New York ad tech startup Chartbeat is unveiling a new product to add to its real-time analytics arsenal, a development which should persuade even the most skeptical product manager that it’s serious about its aim to improve the metrics for gauging how well native advertising is doing.
Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile believes that a major reason why native advertising has so far failed to live up to its billing as “this great new hope for publishing” can be stated in six words: “So much of native is bad.”
Beyond impressions
This is where it gets interesting for tech product managers: Haile believes that much of that badness is down to poor measurement. Typically, advertisers will only see how many impressions their sponsored content has received on a publisher’s website, and maybe how many times a post has been shared on social media. But counting eyeballs tells advertisers nothing about how good the content was.
So the new Paid Content service sets out to change all that, and product managers presiding over it will be negotiating with both advertisers and publishers, because both are likely to want to use it. With easy-on-the-eye graphics, it shows not only the standard eyeball count but how many visitors actually finished the piece and how long they spent engaging with it.
Finally, the piece is given a score ranging from 0–100 to show how well it’s performed against the other content on the site (the score is made up of factors such as engagement time, social media sharing and traffic). It even lets users see the sources of the traffic and which key influencers have tweeted about the content.
Seeing what works
As Haile puts it:
“We started with native advertising because that’s where the need is the most acute — it’s where there’s the most heat and the least light. We’re trying to really understand what’s working and what’s not. Right now it’s very, very difficult to tell the difference between good native advertising and bad native advertising; we want to help people creating good content, and give them good metrics so they can show that it works.”
Haile also revealed that the company has recently raised a further $3 million in Series B funding, with a full Series C scheduled for later in the year.