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2.5 Minute Read

New Ways To Measure Whether Your Ads Are Breaking Through

One of the thorniest issues in public affairs is how to measure whether your messages are capturing the attention of the policy-makers and influencers you are trying to influence. Much of the problem stems from the fact that traditional advertising metrics such as click-through-rates and conversions have little applicability in public affairs. After all, policy-makers won't click on ads to contact themselves. And because public affairs campaigns are not selling something for money, there's no cash register to record a conversion.

Instead, public affairs campaigns must rely on a suite of passive attention metrics to measure whether their messages are breaking through. The good news is that new ad technologies allow for multiple ways to do just that. In today's short read, we show you these modern "attention metrics," and how they can drive results in your work.

The New Attention Metrics  

When it comes to measuring attention, there is no single replacement for the clicks and purchases of consumer advertising. Instead, modern attention metrics work best when combined together to give you a full picture of how your audience is consuming your message. These metrics include the following:

Exposure Metrics: Did They Actually See It?

These metrics are based on the quality of the ad exposure to your audience and include:

• Skippable video completion rates - the percentage of your ad completed by the viewer when they can choose to skip it. We believe this is the most important metric. If the Senator chooses to complete your ad 10 times, she may not necessarily agree with it—but something about it is striking a nerve.
  
  
• Viewability rates (for non-video ads) - the percentage of your ad actually seen by the viewer.
  
  
• Time in view - how long your ad remains visible on screen.
  
  
• Ad share of screen - the portion of screen space occupied by your ad.
  
  
• Video presentation quality - whether your ad was viewed in fullscreen, and whether the audio was on or off during the ad.

Engagement Metrics (Beyond Clicks and Conversions): Did They Do Something In Response?

There are ways to measure engagement beyond clicks that your public affairs audiences actually do engage in. These include:

• Hover rates - the viewer's cursor movement over the ad content. Yes, we can now measure this.
  
  
• Touch rates on mobile - the viewer's physical screen interaction with the ad elements. Yes, this too.
  
  
• Device interaction - whether the viewer changes the screen orientation during your ad, or changes the audio controls. Yup.
  
  
• Time spent on page - the overall session duration by the viewer.

Contextual Environment Metrics: Where Does Your Message Appear?

These metrics are based on the overall context in which your message appears and include the following:

• Page type classification - whether the ad is viewed on a homepage, article, webmail, gaming page, or other site.
  
  
• Page clutter assessment - a measure of the number of competing ads on the page where your ad is viewed.
  
  
• Content sentiment analysis - whether your ad is viewed in a positive, negative, or neutral page context.
  
  
• Ad size and placement - the position and dimensions of the ad within the webpage layout.

Composite Attention Indices: The Bottom Line Score

These metrics combine the data above to give you overall views of whether your ad is capturing the attention of your audience. They include:

• High/Medium/Low attention categories - benchmarked scoring against industry averages in the above categories.
  
  
• Real-time scoring - based on multiple data points above and calculated instantly.
  
  
• Rolling averages - daily updates using 14-day performance windows based on above metrics.

Winning In The Attention Economy

We live in the attention economy. And in this environment, you're not just competing with the opposition for your audience's attention. You are competing with every other advocate, and every other organization (political and otherwise) fighting for the same eyeballs. These new attention metrics help you quantify whether you're winning, or falling behind.

Three Ways To Operationalize This Email

🔱 Review your recent campaign KPIs and determine what you are actually measuring when your audiences won't click.

🔱 Consider adding attention metrics to your next campaign.

🔱 Start with video completion rates, and begin adding the other frontier attention metrics above.

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