Remember chasing those clicks on AWStats that all the OG digital marketers obsessed over back in the day? While not entirely worthless, those vanity metrics only provided surface-level, vain signals of attention. Smart marketers today are looking for deeper metrics that actually measure true engagement and interest. If you are still thinking in clicks, you’re only getting part of the picture.
The Limits of Vanity Metrics
Pageviews and impressions are hollow numbers that merely measure the potential to be seen. Clicks reduce attention to a binary event rather than a spectrum. They say nothing about whether your messaging truly resonated or motivated any meaningful action with your users. We’ve all seen inflated click and impression figures that failed to deliver any actual impact beyond fluffing up some egos and PowerPoint decks.
Where Attention Really Matters
For ads and content, the entire user journey is key – did they actually consume the material and linger, or just bounce? That’s where scroll tracking to measure how far down the page people read before dipping out comes in. On videos, completion rates and webcam-based attention metrics can reveal if your message broke through the noise.
Site and app behavioral signals like taps, zooms, tilts, and hovers indicate a hunger to actually explore and engage with the experience you’ve toiled to create. It’s not just about glazed eyeballs scanning over something, but activating and engaging their attention.
Measuring Content Engagement
When it comes to measuring engagement with blogs, ebooks, whitepapers and other content marketing assets, there are some specific metrics we should be focusing on:
- Video content: Play rate, average watchtime, drop-off points
- Documents/PDFs: Page scrolls, click rates, time spent
- Interactive tools: Fields completed, usage metrics
- Email newsletters: Open rates, click-through rates, forwards
Leveraging heat mapping and visitor recordings with Hotjar can also provide a goldmine of insight into how users actually experience and engage with your content. You can identify common pain points like:
- Confusing nav that causes lots of exits
- Specific sections that don’t get viewed
- Content layout issues on certain devices
The key is to figure out what delights and frustrates users so you can double down on the good stuff and remediate problem areas.
Engaging the Whole Brain
Speaking of which, innovative marketers are moving beyond surface-level gaze tracking. Combining traditional viewability with sentiment analysis, emotion AI, biometrics, facial coding studies and psychographics can uncover whether people felt any resonance with your content on a deeper level.
Of course, fusing physical and emotional data to understand full mind-body attention is still an emerging practice. But the implications are massive when you can numerically quantify whether your marketing tapped into human truths and triggered the right sentiments.
Conversion Clinchers
Naturally, the ultimate attention metric is whether your marketing efforts generated any leads or sales. But getting there requires an interconnected trail of engagement behavioral data across all touchpoints and channels.
On the lead generation front, dwell times on landing pages or brochure PDFs, repeat website visits, cross-platform engagement signals, and click-through rates on calls-to-action can all indicate purchase intent. Marketers should closely monitor:
- Cost per Lead (CPL) to measure the average spend on acquiring new leads
- Lead Conversion Rate to track what percentage convert to sales
- Lead Quality Scores assessing potential value based on demographics and engagement
Once you’ve attracted prospects, form analytics like field engagement metrics and pattern detection can identify which leads are highest quality. Specific areas to focus on include:
- Bounce rates from forms
- Time spent completing each form field
- Overall completion rates
- Dropping off at certain questions
The beauty of leveraging form analytics is connecting that data with your CRM and tying it back to bigger-picture conversion metrics. Integrating granular form engagement with:
- Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) to gauge efficiency
- Average Order Values (AOV) to pinpoint up-sell/cross-sell chances
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) projections for future retention strategies
This is the magic that allows you to precisely measure marketing ROI while seizing expansion opportunities.
Bringing It All Together
Of course, you can track all the attention metrics in the world, but if they don’t correlate to business outputs, you’re still missing the full picture. Once again, smart marketers adopt an interconnected revenue mindset that incorporates:
- Assisted metrics beyond last-click or form-fill attribution
- Multi-touch attribution modeling across channels
- Unified impact measurement combined with media spend data
With an integrated view incorporating both attention signals and conversion metrics, you get powerful visualization capabilities. Interactive dashboard charts and graphs can map things like:
- Content consumption correlated to lead quality
- Specific behavioral paths for your best customers
- Optimal channel mixes and sequences based on attribution
This unified measurement is pivotal for evolving your strategies based on facts rather than assumptions. It allows you to iteratively test different creative messaging, channel tactics, touchpoints and funnels to ultimately optimize your entire marketing performance.
The New Measurement Mindset
Nowadays the marketers still obsessing over click reports while procrastinating on TikTok are looking pretty clueless. Those days of one-dimensional metrics are over.
The real revenuers adopt nimble, interconnected measurement mindsets using attention and engagement signals everywhere. Test relentlessly across dimensions like dwell time, sentiment, and multi-touch attribution. Question assumptions. Chase what captivates your audience throughout their journey. Your goal? A holistic, data-driven attention measurement framework incorporating elements like:
- Continuous A/B testing and optimization based on funnel performance signals
- Integrated, cross-platform view of behavioral engagement trails
- Unified dashboards visualizing media investment impact on deals and revenue
- Privacy-compliant identity resolution to personalize journeys
- Enriched data activation informing content strategy and channel execution
Moving beyond the limits of out-dated metrics is key to delivering high-impact, accountable marketing that sells.
The Path Forward
Look, we’re not getting married to any metrics here – like any healthy relationship, the partnership has its boundaries and limits. Ultimately the goal is to generate measurable business outcomes like leads, sales, and long-term customer value.
But monitoring multi-dimensional attention signals is absolutely vital to achieving and optimizing those meaningful objectives. You can’t settle for vapid metrics that leave you wondering exactly how your marketing made an impact. That’s for the bored and foolish.
No, today’s growth marketers go deep on the data dimensions that capture real minds, emotions and wallets. Bringing together advanced engagement tracking, psychographics, funnel signals and core business KPIs, separates the flavors of the month from the savants actually driving sustainable revenue gains.
So pay attention to what matters by upgrading your attention metrics game. Your customers’ hearts, minds and wallets will thank you.
The views expressed herein are personal and do not reflect the views of any of my clients, partners or employers.
Photo credit: Photo by Harold Wijnholds on Unsplash
Original article: https://www.activelinkmedia.co.za/click-youre-not-the-only-metric-in-town/