To view or not to view – that is the question…
Viewability, attention, clicks, reach – digital advertising is governed by a vast realm of metrics, but how do we ensure what we are reporting back are the metrics that really matter? Here at Encore, we have been conducting research to ensure we are measuring the results that drive real business change and impact our clients in the most positive way for their ad campaigns.
The industry is changing, with the deprecation of the 3rd party cookie, and focus on privacy – this has paved the way for different types of measurement. Talk is being directed around attention focussed metrics, with ad verification partners shifting from looking at viewability to more of an attention-based view.
From our research it’s clear before you begin to look at measurement we need to start with the basics, the IAB and their effectiveness study. This research looks at the five rules the IAB have seen their top 20% performing campaigns reinforce to drive business success.
Ensure focused messaging
Make the brand instantly visible and prominent across all frames of the ad
Deliver new information about the product of brand
Make sure ads are highly relevant – targeting is key
Highly likeable ads are more likely to drive awareness
This may seem simple; however, advertisers must understand that the combination of creative, messaging and value add, paired with targeting & high quality, non-assumptive data give the greatest chance of driving ad attention and engagement.
The idea of generating actual attention is a key component when it comes to understanding digital advertising’s overall effectiveness and the IAB continue & summarise this with 5 key principles.
Quality matters
Think about location
Clean up clutter
Tap into smart targeting
Be creatively fit for purpose
Viewability for years has become the stalwart of advertising agency measurement, with often less rationale as to why and if this is as important as some other metrics. With the industry changing such marketers are having to rethink using viewability as the only measure to determine whether their ads were actually seen.
Players in the market, such as Moat, IAS and DoubleVerify are shifting their viewability offering to more attention-based metrics, to ensure ads are not just seen, but actually paid attention to. Attention in digital advertising refers to the ability of an ad or campaign to successfully engage a user, rather than an ad just being in view for a certain period of time. Moat believes attention is about more than just the click or the view – it’s about the interaction, visibility, the length of time, and the environment.
The ‘attention’ given to viewability means that all impressions have been considered equal – whether any notice has actually been paid to an ad. Although this has given the industry a minimum benchmark for what brands should be paying for, it has meant there is a race to the bottom, with smaller ads being crammed into webpages to satisfy viewability metrics. This has come at the detriment of both consumer experience and media planning alike.†
At Encore, we understand your audience.
Insight can be gathered from Sigma, Encore’s proprietary tool that generates benchmarks and campaign insights. Sigma enables us to analyse viewability as well as other campaign metrics to optimise and drive business success.
When we look at attention metrics (using our partner Moat) – we can see that high viewability doesn’t necessarily translate into the user completing an action (in this case a click). A campaign with a 70% viewability had 32% attention quality‡ – showing viewability should be used as the sole KPI when wanting to drive brand awareness but may have a negative effect on what users do post seeing the ad.
So what conclusions can we take from this?
We know that viewability affects brand resonance, especially in B2B, but does this then become more of a vanity metric to agencies, when what we really want is for the user to have their attention on the ad?
Encore agree that viewability is a key hygiene factor that should be measured during campaigns – however, this should not eclipse the business-focused KPIs.
Attention metrics can be used to create further insight in campaigns where viewability is important and viewed as a key hygeine factor (we cannot optimise directly against them).
Attention should be seen as an evolving complementary metric to more of the standard advertising metrics, with each client creating their own benchmarks through the advertising they are running.
When looking at KPIs, focussing on metrics that can drive ROI and real business success to ensure advertising is hand in hand with driving growth.
This is crucial to the niche audiences that Encore cover across Finance, B2B and Automotive due to their hard-to-reach nature.
When receiving briefs we integrate channel response to gain a deep understanding of objectives and propose a campaign plan that is engineered towards achieving and demonstrating ROI – including both soft & hard KPIs that include attention metrics & viewability.
Combining accurate targeting and high quality, non-assumptive data such as Encore’s Exclusive 1st Party data with KPI’s such as attention and reach solidify the rationale that investment has been truly focussed on making sure the brand is noticed and recalled by the right people.
Tying spend back to a clear, concise campaign conclusion of quality over quantity is always going to be a better demonstration of actual ROI.
† https://advertisingweek.com/attention-is-the-new-metric/
‡ Attention Quality. The percentage of impressions that converted from hovering to interacting