Attention metrics are becoming an increasingly popular way to measure the success of ads within the wider advertising industry, as they can give advertisers and publishers a much more accurate idea of how users are interacting with their content and how that content is performing. As they continue to gain industry adoption, we need to start thinking about how these metrics impact our media buying decisions and how to successfully incorporate them into our marketing plans.
So, in what areas do attention metrics impact media buying?
Planning
Today, forecasting typically involves inputs like target audience attributes, geographies of audiences being targeted, and what type of creative(s) might be used, in order to produce an estimate of reach, usually represented by impressions, unique consumers, and target bid amounts, e.g. CPM.
Forecasting inputs and outputs are extremely important as it helps to remove the guesswork from business decisions, allowing you to predict the outcome of marketing activities. Depending on your target KPIs, this will influence the type of campaign that is run, the channels used and how the campaign will be measured.
As attention metrics gain industry adoption, they will be incorporated into forecasting inputs, like viewability targeting has, and outputs, e.g. cost of aCPM.
Attention oriented campaign goal types
Traditional campaign KPIs such as CTR aren’t going away anytime soon, however, more attention-based goals will start to be added more regularly.
In the MediaMath platform, campaign goals define and inform how to bid and optimize toward your ideal business outcomes. Of the goal types available, several are attention-oriented and can be leveraged for your campaigns today:
- Cost Per Action (CPA)
- Video Completion Rate (VCR)
- Viewable Rate
- Viewable CPM
Attention oriented goal types, such as the ones listed above, are much more efficient at helping brands and publishers measure the success of their campaigns as they give a clearer picture of how well consumers are engaging with their content and can adapt campaigns as necessary.
Targeting
Depending on the attention metric, there may be suitable proxies available today from bid enrichment specialists like DoubleVerify and Oracle for targeting in ad platforms. Targeting parameters like ad position, player audibility, and even app/domain allow and blocklists can be leveraged to filter ad opportunities to avoid attention-dark ad experiences.
Like with planning, as attention metrics gain industry adoption, they will be incorporated into new or existing targeting solutions.
Inventory Intelligence
The MediaMath Attention Marketplace offers turnkey access to inventory that index high for attention, as measured by Adelaide. Adelaide’s AU is an omnichannel media quality measurement that allows for standardized comparisons across sites, placements, platforms, channels, and more to predict the likelihood of greater attention to creatives by customers.
Through the MediaMath Attention Marketplace, you have on-click access to placements turned for quality attention curated with Adelaide. This partnership also allows direct access to inventory that is specifically curated to place ads where people are more likely to see and interact with them and have been proven to perform well when measuring using attention metrics.
Optimization
With targeting comes the opportunity for optimization. While the attention metric discussion in the industry evolves, brands can optimize using post-campaign analysis learnings to adjust fold position, app/domain lists, viewability, audibility, and even frequency, to maximize attention.
Through the MediaMath Brain, our algorithm for determining optimal bidding strategy based on buyer and market value, we consider several components of attention, automating a portion of the task of optimizing for attention:
- Exchange viewability, included within the bid request as part of the metric object to offer insight into the available ad opportunity
- Fold position, aka ad position, included within the bid request to indicate the position of the ad
- Time of day, for instance whether the ad opportunity is available in the consumer’s time zone
- Historical interactions like completed video views and clicks on content
By measuring with attention metrics during a campaign, you can ensure that your campaign is performing to the highest of its ability to produce the best results or you can collate your findings post-campaign to produce a more effective strategy for future campaigns.
Creative Intelligence
Creative fatigue happens, but consumer sentiment and content consumption change over time too. Creative intelligence unlocks effective planning for your marketing strategy. Evaluate aspects of media like page clutter and ad format, which can inform attention, holding creative and audience targeting constant, so that you can compare attention across media properties. These comparisons help publishers to create a better user experience and boost revenues, while, in turn, increasing media effectiveness for advertisers.
Creative vendors like Marpipe, help with multivariate testing to measure the performance of every possible combination of creative variables, which can help focus your development of creative specifically designed to maximize attention. Companies focused on capturing attention, like Lumen, also offer consultative services to help build creatives to cut through the clutter of ads and are designed to capture attention.
Measurement
Measuring attention is a first step toward deciphering which attention metrics are best at achieving your brands’ key business outcomes.
The results can influence future campaigns, impacting outcomes such as budget allocation channels used, and creatives made.
Companies like Adelaide, Amplified Intelligence, DoubleVerify, Lumen, Oracle/Moat, Playground.xyz, and TVision offer several tag-based measurement solutions that can be used to measure attention &/or a proxy for attention. These solutions can be implemented on your campaign in the MediaMath platform today.
To learn more about attention metrics and find out how MediaMath can help you implement them into your media buying strategy, download our attention metrics whitepaper or contact your MediaMath rep.