Thanks for Your Time
How attention metrics lead to increased recall, awareness, and consideration.
By Dr. Erik Nylen, Parsec Data Scientist
You’re reading an article on one of your favorite websites on your phone, and about halfway through the article, as you continue to scroll down the page, an ad appears between two paragraphs. Not unlike magazines, when you flip to a full-page advertisement, you glance at the ad. If it is an eye-catching new style, an item you’ve heard talked about, or the ad visually resonates in your head, your glance becomes a pause, and you’ll devote more attention to the ad. When you’re finished consuming the ad, you proceed back to your article that continues below the ad. This behaviorally native ad format has found great success in the digital advertising ecosystem, giving a natural feel to the ad, avoiding the annoying “pop up X,” and — more importantly for ad-tech wonks — it allows advertisers to transact on the exact amount of attention paid to that ad.
Time spent reading an article reflects the interest in that article: an individual spending two seconds on a page certainly wasn’t interested enough in the content to stick around (or the page had a crappy UX). Similarly, time spent with an ad that sits between text reflects the interest in, and impact of, that ad.
At Parsec, we only charge advertisers for the amount of time that consumers choose to spend with their advertising. As you might expect, we’re big believers that choice leads to brand-favorable outcomes, but what is belief without data to back it up? So off to the lab we went.
Through our research (using our consumer-friendly single question study), we found that at least three types of attention are correlated with time-spent with ads on the mobile web:
- Aided Recall: Ability to remember seeing an ad, also known as attentional memory.
- Awareness: Knowing about a brand or product.
- Consideration: Indicating the likelihood of considering purchasing the product that was advertised.
