View time
View time refers to the amount of time an Internet user spends looking at a website. It is the time that elapses from calling up the page until leaving or switching to another page. View time is a so-called key performance indicator (KPI) that can be used to express the visibility duration of advertisements and to determine the advertising reach.
Importance of view time for the advertising industry
View time is particularly important in the advertising industry, especially in online advertising, and is one of the newer KPIs. It is used to determine how long a user has actually seen an advertising medium, for example an advertising banner on a website. The longer this time span is, the greater the probability that the user has actually seen the advertisement and not just scrolled over it. Therefore, view time is used to assess the degree of achievement of campaign goals and to increase the chances of reaching the goal.
Use of view time in practice
View time is measured in seconds or milliseconds. On its own, however, it has little significance. It is often put into a relationship with visibility and then given, for example, in the form 75/1. This means that 75 percent of the advertising material viewed was visible for one second in the visible area of the browser and thus recognizable to the user. The higher both partial values are, the better the quality of the advertising environment is to be assessed. A typical example of the use of view time as a measurement value is the use of short videos as advertising media. For example, if visibility of only two or three seconds can be achieved in an advertising environment, videos of 10 seconds or more make little sense, as it is no easy task to draw the reader’s attention to the spot within two or three seconds.
Risks of view time as a KPI
One of the biggest problems with view time currently is that JavaScript is required to capture it. However, since JavaScript also poses a potential risk to computers, many users have disabled the technology via their browser settings. Thus, their view time cannot be captured. Another problem is the measurement itself. Each measurement slows down the loading times of a website and an advertising medium. On the one hand, this can lead to the ad being scrolled over because the user has continued reading before the final load. On the other hand, the Google ranking can deteriorate, since loading times are an important ranking criterion for the search engine. In addition, it is difficult to determine whether an advertisement was loaded at all within the view time or whether the user had already scrolled over it before it was even displayed.
