Why Content Marketers Should Pay Attention to Attention Minutes

Have you ever woken up in the morning, rolled over, opened Facebook and clicked a few links? Chances are you have, and if you’re like me, you read and hit the back button. Scroll and click another link.

Or, you’re on your computer, open a million tabs, and read the content later.

Only to close the tab.

This is how we consume content now. The internet is less of a journey from site to site, and more that we go to a destination and click out from there.

The big challenge, in these two scenarios, is that your attention is properly measured. Metrics like Time on Page, measure the time you open a page and the time you click the next link.

This means, whenever you hear a stat like ‘2 minutes time on page’ it doesn’t truly reflecting how people read your content. Yes some people are spending 2 minutes, but that’s not the real average.

Why is this?

• If 30-40% ‘bounce’ as in didn’t click another link. That means you haven’t measured 30-40% of attention.
• If you leave a tab open, then revisit, and DO click a link, then it hasn’t captured your attention correctly.
• Time on page, never captures the last page of a visit, as you don’t click a link.

As a content marketer measuring time on page, is like measuring time on page for a Youtube video. What you want to understand is how much of the video did they actually watch.

This is where Attention Minutes come in to address the problem. It measures the active time on your content. So if someone doesn’t click a link you still capture their attention. Further, this increases the accuracy of your bounce rate, if a visitor reads your content, they didn’t bounce did they?

This is why, Nudge measures Attention Minutes – accurate down to the second. So you can better understand what content is driving attention, and where to improve. Further, we have updated bounce rate to reflect this.

An unintended consequence of this, is that it demonstrates the quality of content distribution sources. For example, in this examination of the ROI of Content Distribution networks, they recorded bounce rates of 80%

That doesn’t accurately reflect the value of those clicks, as someone has clicked an article, they want to read, I daresay they did read it but hit the back button. By not measuring Attention Minutes, you can’t tell.

It’s time to stop using time on site and focus on attention, real attention.

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