Rules Of Engagement: Time Spent And New Metrics

MediaPost: "In April 2007, Web tracking company Compete.com added an 'Attention' metric to their analytics, which takes into account time spent on a site. In July of last year, Nielsen//NetRatings followed suit, and began using time spent as the primary metric of popularity. In search, text-dominated search engine results pages are making way for universal search results that include more 'engaged' formats for search listings.

Similarly, Yahoo and Google recently added video ads to their paid search programs--a change that favors time spent with the ad rather than impressions or clicks. And YouTube recently announced YouTube Insight--an analytics product that measures the length of users' interaction with videos. Over the last few months, time spent has clearly become an established metric, and it provides one gauge for engagement."