The need for attention metrics

A few months ago our CEO Tony Haile wrote a piece for TIME that rebuked commonly-held assumptions about the internet. One fact in particular – that only 24% of readers exhibit any sign of engagement at all with sponsored, branded, native or as we call it, paid content – specifically struck a chord with many folks who read Tony’s piece. Our data science research confirmed something many of us already assumed or suspected – that most paid content failed to capture audience interest and attention – that most paid content failed to match the quality of the editorial content surrounding it.

At Chartbeat, we see these low engagement numbers, depressing as they might be, as an opportunity.

Right now we’re seeing that most paid content isn’t being measured by audience attention at all. A lot of publishers are tracking and reporting on paid content performance using things like clicks and impressions and shares. Metrics we’ve long-known don’t help us wholly understand content performance in terms of audience engagement. There is a clear dearth of metrics for publishers that speak to the impact of advertisers’ paid content. Publishers can’t get the data they need to answer key questions around paid content performance:

• Did their message got in front of a quality audience?
• Did that quality audience actually spend time actively reading that content?
• Did that paid content ultimately perform similarly to that publisher’s editorial content?

At the end of the day, we knew that answering these questions for both publishers and advertisers and aligning their goals and success metrics required a new product that provided core attention metrics to paid content teams.

Today we’re excited to introduce the Chartbeat Paid Content Solution.

We’ve built a product that brings content quality measurements to those on the frontlines of paid content. We created this product because we have the knowledge and the network to actually help clients better understand their paid content – the traffic it gets, who spends time with it, what social activity is relevant to this piece, and whether or not this paid content creates a native reading experience for the publisher’s audience.

Because our editorial and advertising products are built on the strength of the thousands of sites we work with – 80% of the top media sites in the US and across 35 countries – we understand their goals and performance at both a mass and individual site level,  we’re set up to help the industry solve this issue at the entire ecosystem level.

Building this product reflects the fact that we know paid content can get better – and we know that advertisers’ and publishers’ goals can be aligned to ultimately result in a better paid content reading experience for audiences.

Three Things to Know about this Product

We wanted to bring the critical answers you need front and center, within one dashboard that helps you tell a complete story around how your paid content is performing. While I hope you’ll explore the product demo on your own, here are a few quick things to know about this new product:

1. You can show your advertisers if their paid content is actually being consumed, rather than just provide click counts. You can provide advertisers with clear audience insights around how many folks begin and finish reading a piece of paid content.
2. You get an in-depth understanding of where your audience is coming from and how much time they’re spending with your paid content. This product lets you dive deep into a piece of paid content’s traffic sources so you can see what kinds of traffic are spending the most time with your paid content.
3. You can benchmark your paid content’s performance. See how audience attention on a piece of paid content measures up against the attention on your advertiser’s campaign overall, the attention across your whole site, or the attention averages for your site’s competitive set.

Want more?

You have a few options for getting the scoop on our new paid content product:

• You can watch the nifty product video below
• You can explore a demo on your own here
• You can read more about the product here
• You can get in touch for a personalized walkthrough here