Martin Beck says, “Joining the drumbeat against clicks as a flawed metric for user engagement and interest, Yahoo Labs scientists have published a paper that finds time spent on content items — dwell time — is a better indicator of what people enjoy online.

It’s essentially the same argument long made by Chartbeat, the real-time analytics firm that last week announced that “attention minutes” had been accredited by a national metric standards board. Namely, that clicks to a page don’t mean as much as time spent there because people can be fooled by click-bait headlines or just accidentally click to a page before immediately leaving.

Yahoo’s research, which analyzed interaction data on the Yahoo home page, was supportive of that theory”.

Yahoo Scientists: “Dwell Time” Is A Better Metric Than Click-Through Rate

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