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Industry Trends

Dwell Time To Measure Digital Branding

By March 10, 2010July 30th, 2023No Comments

A recent white paper from Microsoft Advertising discusses how the growth of digital as a branding channel is prompting the need for advertisers to know how effective their ad campaigns have been. Dwell Time is proposed as a measure of the effectiveness of digital branding.

Brand advertisers want to know whether they are getting their money’s worth, in terms of quality and quantity, where digital media is concerned.

It is a well established fact that the more time a user spends seeing an ad, the more he or she is likely to be influenced by it and if this user is actively engaged with that ad the perception of the brand concerned is usually found to be higher.

The time spent on an ad, multiplied by the rate at which it is actively engaged with is known as the dwell score. The dwell score thus provides a tangible source to measure the effectiveness of a brand and its online ad campaign.

Dwell Score = Time spent on ad x Rate of engagement

Research from other sources such as comScore corroborate the fact that a high dwell score indicates a higher number of branded search queries, more visits to the brand website and more engaged visitors.

Data also shows that click-through-rates are not very effective in measuring brand performance as consumers are likely to spend more meaningful time on an ad then to actually click on it. To better understand this subject, new systems are required to measure the time spent and engagement with an ad.

According to the findings of the MIA Project, 96% of marketers surveyed felt that these digital ad measurements and calculations should be clear and transparent, but only 29% felt that they were so at present. 96% of them also felt that there should be consistency in the terms of measurement, but again, only 23% of them were satisfied with the present state of affairs.

Read the full white paper: Being Greater With Data (PDF 627 KB)