How Marketers Are Using Attention Measurement to Drive Performance

Learn how to drive stronger campaign performance and maximize outcomes with attention metrics in part two of our attention series. 

“Now that viewability is a standard expectation in the industry, it’s time to move beyond measuring whether an ad was merely seen, and measuring who saw the ad, for how long and what, if any actions they took,” Forbes proclaimed, back in 2017.

Even though this was almost five years ago, the industry has yet to adapt a standard for attention. But with third-party cookie-deprecation looming and user-privacy concerns growing, advertisers do not only need a way to measure user attention – they need one that is future-proof and privacy-friendly.

What Can Advertisers Accomplish With Attention Metrics?

The phrase “attention metrics” refers to understanding how users engage with ads. Are they, or aren’t they paying attention?

As Gian LaVecchia discussed in part one of this series, people are bombarded by ads each day, and it’s never been more important – or more difficult – to stand out from the crowd. Estimates show that in 2017, the average American was exposed to as many as 10,000 ads each day. And that was in a pre-pandemic, pre-TikTok world. In 2020, people began consuming an average 25+ hours of online content each week, a DV/Sapio study found.

It’s safe to say that in 2022, 10,000 ads a day is a conservative estimate – and it’s easy to see why marketers want to know how their messaging is resonating. But in 2022, privacy concerns are also paramount. Marketers need an attention solution that gives insights into user behavior while remaining privacy-friendly.

Privacy-Friendly Attention Metrics

DV Authentic Attention® provides privacy-friendly, cookie-free insights into everything from the impact of an ad’s presentation to the key dimensions of consumer engagement, such as which content drives the best performance. By analyzing the ad itself and its surrounding environment, advertisers get granular, privacy-friendly detail into performance. These insights can then be used to plan and optimize at both the creative and placement level.

DV Authentic Attention® Across the Workflow

DV Authentic Attention® builds on the foundation of quality laid out by the DV Authentic Ad™, an MRC-accredited metric that provides a baseline of quality. To be considered Authentic, an ad must be viewable, free of fraud and served in a brand safe environment in the intended geo. Once this baseline of quality is established, DV Authentic Attention™ overlays 50+ data points to provide deep impression-level insights that are actionable across marketing goals.

Planning and Optimizing With DV Authentic Attention®

DV Authentic Attention® powers a number of optimizations. Optimizations at the creative level, for example, will help advertisers make sure their messaging is being seen as intended. Advertisers can use optimizations at the engagement level to improve specific key performance indicators (KPIs). Consider the two use-case below.

1. Improve Creative Messaging

One of the 50+ data points DV Authentic Attention® looks at for display ads is the length of time an ad is viewed. On video impressions, Collette says, “Advertisers can look to video completion and audible rates by quartile as an equivalency for time in view.”

Knowing audible and in-view completion rates, or AVOC, is particularly important for video ads because these determine just how much of a brand’s messaging a user sees. Consider the following two graphs that show global video completion rates across devices and global audible rate drop offs across devices, respectively:

Graph 1: Video Completion Rate Drop Off Across Devices

Graph 2: Audible Rate Drop Off Across Devices

The first graph demonstrates that on a desktop device, for example, 87% of video ads are viewed through the first quartile compared to 71% that are fully completed through the final quartile. Looking at the completion alone, it may seem like seven out of every 10 users will see an entire ad. But AVOC rates tell a different story.

On desktop, only 16% of ads are audible through the first quartile and that number drops to 12% by the end of the fourth quartile. So while, on average, seven out of 10 consumers may finish watching an ad, only one out of 10 actually hears the messaging through to the end. This is where DV Authentic Attention™ insights can help with creative optimization.

Use Case: Optimizing Creative Messaging With DV Authentic Attention®

The panel below shows an ad for a mobile provider broken down by quartile. The first quartile shows two people presumably, the second quartile shows the two people continuing to speak, the third shows the woman holding a cell phone and the last displays the brand logo.

This brand’s customers do not learn who the brand is until the end. As Graph 1 illustrates, this is a problem because drop-off rates increase as video ads progress. But, even more importantly, if a consumer is viewing this ad without sound, then they have no way of knowing — even by the end of the video — what, specifically, the ad is promoting.

Using DV Authentic Attention® insights, an advertiser can make sure their messaging aligns with user attention. For example, this mobile phone brand can begin by leading with their brand logo, so all customers know who the brand is. Then, if this brand found that most of their customers make it through to the third quartile, they can make sure to put their key messaging in the third quartile. Finally, the brand can make sure that key messaging is not dependent on sound by adding copy to the creative — so even users who are only viewing, as opposed to viewing and hearing, their ad can understand the messaging.

To learn about a real-world use case where a DV client used DV Authentic Attention® insights to optimize creative messaging, watch here:

2. Optimize Engagement

DV Authentic Attention® insights can also help drive engagement. Consumers respond to relevancy. Sixty-nine percent of people say they’re more likely to consider an ad when it’s relevant to the content they’re reading. As we approach a world without third-party cookies, marketers may want to consider the relationship between context and performance when determining where to engage their audience.

Advertisers can further use DV Authentic Attention® to optimize performance in a privacy-friendly way based on the context in which ads are delivered. DV’s Attention Index looks at performance across the DV Authentic Attention® indices — the engagement index (how a user interacts with an ad) and the exposure index (how the ad is displayed on the page). High engagement and exposure on the DV Attention Index corresponds to increased performance.

Use Case: Optimizing to High Performing Placements with Authentic Attention™

Vodafone Germany, for example, used DV Authentic Attention® to optimize toward placements that drove the highest qualified traffic and sales conversions. First, they found that DV Authentic Ads™ — ads that are viewable, brand safe, fraud free and serve in the intended geo — were driving the majority of conversions.

Then, Vodafone found that high engagement DV Authentic Ads™ — ads that index over 100 on the DV Attention Index — performed three times better than low-engagement DV Authentic Ads™. Specifically, Vodafone looked at qualified traffic and sales conversions to measure performance.

One of the challenges of focusing on lower-funnel data, though, is scale. According to Collette, “It can be difficult to identify optimization opportunities when rates are based on small sample sizes.” But with DV Authentic Attention™, Vodafone was able to see hundreds of times more high engagement impressions than qualified traffic visits and thousands of times more high engagement impressions than sales conversions. This scale allowed Vodafone to make optimizations at granular levels such as placement, creative, delivery site and more, because the number of impressions/ads being analyzed had the volume to be statistically significant.

The Value of Privacy-Friendly Performance Solutions

Privacy concerns are not new, but over the past year, increased privacy regulations and third-party cookie deprecation have grabbed headlines — leaving advertisers looking for new, privacy-friendly targeting solutions. When it comes to privacy, DV has focused on creating solutions such as Authentic Ads™ that do not rely on third-party cookies, fingerprinting or persistent tracking.

To learn more about DV’s other privacy-friendly solutions, read our blog on powering your programmatic performance. Or reach out directly with any questions to sales@doubleverify.com.