Attention all…
Why ‘read time’ is the key to boosting engagement.
Marketers must reframe how they measure engagement to optimize content. Instead of focusing on awareness metrics like clicks, shares, likes, and downloads (which have their value), interrogate “read time” data – the time someone spends actually viewing your content – to better understand the tactics that work. This means investing in better tooling and modernizing your content formats.
Marketers are under pressure to justify spend and prove ROI. Often, we focus on metrics like clicks, views, and downloads, which are easy to access and simple to analyze. The more people click, the better your content is performing. But that’s only half the story. A customer can download a report and not read it. They could ‘like’ a video but not watch it.
“The downstream metrics that show what happened after they clicked are much harder to measure,” says award-winning content expert Judy Wilks, Senior Executive and ABM Content Manager at Autodesk, a $5bn design and engineering software company.
That’s especially true if you rely on formats like PDFs or downloadable assets that don’t allow you to track user behavior or content engagement. “It can be easy to just geek out on the [clicks and downloads] and forget about what you're actually trying to achieve with your content.”
To measure engagement and optimize your content, you need a deeper set of data that shows you how customers are interacting with your assets. Read time offers that visibility.
What happens after they click is much harder to measure.”
A growing body of evidence shows that the longer people engage with your content, the bigger the impact on business outcomes. A study by media agency Dentsu1 showed a statistically significant link between dwell time (how long a viewer spends on a page before returning to their search engine results) and prompted recall (how well the viewer was able to remember your brand when asked) for instance. The more time someone spends reading your message and engaging with your perspective, the more likely they are to convert.
1 Source: Dentsu, Unlocking the Currency of Attention, 2022
Lenka Kaňáková, Senior Industry Marketing Manager, Financial Services and Retail EMEA at VMware, explains why awareness metrics don’t tell the full story.
“We produce a lot of content, from blogs to manifestos and white papers, which may not get that many clicks. But [with read time] we can identify a much more engaged audience who are willing to spend more time on the content. If there’s a call to action and they click it, that’s the ultimate result, but for judging the pure quality of content, time spent on page is the best indicator.”
Increasing the time a reader spends on your page will build more meaningful customer interactions and brand loyalty. Find out where to start in the next section.
For judging the pure quality of content, time spent on page is the best indicator.”
