Use Attention Data to Build New Audiences
Hut! Hut! Hike! Time-based Data Passback
Your Attention Data, Please
At Parsec, we know that holding someone’s attention is a fundamental part of communicating with them, changing their perceptions, and ultimately influencing their purchase decisions.
We’ve been measuring and selling consumer attention for nearly three years using a Cost-Per-Second buying model and a consumer-controlled, full-screen mobile creative. Our politely interruptive format, which puts the end user in control of duration, enables us to use time as a proxy for attention. While we’ve demonstrated that buying on time-spent leads to more certainty and efficiency in driving brand metrics, we hypothesized that the value of time-spent can extend beyond a single campaign and even beyond our own platform.
Every campaign we run generates a wealth of user-level attentional data. Although clicks and engagements can serve as signals of consumer interest, relying solely on these actions ignores the 98–99% of consumers who didn’t interact with an ad.
Time-spent on the other hand, empowers brands to fully contextualize their potential audience since every viewable session garners some amount of measurable attention. To test the hypothesis that user-level attentional data can provide value to brands outside of the Parsec platform, we designed a test campaign using our attentional data to target a standard banner creative. Our findings show that time-spent is a strong signal of consumer interest and can even be used as a leading indicator of future behavior.
Methodology
Working together with a Financial Services client, we ran a control vs experiment test campaign to measure the incremental impact of using time-spent data on standard banner creatives. The control group was served only a standard banner creative, utilizing the brand’s geo- and demographic targeting to establish a baseline for performance. The experiment group was first served a Parsec Ad and then retargeted with a standard banner ad based on their time-spent with that first exposure.
To control for exogenous factors, we ran all creatives on mobile web across a consistent media footprint within the same timeframe.
We then analyzed the correlation between time-spent with the initial Parsec Ad exposure to engagement and brand lift with subsequent banner exposures by tracking interactions and stated preference metrics across the test groups. Specifically, we measured the impact of time-based audience data on the performance of subsequent standard banners along two main vectors:
- Click Through Rate (CTR)
- Lift in Brand Awareness
The data below is based on over 250,000 MRC Viewable sessions split nearly equally across control and exposed groups.
The Results
1. Click Through Rate Increased by over 18% After Three Seconds
We found that users were more likely to click-through on a standard banner creative as a function of time-spent with their initial exposure (see figure 2). Applying a linear trend to the data, we tracked an average relative lift in CTR of +9.84% on the banner for each incremental second of time-spent with the initial Parsec ad. In fact, users that spent more than 3 seconds with the initial creative were over 18% more likely to click on the banner creative than users that spent only 0–2 seconds with the initial Parsec Ad.
The trend we found shows that time-spent is a leading indicator of CTR, but what about more meaningful metrics like brand lift?
2. Brand Awareness Increased by over 11% After Three Seconds
In addition to studying the impact of time-spent as a predictor of CTR, Parsec ran a brand study to measure the effect of time-based user data on Brand Awareness. Parsec served a single question survey creative to both the control and experiment groups to measure each group’s respective awareness of the brand.
Tracking over individual 300 responses, users who were retargeted with the banner using time-based audience data were 13.9% more likely to be aware of the Brand’s offering than users that were only exposed to the banner alone. Those consumers were exposed to two ads for the same brand however, so it would make sense that they’re more likely to be aware. To hone in on the impact of time-spent explicitly, as opposed to the impact of multiple exposures, we also assessed the brand survey results in relation to time-spent with a user’s initial exposure.
Analyzing the responses as a function of time-spent reveals a positive correlation between increased time-spent and increased brand lift. Users that spent only 0–2 seconds with the initial creative were 8.95% more likely to be aware of the product offering than users who were only exposed to the standard banner. Users that spent 3 or more seconds with the initial creative however, were 21.01% more likely to be aware than the control group and 11.02% more likely to be aware than the users who spent only 0–2 seconds with the initial creative. This demonstrates that time-spent with the primary exposure is positively correlated to incremental brand lift with a subsequent exposure using a different format of creative.
In Summary
Parsec found that time-spent with a Parsec Ad was positively correlated to lift in both CTR and Brand Awareness of a subsequently targeted banner creative for the same brand. Users that spent 3 or more seconds with the Parsec ad were more likely to have increased CTR and Brand Awareness with a retargeted banner ad, as compared to users that spent only 0–2 seconds with their initial exposure:
+18.18% higher CTR
+11.02% higher Brand Lift
This preliminary test offers a glimpse into the value that Parsec attentional data can have outside of our own platform. By capitalizing on time-based data, brands can generate insight from 100% of the consumers exposed to their creatives—and in doing so can start to reach those consumers in more meaningful and sophisticated ways.
