Why advertisers should dwell on engagement...

My previous blog looked at engagement as a metric and it seems it may be a hot potato in the world of online advertising right now.  I read a couple of articles over Easter that particularly caught my attention...

New Media Age reported that Johnston Press, Emap and The Times and Sunday Times have introduced paywalls for readers to access content and no longer provide ABCE auditing figures to advertisers, but are being forced to shift focus to loyalty and engagement. Whether you agree with the paid-for content model or not it’s interesting to see them talking quality not quantity. Creating loyal and engaged readers is key to the success of any online publisher and also to the success of maximising client brand impact.  We don’t believe paywalls are the way forward and won’t be introducing them to our readership, but we do share something in common with Paul Hood of Mirror Group Newspapers – that frequency and dwell time are critical metrics – in fact, as a publisher to B2B communities since 1997 we’ve been delivering campaigns on this basis for quite some time!

Something else that we’ve been focusing on in recent years is exploring engagement channels, including video. Dwell time and brand recognition are proven to increase when integrating rich content such as video and it’s no surprise to see an independent study supporting this (see feature on Utalkmarketing.com). Laurent Delaporte, Vice President EMEA, Microsoft Advertising further supports the importance of dwell time, "If you evaluate your brand campaign success on click throughs alone you risk writing off successful campaigns as a failure. Dwell scores tackle this problem head on, and allow advertisers to better understand the true impact of their online marketing investment on their brand.”

While content continues to be king (or more specifically ‘engaging online content’), it is important not to lose sight of the basics and ensure you’re delivering the right message to the right audience via the right channel – a challenge for anyone, but some have a particularly tough fight on their hands and need to question exactly where their ad budget is going – Gordon, David, Nick, are you listening?!

Posted by Ed Martin
Marketing Managerr
Sift Media