The Telegraph said. It’s now sharing between seven and 10 metrics that it assumes are a proxy for the reader’s attention, including active dwell time, hover, scroll depth and predictive heat map analysis of ad creative.
From the article “The Telegraph is moving beyond clicks to convince marketers its ads work” on DigiDay.
This is a smart move and a good signal to the rest of the media and publishing industry. As the focus has shifted from driving low-margin digital impressions to acquiring subscribers, an ad sales strategy that makes the most of this focus has been sorely needed.
The benefit of publisher content, in the eyes of prospective advertisers, is that readers place a higher value editorial content and are likely to pay closer attention, retain more, and return frequently.
These factors translate into greater value in advertising because viewers don’t just glance at the content and click away in seconds -but actually read the content, creating an opportunity for the ads on those pages to do their job effectively.
This is demonstrated in The Telegraph’s results for these campaigns…
During the past year, it’s stripped out code, reduced page-ad ratio and page-load time all in the name of improving the reader experience. It found that ads for The Telegraph’s subscription product placed at the end of an article are four times more effective than ads in the top right handrail unit, highlighting how ad CTR doesn’t always reflect the relationship between reader and publisher.
It’s encouraging to see this kind of experimentation. As the industry aligns with more privacy-conscious standards, a parallel shift from vanity metrics toward more meaningful engagement metrics signals that digital marketing is finally maturing as a profession.
