The Fundamentals of Attention Metrics
Why Are Attention Metrics Crucial in Today’s Advertising Landscape?
For the past four deades, advertisers have pursued reach, often at the expense of understanding the quality of that reach. With the advent of new advertising channels, platforms, formats, and devices, audiences have become increasingly fragmented, magnifying the challenges associated with opaque media quality.
Digital marketers adopted metrics like viewability and video completion rate to gauge media quality, but these measures provided an incomplete picture and were susceptible to gaming. The result?
A digital marketplace filled with viewable yet ineffective inventory that fails to drive positive outcomes.
Addressing these issues requires a paradigm shift akin to how CARFAX transformed the used car market through increased transparency and quality assurance. In advertising, attention-based metrics have emerged as a reliable quality indicator, offering a path toward a healthier market and better incentives for all stakeholders.
Adelaide’s quality rating, AU, measures the ability of an ad placement to drive outcomes. AU ratings offer advertisers a unique method of determining the value of their spend. Placements with low viewability and VCR, viewed through the lens of AU, usually provide better value for driving KPI-centric results.
What Exactly Are Attention Metrics?
The concept of attention metrics took root around 2015 when researchers and vendors, faced with the near-complete gaming of viewability, started building technology to measure attention paid to advertising and its resulting impact. Unsurprisingly, campaigns that captured more attention also drove better outcomes. Subsequent studies found consistent results: longer durations of attention on individual impressions were strongly correlated to increased impact throughout the marketing lifecycle from awareness to sales.
In advertising, “attention metrics” broadly refer to signals used to proxy consumer focus on messages from advertisers. These metrics range from loose proxies like viewability to exact measures like lab- or panel-based eye-tracking that record gaze and focus.
However, it’s essential to recognize that attention paid to advertising is a product of creative relevance, audience, and media quality. Therefore, advertisers must be very cautious when using it as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) or campaign target.
How Does Adelaide Build Attention Metrics?
Adelaide brings increased transparency and fairness to advertising by supplying the market with a more precise media quality metric centered around business outcomes.
We believe a media placement’s job is to create the opportunity for creative to hold attention; advertising’s job is to drive business outcomes. Adelaide’s attention measurement model uses attention and full-funnel outcome data to generate meaningful and accurate media quality ratings.
Adelaide’s omnichannel attention metric, AU, is proven to measure media quality and predict outcomes more accurately than any existing media metric. It is a 0–100 score representing a placement’s probability of attention and subsequent impact.
AU is generated by a machine learning model that blends research-backed media quality signals—like placement position, ad clutter, and coverage—with full-funnel outcome data. In addition to exposure and outcome data, the AU model factors in eye-tracking data from TVision and Realeyes. The result is a precise, outcome-based quality metric that is difficult to game and broadly applicable across all channels, formats, and devices.
The Attentive Audience Paradox
One challenge marketers have encountered with early duration-based is a phenomenon Adelaide coined the “Attentive Audience Paradox.” As highlighted, duration of attention is a product of three factors, so when optimizing impressions to maximize attention, media isn’t the only input affected—creative and audience levers are also pulled, often inadvertently.
Marketers using duration-based attention metrics have discovered that there are several ways to increase the duration of attention, some of which aren’t always in their best interest. For instance, research shows that older audiences with pre-existing awareness of the advertised brand seem to pay the most attention. There’s also the risk of targeting over-frequencied or intoxicated audiences who generally index higher in time spent with content.
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Advertisers need to look beyond optimizing to duration-based metrics to avoid the Attentive Audience Paradox. Investment strategies should instead focus on securing media placements that offer the greatest value in their probability of capturing attention. Most importantly, media buyers should use attention data to fuel smart investment decisions and refine buying algorithms. This outcome-based approach improves campaign performance while countering the effects of the Attentive Audience Paradox.
FAQs: Demystifying Attention Metrics
What are attention metrics?
Attention metrics refer to data points used to model consumer attention to both media placements and creative. On the web, attention signals include size, position, viewability, duration, clutter, device, and eye-tracking.
How do attention metrics differ from viewability?
To understand true media quality, marketers must consider the numerous factors that impact the value of a media placement and its ability to deliver advertising outcomes. While metrics like viewability and duration contribute to campaign efficacy, they offer an incomplete view of media quality and are often inconsistent depending on format, platform, and channel. Attention metrics are unique because they process many granular media quality signals, helping advertisers pinpoint the placements that offer the greatest opportunities to drive impact.
What are the benefits of leveraging attention metrics?
Due to media fragmentation, particularly within digital, marketers utilize diverse KPIs for multi-channel campaigns. Each channel presents a unique success metric creating an "apples-to-oranges" challenge. Attention metrics enable “apples-to-apples” cross-channel media quality comparisons, powering better investment decisions.
Proving the connection between our omnichannel media quality metric, AU, and advertiser outcomes is the foundation of our business. Across dozens of campaigns, Adelaide has proven the impacts of attention metrics compared to traditional metrics. View the impressive results in our case studies or latest outcomes guide.
Who uses attention metrics in advertising?
Attention metrics can be used by both the buy-side and sell-side. Advertisers use attention metrics in their media planning and buying strategies to secure higher-quality media placements at a fair price and maximize campaign outcomes. Publishers use attention metrics to measure media quality across their inventory and price media offerings accordingly.
How does Adelaide’s AU metric differ from other attention metrics?
Attention is a product of three inputs: creative relevance, media quality, and audience. AU focuses explicitly on media quality and a placement’s probability of attention and outcomes. Adelaide’s model emphasizes the importance of focusing on the likelihood of attention rather than the duration of attention, given unintended biases introduced surrounding age, pre-existing awareness, and creative when leveraging duration-based metrics.
