By
·
4 minute read
According to a recent report by Hubspot, 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your website. For anyone who lives off people clicking and sharing web content, this would probably come as a big shock. Journalists, for example, define success by the number of people who read and share their content. So, how do you make a living when in reality people aren’t reading your content as you first thought?
Hubspot’s report summarizes the findings of a study by Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat. Haile calls today’s web the “attention web” because now more than ever, web publishers are more interested in undivided attention, and little else. His main concern, though, is that the same publishers haven’t done enough to get people’s attention.
According to Haile, we’re getting a lot wrong about the web. When a visitor clicks on something, we instantly assume that they will read it. We track how long they stay on a page and assume that for all that time, they were concentrating on our content while in real sense they might have been busy doing something else. Worst of all, we are always quick to assume that when someone shares a post, then they’ve read it. It’s sad because we’re making the same mistakes over again; racing towards new trends such as native advertising without fixing what was wrong with the old ways.
Narrating the story of how we came to be where we are today, Haile identifies 1994 as the year when things started going wrong. In that year, Ken McCarthy, a former direct mail marketer, came up with idea that “clickthrough” was the best way to measure content marketing success. Essentially, McCathy was saying that the more clickthoughs your content generated, the more successful you were. That’s how the “click” gained its fame. Every time we thought about adding to our web pages, the first thing that came to mind was, “how many clicks can we get from this?”
Interestingly, some of the largest companies of the mid 90s, including Google, owe their success to the dominance of “clicks.” Soon a whole new world of advertising was born where ads were directly tied to consumer action.
A few years down the line, problems started to surface. The web was quickly getting filled with spam, linkbait, and unethical tricks that treated readers like lab rats. As long as they were getting enough clicks, publishers cared less about the visitor’s experience.
However, times appear to be changing. Spurred by new technology and dwindling click-through rates, publishers are beginning to think about what happens between the clicks. In fact, some organizations such as the New York Times have completely redesigned their websites to move away from the all too powerful “click” to “attention-focused” design. An advertising strategy designed to hold visitor attention rather than simply gain an impression, native advertising is quickly gaining pace.
Media companies realizing their mistakes
As this shift from click-focused to attention-focused advertising takes shape, publishers are learning several things;
- Visitors don’t always read what they click on
We usually count success as being able to get a high number of clicksthoughs or pageviews. Everyone believed that the more pageviews you had, the more people were reading.
Chartbeat studied the behavior of over 2 million web visitors over a whole month and discovered that it’s not always the case that people who click on a website end up reading it. In fact, 55% of visitors only spend 15 seconds actively on a website. Surely, they couldn’t be reading a whole page of text in just 15 seconds, can they?
- Newsworthy content outperforming evergreen content
The stats get even more interesting as you dig deeper. Editors have always taken pride in knowing exactly what topics drive the highest clickthough rates. They call them the “evergreen” pageview boosters. By pulling down these "evergreen" topics at the right time, editors are able to get enough pageviews to make their goals. Unfortunately, it appears that most people who click on the evergreen topics do NOT actively read the articles.
Chartbeat studied two billion articles then pulled out the most clicked topics and compared them based on how much attention each topic got per pageview. The topics with newsworthy information were found to have had the highest attention per pageview. The most clicked, but least engaged with were generic articles. This basically shows that web visitors are more excited by newsworthy content compared to evergreen content.
- Sharing isn’t the solution
When clicks failed, publishers turned to social sharing to get more people to read their posts. But has that worked? Well, not as much as was first anticipated.
Social sharing might be construed to mean that someone has fully read a post and is so impressed that they decide to share it with their friends and colleagues. Today, there is a whole industry dedicated to promoting social sharing as a way of attracting more pageviews.
From the outlook, it makes perfect sense. In any case, there is a greater chance of getting a few more pageviews if you share your content than if you don’t. However, the Chartbeat study also shows that there is no relationship whatsoever between sharing a piece of content and getting people to engage with it. In the study, 10,000 socially shareable articles were compared and the one with the highest number of tweets only scored a 20% total engage time. Meanwhile, the article with the highest engaged time received fewer than 50 tweets.
- Native is cool, but it too has its own shortcomings
Finally, as media companies turn to native advertising as a way of hiding from the scare of “click” advertising, they need to know that native too has its problems.
A good example is a company putting their content on a site like Forbes or the New York Times to access their audience and attract attention. This may work, but only with sufficient effort.
As already mentioned, on a typical article, 55% of visitors are usually actively engaged for 15 seconds. In native advertising, that number plummets to about 33%. Surprisingly though, compared to normal articles where the number of visitors who scroll down the page are 74%, in native ad content, that number is only 24%.
This shows that brands are driving traffic to content that is not attention grabbing. The bottom line is; native advertising is good but brands need to find ways make their content more attractive.
Summary
What we can learn from all these is that marketing though web content is more complex than we often think. And, as web users become even more informed, we can expect even greater difficulty in getting them to fully engage with web content.
Organizations need to start coming up with ways to impress visitors and get them to interact with their content. Whether it involves posting higher quality content and redesigning to improve user experience, so be it. This will lead to the Attention Web we all desire; where publishers get the attention they crave and visitors are freed from bad design and any friction that may cause unpleasant user experience.