Seedtag, the leading Visual Media platform, carried out a study performed by digital research agency MetrixLab, showing that View Quality, as measured by eye-tracking, demonstrates the increased potential for stronger campaign performance by ads placed on images and contextually targeted.
In a saturated digital world where users are overexposed to excessive amounts of advertising throughout the day and have eventually developed blindness towards them, advertisers are struggling to come up with new, effective and user-friendly ways to engage with users.
For this reason, Seedtag wants to shed light on how the advertising industry can leverage the effectiveness and prominence of images and videos to catch users’ attention through research conducted by MetrixLab. This study aims to measure the impact of ad placement combined with an optimal targeting strategy.
The findings of this research show that the power of visual media combined with a contextual targeting strategy can be the recipe for a successful campaign, generating a high level of brand awareness and strong association between the brand and the content it’s placed on.
Also, the study has led to the re-evaluation of viewability, a metric that is commonly used to assess potential ad exposure but fails to give other relevant engagement insights, such as the time it takes for the ad to be noticed, the number of users that have actually seen the ad, or the time that each user has spent interacting with the ad.
Due to Seedtag’s constant desire to create the best and most efficient advertising in the world, the research went beyond viewability to develop a more comprehensive metric that is able to provide a more thorough measurement of a campaign. This new metric, called view quality, takes into consideration the percentage of people who were not just exposed to the ad but actually looked at it, and the length of time they spent watching it.
MetrixLab applied an eye-tracking technique to monitor users’ main focus of attention and the time they spent on each area of the page. This has demonstrated that the ads placed on visual elements such as images and videos are noticed 3.5 times (or 3.4 seconds) faster and drive attention for 3 to 4.5 seconds longer than other display and video ads.
MetrixLab’s consumer viewing behaviour study shows that Seedtag’s video ads deliver a 6.8X stronger view quality than other video ads in the market, thanks to a greater noticeability and a higher engagement of the ads.
This study has also proven that factors such as creativity, placement and predisposition or affinity to content from users are directly related to an ad’s View Quality in contextually delivered ads and are crucial for the success of a campaign.
By contextually delivering ads through its proprietary Cognitive Content Analysis technology (CCA) based on Machine Learning algorithms, and its ability to integrate ads into the most premium images and now also videos, Seedtag offers advertisers the possibility to develop their brand values by being associated with related content, and achieving non-standard KPIs such as brand favourability or purchase intent.
This technology also represents an effective alternative to the use of cookies, allowing targeting based on the users’ interests in real-time, and providing stronger brand suitability and better user experience by reaching users who have a more positive mindset at the point they are exposed to the ads.