementing attention measurement are helping advertisers optimize their creatives based on user attention, resulting in significantly higher engagement rates. Optimizing campaigns based on attention analytics can produce better results across the marketing funnel. Attention is a metric that prioritizes the relationship between the consumer and the ad, rather than just the platform where the ad appears.
Experts predict that 2023 will see a shift from the traditional CPM buying model to one based on aCPM, which only counts impressions that meet a quality threshold determined by the buyer. This method aims to measure the ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) of campaigns more effectively.
What is Attention?
Attention refers to the time a person spends watching an ad. It differs from viewability, which only indicates that an ad was in view but not necessarily seen. Historically, viewability has been a popular metric among advertisers for measuring impact quality, focusing on whether an ad had the chance to be seen. This system has favored shorter, smaller formats, which are less effective from an attention standpoint.
How is Attention Measured?
Currently, eye-tracking cameras are used to follow a user’s gaze as they move across the screen, providing insights into how ads are actually viewed across different channels, platforms, and devices. According to Lumen Research, the technical data required for attention measurement includes:
- Biometric data from eye-tracking panels, authorized and enabled by web camera software for desktops and mobile devices.
- Psychographic data from surveys validating brand recall, purchase intent, and more.
- Proxy data such as scroll speed, ad density, impressions, viewability percentage, and viewing time.
Attention Seconds as the New Currency
The ability to measure ad attention is highly desirable and a valuable tool to demonstrate that ads are not only seen but that there is a direct relationship between the time spent watching the ad and brand recall, and consequently, consumer action. One of the most important metrics for measuring attention is “seconds of attention per 1,000 impressions.”
Recent data from Touchpoints IPA shows that while people spend an average of 5 hours consuming content and are exposed to 84 minutes of ads daily, they only pay 9 minutes of attention to ads.
Lumen measures visual attention across all media, applying consistent standards of visibility and viewability. This consistency allows for the comparison of formats and media, using only “seconds of attention” as the currency.
Factors Influencing Attention Levels
Quality and visibility of content are crucial. High-quality content can generate higher engagement and make ads visible for more than 12 seconds. Differences in creative quality can impact brand recall by up to 17 percentage points. Additionally, A/B tests show that ads with optimized creativity based on attention analysis generated 49% more average attention than original versions. Ads placed in relevant contexts for users increased attention by 13% per 1,000 seconds.
It has been found that sidebars attract more attention than headers, assets on the left capture more attention than those on the right, video creatives attract more attention than non-video ones, and vertical videos receive more attention than horizontal ones.
To delve into these issues, Teads, in collaboration with Havas Media Group, presented the results of the “Project Trinity” in 2022. They analyzed over 15 factors such as content design and context, ad formats, and reader demographics in some leading media outlets. This study used eye-tracking and behavioral data from over 2,000 panelists in the US and the UK, provided by Lumen Research since 2018, measuring attention based on user screen time and scroll speed. The analysis found that news, science, and sports websites generated higher user interactions.
Implementing This Metric
In the Mexican market, we saw a few months ago at Teads Vision Mexico 2022 that capturing user attention in a saturated environment is a challenge.
Looking ahead, this event highlighted four key factors to focus on:
- Media quality.
- Creativity.
- Relevance.
- Consumer experience.
Studies on Attention
Teads, in partnership with Dentsu, conducted the “Economy of Attention” study globally and employed Lumen Research’s LAMP program to measure the attention of Heineken Brazil’s campaign as the official sponsor of the “Rock in Rio” music festival..
This was the first time a brand used predictive methods worldwide and became a success story. This campaign achieved twice the viewing rate (66%) and an APM (Attention Per Million) five times higher than the industry average. This was reflected in the campaign’s recall index compared to other sponsor brands. In Chile, Teads and Initiative conducted the first global multiplatform study involving a real-time campaign for Dove. In the Teads attention study with Lumen, Dove Chile’s campaign received 3.5 times more attention on Teads compared to social media platforms.
In Summary, What Does Attention Offer Us?
Attention measurement campaigns provide a distinct perspective on how advertising connects with audiences and the factors that drive users to pay attention and take action after being exposed to an ad. This new method of measurement and optimization offers advertisers the chance to understand what works best for them, thanks to technology. It also helps gather data from ad creativity to formats and domains where ads have appeared, allowing for the creation of a history based on human behavior.
