On Thursday I had the pleasure of presenting NuConomy in the Under The Radar Conference (and may I add - we won both the Judges and audience awards).
After my pitch, Rafe Needlman (CNET) who moderated the event asked me a very interesting and important question: "Do I think that advertisers will start to use engagement as their buying currency?"
My answer was that I think it will happen eventually, but it will be a long process.
Coming back home, I thought that I gave just half the answer. The second half is all about why it is so important for the future of the web, that engagement will become the next currency for advertising.
Today most advertisers look on three metrics: Unique users, page impressions and time spent on site.
The number of unique users is no doubt very important and will stay like this. Let us focus on the two other metrics.
By measuring page impressions as a currency we basically encourage sites to create bad user experiences. You can argue that some sites use too much ajax today, but I believe we can all agree that page refreshes are simply bad thing. The best user experience comes from sites that use a smart combination of Flash and ajax. Instead of encouraging this, we actually punish those sites by paying them less money.
Same thing also for time spent on site. Again, we actually encourage sites to be slow. If the pages will take more time to load, if you will need to go through more steps to get what you want, if you won’t be able to get the data through RSS and other channels, you will spend more time on the site. Again, advertisers today encourage sites to develop bad user experience.
Measurement of engagement takes a different approach. In essence, it say that what’s important is not the quantity but the quality. By using engagement as currency, advertisers will say "We don’t want just a million people to watch our ads, we want the right people to watch and interact with our brand". Instead of paying for every joe that see or click on the ad, an advertiser will pay just for the audience he actually want to engage with.
If you advertise a sport product, you want to pay just for sports fans that interact with your brand and not for people who never watched a football game in their life. The more they are engaged in sport, you will probably be willing to pay more.
Using engagement as a currency, will not just encourage better user experience and adoption of new technologies, but will actually yield better ROI for the advertisers.
So if this such a great solution for everyone, why do I think it will be a long process until we will get there?
There are many reasons, but probably the number one reason is the fact that engagement is not a comparable metric. It’s easy to say that one site has more page views than the other. It’s much harder to say that one has a more engaged audience than the other.
We still don’t have any standards to how engagement should be measured. If you read this blog, you know that I believe that there is no just one engagement metric that fits all. Still, I do believe that we all can come up with different engagement standards for each vertical.
So we will have an engagement metric for blogging sites and another for video. Who should define them? It will probably be a joined effort of the community and the IAB. Yes, the world of engagement will be more difficult to navigate in but it is also the right way in order to take us to the next step in the evolution of the web.
5 comments ↓
Fascinating! From my point of view, the problematic of measuring “engagement” starts much earlier since it’s hard to define what “engagement” is.
This term appears in other fields as well, and I can only suggest my own fied of expertise, which is online learnin. Engagement in learning is said to be very important, but an implicit/measurable definition of it was yet not suggested… Since I’m working on related issues right now - I’ll be able to report on them only in a while.
Interesting! But how hard is to measure engagment?
Isn’t this the same as attention? Isn’t engagment a time spent on the site, overall interaction like coping, scroling down in one unviersal indicator?
Why nuconomy go to take that all (crucial engagment) in that complicated (customized) way to measure it??
Why not to keep it stupid simple?
Hi Shahar, this is very interesting (as is the whole blog and your company!) - I have added your feed to my reader, so count on a new reader. As for engagement, I agree with you on its relevance; and that it is going to grow, too.
Regards, Paolo
I’ve been a fan for a few months now. I have a couple of questions though - how can greater engagement be linked to greater ROI. Say for example if i have a technology blog. I get 100 readers every hour, 5 of them comment, 5 of them chat with me. And the rest just read and go away. So would only those 10% classify as engaged? And what about those other 90%. Also - does the fact that the same 100 users come everyday at that very hour count them as ‘engaged’ because according to me that indicates that a connection exists with the medium. Also for an engagement weightage - how much weightage should one give for a chat as opposed to commenting; are there any objective standards for that? I would say a chat deserves more weightage because it indicates that the user is prepared to spend more time with you and have a conversation however the counter argument could be that the user wants to have a conversation but at a liesurely pace and thus he chooses to comment. So he will potentially interact with you but over longer periods of time. So how exactly does one decide? And how does nuconomy’s analytics platform help you determine that?
You also seem to be suggesting that there will be a different method of placing ads altoghether on blogs and other internet related media vehicles? Is that correct?
Finally what has been the response of advertisers to your idea of crowd sourced metric classifications? more importantly, what do advertising intermediaries have to say about that?
Its great to read your blog - i plan to get my personal blog and a couple of others kick started post exams and i will definitely be using nuconomy’s metrics.
Automatic Scuttle Submitter is 100% automatic social bookmarking software designed to submit your domains to thousands of Scuttle sites. Not only Automatic Scuttle Submitter creates accounts and bookmarks sites automatically, but also parses meta tags for each URL and runs itself in background without any user interaction.
Leave a Comment