Do Impressions Measure Digital Success?

The popular web magazine CMS Wire hosts a number of Discussion Point panel discussions with business leaders on topics that are important to the technology industry. We were fortunate to be asked to join in one recently on a topic that is near and dear to our heart: attention. We have been talking a lot about attention recently and the importance of delivering instant digital gratification to consumers (download our recent ebook on the topic for more details).

Specifically, CMS Wire asked us: “should CMOs give priority to attention over impressions?” and our response is below. Let us know if you agree or disagree – we love to hear from you!

“Consumers spend more and more time online, and marketers have responded by generating more and more content in pursuit of a page impression, which all too often is the short-term aim of any given campaign. Modern marketers realize that measuring the success of their online endeavors is less about if people visit a website and far more about how long they visit and what they do during that visit. It isn’t about measuring clicks. It is about measuring attention -- the time people spend with digital experiences and the ways they interact with them. Measuring that attention and providing a basis for optimization is the tricky part. In practice, there are a few moving parts:

1. Time Spent. How long does a consumer spend on your digital experience? The first 10 seconds are critical; how does that figure drop away after 20 seconds ... 30 seconds? The first minute? Standard analytics will tell you this. They won’t, however, tell you how to improve the time spent. That is where marketers truly earn their (creative) keep.
2. Actions. How are consumers engaging? Are they just staying in one spot, or are they moving around your site? How do their actions change over time during a visit? This requires measuring “signs of life” — the clicks, scrolls, mouse movements, page views, etc. that people perform on or around an experience in a specified period of time.
3. Reactions. What did consumers think about the experience? What was the call to action? Have you converted them as loyal brand advocates or gained a new public critic? In this metric, marketers need to measure if their efforts are generating positive or negative attention for their brand through social listening.

Taken together, these three metrics and the interplay between them provide a useful measure of attention with critical focus points for improvement. The longer a consumer spends on your site — softened, wowed and rewarded by great creative — the more likely they are to move effortlessly to the checkout. Having the right insights and success metrics along every step of this path enables today’s marketers to rapidly fill any gaps where they may be losing people’s attention.”

Click here to see how other business leaders responded or to read the full article on CMS Wire.