e-commerce & social media

Every few months media types seem to loop back to a familiar question: How to measure media beyond the page view.

This week the Financial Timesannounced it would begin exclusively selling display ads off of a new metric: time spent. Medium recently  reported it has started paying certain writers based on total time readers spend on articles. Upworthymade waves back in February ditching page views altogether to focus on what they call “attention minutes.” And back in May the traffic analytics company Chartbeat  launched its “Attention Web” campaign, in an attempt to move beyond the click.

“The thing about time spent is that it plays into three of the biggest trends right now — mobile, viewable impressions, and video,” Eric Franchi, co-founder of the digital ad firm Undertone told BuzzFeed. Franchi, like many others in the ad tech world, have been working to champion viewability, an ad metric that makes sure readersactually see and engage with the ads on the page....

Via Jeff Domansky

...Content marketers are incredibly uncertain about how they’re measuring the success of their content.In April and early May 2014, Contently surveyed 300 marketers split evenly across B2B and B2C businesses about their content goals and measurement practices. Here are some key findings:

• 90 percent of marketers expressed uncertainty that their key content metrics are effectively measuring business results.

• 73 percent of marketers said brand awareness was the goal of their content.

• 69 percent of marketers said that they were using pageviews and unique visitors to measure content, while fewer than half are examining time on site. Yet, 50 percent of respondents expressed a desire to be able to measure how much real attention users are paying to their content.

• 7 percent of respondents are not measuring the success of their content in any way....

Via Jeff Domansky