For the last 20 years, the media industry has been measuring its success and monetizing its content based on pageviews, impressions, and clicks. Most digital advertising has been sold by impressions, squarely rewarding the number of eyeballs a site delivers. But these metrics don’t measure the quality of the content or advertising behind the link. They don’t measure the interest of the reader nor the attention the website captures.
Keep ’em reading, keep ’em returning. Our Insider Guide to Audience Building will show you how.
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Chartbeat rewards attention after the click to know what’s grabbing and keeping readers’ attention right now — and every time they return. We measure attention with our very own, Data Science team-approved metric — Engaged Time.
Engaged Time correlates directly with quality. If you’ve captured someone’s attention, nice trick. If you’re keeping it, something special is happening.
So, How Do We Measure Engaged Time?
We silently ping every single visitor’s browser every few seconds to check what they’re doing. First, we look to see if a browser tab is active or inactive — are they there or grabbing a cup of coffee in the kitchen? — and then we look for a few key triggers, such as moving or clicking a mouse, typing on a keyboard, or watching an on-page video. It’s pretty different from traditional time on page, which estimates how long users keep pages open, rather than how long they actually engage with pages.
Why Is Measuring Time So Incredibly Seriously Must-Do-It Important?
Well, not only does it go beyond surface clicks and page loads to tell you what happens between those clicks, but we’ve done a lot research that says it’s a huge indicator of the core goals most every publisher has: Building a loyal audience and monetizing that audience. Our data team found that users’ Engaged Time is strongly correlated with their loyalty to your site. Below is a figure showing the relationship between the maximum amount of time visitors spent reading articles one day and whether they returned to the site across the rest of the week.
Visitors who read an article for three minutes returned twice as often as those who read for one minute. If you get them to read your stuff, like your stuff, and come back again to read more of the stuff they like, you’ve done your job. Why? Because that’s the kind of content and audience insights your marketing team can use to target the right audience with paywall upgrades or newsletter signups. And most importantly, it’s information your ad sales teams can take to your brand advertising partners and sell. They can use this information to prove that your best content is read by your best audience and should be sold at a premium.
It proves your content is worth more than the headline that someone clicked on it. It’s worth the value of someone actually reading that. Because when they read more, as this study on brand recall below shows, they’re more apt to recall the brand that advertises next to that content they just consumed. That’s pretty damn valuable, we’re told.
Embracing the right metrics and the right tools is the key to building a sustainable media business. Those metrics, those tools center around human behavior — around how much attention people are willing to give.
It’s what we call the Attention Web.
This move to the Attention Web is more than a collection of small signals and changes; it has the potential to transform the web. It’s not just the publishers of quality content who win in the Attention Web, it’s all of us. When sites are built to capture attention, any friction, any bad design or eye-roll-inducing advertorials that might cause a visitor to spend a second less on the site is bad for business. That means better design and a better experience for everyone.
A web where quality makes money and great design is rewarded? That’s something worth paying attention to.
For more on the importance of measuring your audience’s attention, check out The Battle of Attention: Why Publishers are Killing Pageviews