What Are Attention Signals?

In Part 1, we revealed what “Attention” is in the context of advertising and how we can begin to use it to measure effective advertising. In this section, we’ll dive deeper into Attention Signals – the building blocks of data that we use for optimization.

Yieldmo uses impression data to enrich the data used to train our machine learning models to achieve best performance. We use data including Consumer signals, Content/contextual signals, and Creative signals. We then combine this information with Attention Signals.

Attention signals range from granular data like pixels in view to baseline information such as quartiles of videos reached. We identified more than 20 important signals that we categorize into Baseline Signals and Gestural Signals (proprietary to our technology).

Below is a sample list of some (but not all) of the important signals we capture.

Baseline Attention Signals

Baseline attention signals, which we consider table stakes, include (but are not limited to) the impression, MRC and GroupM viewability, click, time spent in view and pixels in view, and video signals (plays, quartile completes, change to full screen, etc).

Gestural Attention Signals

User-initiated gestures are the heart of why Yieldmo technology is so powerful. We discern real human behaviors and translate them into signals of attention.

Here are a few of the gestures that we measure:*applies to Yieldmo ad formats.

The Collection of Signals and Their Permutations

What happens when someone is interested? Often, you will see this person bring the phone closer to his or her face (tilt) as well as scroll, stop the scroll, or scroll back. We call this combination of actions the “Scrilt.”

We understand that gestures in a vacuum don’t mean much. One scroll, or one tilt, by itself, can’t fully explain human interest or attention. What makes our technology so powerful is that we take into account combinations of these signals – and our AI looks further for patterns and combined actions in context.

In this way, we’ve created a flowing, living database mirroring human attention to understand the true value of your advertising.

To learn more about how we use attention to improve advertising, download the Guide to Attention Analytics. Here you’ll learn more about the science behind Attention Signals, Attention Metrics, and how to leverage them to improve your advertising.

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on attention analytics. Read part 1 here and part 3 here.