Engagement vs. Impressions
Online audience developers have been closely watching for the past year or so the rise in engagement metrics as a measurement for defining how an audience interacts with a Web site. Some industry pundits have gone as far as saying time-spent and engagement will overtake page views and impressions as a more meaningful method of Web measurement. That argument has died down significantly as of late, due largely to moves by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) to address the impact of Ajax, and the fact that, at the end of the day, online advertising is far from deserting its impression-based business model.
The concept gathered steam as a result of applications such as Ajax, which allow interactive Web applications to run without a page refresh and therefore have a real impact on page views and impressions in certain contexts. For example, real-time stock quote updates or slide shows can operate in one section of a Web page without reloading the entire page. The technology facilitates a better user experience, but can suppress ad impressions. “There was a notion floating around that because of [Ajax], page views would decrease on sites and along with that came the idea that if ads are tied to page views then we would have to come up with another way to measure it and display it,” says Michael Silberman, New York magazine’s general manager of digital media.
The Ajax effect was thought to be significant enough that the IAB stepped in with guidelines to short-circuit any impact the technology might have on page impressions, and, consequently, an ad buy. “They came out with a set of rules that say if there’s a significant action that would have in other cases resulted in a page view, then you can change the ads even if the page doesn’t change,” says Silberman. “In some ways, it took the issue off the table from an ad display point of view, which really is the thing that would be driving the need to have a new metric besides ad impressions and page views—some kind of engagement metric.”
Beyond that, the ad community is still fundamentally buying ads based on impressions. “It’s not really about a person’s engagement with the Web site, it’s about a person’s engagement with the ad,” says Eric Shanfelt, EVP of new media at enthusiast publisher Aspire Media. “The impression is such a solid, fundamental metric that we all understand. And I can do apples to apples comparisons. The whole online advertising industry is build on impressions—clicks, CPM, CPR, CPC—and you can’t just turn it on its head like that, there’s just no way to do any kind of comparison.”
Plus, Shanfelt points to his own research that shows a highly engaged Web site audience can have a negative impact on advertising. “I have run sites where there was a traditional publication-based Web site that had an average time-spent of three minutes and average page views of two to three. In the exact same market we ran a site where we had 20 to 30 page views per visit and time spent was 15 minutes. This was a more community-based site, where people are reading through forums, browsing images or posting comments. But when you looked at the click-through rate, it was anywhere from half to four times less than the clickthrough rates on the publication site.”
As a result, says Shanfelt, CPMs are sold at a much lower rate on the social networking portions of a site. “But social networking sites have a lot of inventory,” he adds. “We were able to get by that by selling 100,000 impressions at a publishing Web site at a $30-$50 CPM, but at the social networking part of the site we had to sell it for a $10 CPM. We had tons of inventory so we could get away with it, but quite frankly, I don’t think a lot of publishers understand those dynamics.”
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