Digital has never been more important for brands that are seeking to communicate and engage with their customers, this is especially true when speaking in terms of purchase decision-making and brand perception. As digital media battles for its share of cash and eyeballs in an increasingly saturated market, advertisers find themselves faced with the age old challenge of demonstrating return-on-investment (ROI) to their colleagues in the boardroom, only this time from online spend.

Marketers have always known that time spent with an advert is an important measure. Couple this with actual active engagement with an ad (rather than passive viewing) and a truer measure of effectiveness emerges in the form of dwell scores. The method behind dwell scores involves combining the length of time spent actively engaging with an ad, multiplied by the rate at which it is engaged with. As a result, dwell scores offer much more valuable evaluation metric for brand advertising.

Our new research, Dwell on Branding, proves that there is a clear connection between the amount of time that a user spends actively engaging with an online ad and a consumer's subsequent online behaviour with that brand. Using data sets from comScore and Eyeblaster, the research reveals that increased dwell scores correspond to a significant improvement in positive engagement with a brand post ad exposure. Specifically, the results show that a higher dwell score stimulates a higher number of branded search queries, increased visits to the brand website, and drives uplifts in the numbers of engaged visitors to the brand website (measured in number of pages viewed and time spent).

Various reports such as comScore's 'Whither The Click' or Eyeblaster's 'Trends Of Time And Attention In Online Advertising' illustrate that consumers are more likely to spend meaningful time with an advert than to click on it; providing further evidence that click-through rates (CTRs) alone are an unsatisfactory means of measuring performance for brand advertisers.

A gear shift is required in the world of online measurement. For campaigns geared towards building brand recognition, loyalty and affinity online, consistent measures of time spent and engagement with an advert need to be adopted, understood and advocated.

Download our whitepaper, Digital Challenge: Being Greater with Data, to learn more about the digital metrics required to evaluate the effectiveness of brand campaigns.