So you have yet another campaign to analyze – and your ad server puts tons of metrics at your disposal.  So many – you can get a slight dizziness just considering them all.  But how can you capture the essence of consumer experience while still presenting a simple picture that corresponds with the brand’s business objectives?

CTR is the easy choice, it is so commonly used everybody gets it… or is it?  Chances are, you know CTR doesn’t reflect much of anything. Why spend money on advertising to keep the users engaged if at the end you decide you measure success in clicks which moves users away from the ad?

So which metric should you use? There are interaction rates, video metrics, expansion metrics, etc.   Should you choose rate metrics or duration success criteria? Which one will sum it all up the best while still providing an accurate measure of success?

Things get even more complicated if you are running a campaign with two very different creatives.  One may have tons of custom interactions, the other may have a cool video with only a few interactions. If you measure the interaction rate, the first creative will look more successful, however you know that the video was great and people played it and watched quite a long portion of it.  How do you compare duration with interaction rate – a seemingly apples to oranges comparison?
 

Now you might be thinking – “I wish my server tracked viewer brain activity or otherwise read people’s mind to tell which creative was more engaging, captured more attention for longer?”  Although at Eyeblaster we’re still working on getting inside people’s brain and examining it – for the time being, consider Dwell. Dwell Rate allows you to see which percentage of your impressions had some sort of engagement.  Couple that metric with the length of time people were engaged – Average Dwell Duration – and you get the closest reading into people’s thoughts.  At the most basic level, you want to answer the question – did they see it.  The answer is defined in terms of reach, frequency and dwell.

Dwell allows you to capture the depth of the engagement and the length of it all – allowing for comparison between very different creatives and even allowing you to compare your digital campaign to your TV campaign – giving you one success metric to be used across it all.

Yael Tolub, Director of Product Planning and Analytics