Vibrant Media, a publisher network with a focus on native advertising, on Wednesday announced a partnership with Moat, an analytics company.
Through the partnership, advertisers in the Vibrant network will gain access
to measurements such as viewability, in-view time, interaction rate, and interaction time.
Jonah Goodhart, CEO of Moat, broke down what each of those measurements are for RTM
Daily.
Viewability is the most common metric listed above, and Moat follows the typical definition of at least 50% of an ad being in-view to the user for at least one second. The “in-view time” measurement is self-explanatory; Moat also measures the average time an ad was in-view for.
The other two -- interaction rate and interaction time -- are what drew Vibrant Media to Moat in the first place. Vibrant argues that data should go "beyond viewability" to get a read on an ad's effectiveness.
The “Universal Interaction Rate” is the
percent of impressions in which a user has actively hovered on an ad, Goodhart said. “This could be to take an action such as flipping through a photo gallery in an ad, playing a video in an ad,
scrolling through the content in an ad, or just actively navigating in the ad,” he said. The interaction rate time measures how long each interaction lasts for.
“To find the
true value of an ad’s success, you need to look at how -- and for how long -- users are interacting with it,” stated Ariff Quli, SVP of global accounts and marketing, Vibrant Media.
Moat’s benchmarks for interaction rate on desktops is 3.3%, and the average interaction time is 8.9 seconds. Vibrant claims its ads have rates 58% and 51% higher, respectively.
The true value of an ads success...users are interacting with it. For direct response this is true.
With branding the key metric is did they see the brand. If person mouses over anywhere on a page, it does not necessarily mean they even saw the ad.
Google did a study on the correlation or lack of between what a consumer actually sees versus where their mouse it.
For direct response you want clicks, for branding if you are paying for an impression you want to be sure consumers actually SEE the brand.
No one is buying a coke or big mac online...yet
Here is the Google study:
No basic correlation for over 80% of users. It’s quite simply a non-starter for telling us where people look on the screen
Google analyzed this correlation
(http://www.simpleusability.com/our-news/2011/01/mouse-eye-tracking-how-useful-is-it/):
"What do Google say about mouse eye tracking?
Dr Anne Aula, Senior User Experience Researcher at Google, presented some data at the 2010 eye tracking conference in Leuven. They have lots of data, regularly use eye tracking, and would also like to save some money and time by using mouse tracking data to replace eye trackers. A few highlights from the research data Google shared was:
6% of people showed some vertical correlation between mouse movement and eye tracking (that’s 94% with NO correlation)
19% of people showed some horizontal correlation between mouse movement and eye tracking (81% with NO correlation)
10% hovered over a link and then continued to read around the page looking at other things.
The figures speak for themselves. No basic correlation for over 80% of users. It’s quite simply a non-starter for telling us where people look on the screen – even on highly functional google SERPs."