In our digital age, we are constantly confronted with distracting information. Every few minutes there is a new notification. And if it is not outside triggers, maybe a growling stomach is making you check whether it’s lunchtime. Therefore, when creating advertising material the most important performance metric is: can your content keep the consumer’s attention? With FaceReader Online you can gather this information in a simple and straightforward way.
A Valid Approach to Measuring Attention
The best approach to measuring detailed attention is by including eye tracking. You can implement this without any additional hardware with FaceReader Online. The only downside is that localization of gaze on the screen requires a calibration session, which means an additional task for your participant. While you might not always be interested in what exactly people are looking at, sometimes you simply want to know: are they looking at your content, yes or no? This is possible with the validated attention metric. Since, our proprietary algorithms are grounded in science we find it important to research them thoroughly.
The metric uses head pose and gaze direction to analyze whether people are focusing on the centre of the screen. This requires some thresholds to determine when attention is likely not on the screen. Of course, it is important that this classification is accurate. With a recent validation study we show very high accuracy with a median score of 87% (see this blog for detailed information on the validation process). The dataset includes difficult examples (mobile devices, bad lighting, sideway camera position), thus when you instruct participants well, the quality is even higher (read more about how to instruct participants here).
Beneficial use of Attention Metric as Filter or Result
So how can you use this metric in your project? There are two main applications to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.
- Filter out distracted participants. When gathering insights into emotional expressions, it’s important to ensure a minimal effort of the participants. You can use attention to only draw conclusions based on participants who are actually watching the content.
- Visualize the results and compare the attention for different groups, scenes and stimuli. You can quantify if there is a part of the ad where people lose focus.
In video ads it is important to keep attention until the end, which often features a clear presentation of the brand. In this example from a car commercial, you can see that there is a drop in attention in the end (when the brand is visible, compared to a tunnel scene in the middle). This helps finetune and optimize your ads for maximum engagement.
Within FaceReader Online, you can create the episodes to compare elements of the ad yourself, allowing for quick insights into the effectiveness of the ad in capturing attention. Create your account now to start testing with the validated attention metric!
