Are Clicks and Impressions Still Fit for Measuring Marketing Impact?

By 2024, global digital advertising spending had surpassed US$600 billion, yet independent eye-tracking benchmarks indicate that fewer than 35% of served digital impressions elicited more than 1 second of active visual attention. At the same time, Nielsen’s Digital Brand Effect studies show that over half of viewable ads produce no statistically significant brand lift. The widening gap between media delivery and commercial impact is no longer anecdotal. It is measurable, persistent, and costly. 

This disconnect reflects a deeper structural issue in marketing measurement. Clicks, impressions, and viewability scale efficiently, but they fail to capture how advertising is cognitively processed in fragmented, high-velocity media environments. As acquisition costs rise and boards demand greater transparency in brand investment, attention analytics has emerged as a critical layer of marketing intelligence. Not as a replacement for performance metrics, but as the missing signal that explains why spending creates value or fails to do so. 

Why legacy metrics are structurally misaligned with impact 

The limitations of traditional exposure metrics are now empirically established. WARC’s meta-analysis of more than 2,000 global campaigns found that only 18% of digital impressions contributed meaningfully to brand outcomes, even when industry viewability standards were met. Nielsen further reports that ads receiving 2 seconds or less of active attention deliver 50% to 60% lower brand recall than those that receive 5 seconds or more of active attention. 

The root problem is not insufficient data, but distorted signals. Legacy metrics assume a uniform value per exposure and ignore cognitive constraints such as scrolling speed, competing stimuli, and screen dominance. Programmatic systems trained on these signals therefore optimise for scale rather than effectiveness, systematically favouring low-cost inventory with limited human impact. 

For organisations deploying annual media budgets exceeding US$100 million, this distortion results in a material misallocation of capital. 

What attention analytics measures, precisely 

Attention analytics quantifies the quality and duration of human engagement with advertising. Core metrics include attentive seconds, gaze duration, visual dominance, and interaction depth, normalised across environments such as mobile, CTV, social feeds, and open web display. 

Lumen Research, whose eye-tracking database exceeds 80,000 participants across global markets, has demonstrated a consistent causal relationship between attention and outcomes. Across FMCG, automotive, and financial services categories, Lumen reports that each incremental second of attention increases the probability of brand recall by approximately 10% to 15%. Adelaide’s Attention Unit framework converts placement-level signals into predictive attention scores and is now used by agency groups, including Omnicom and Publicis Groupe. 

Australia-based Amplified Intelligence, working with advertisers such as Mars and PepsiCo, has shown that high-attention CTV placements deliver up to 2.5 times the sales lift per impression compared with low-attention video environments, even when reach is held constant. 

Evidence from the market, across company scales 

Attention analytics is now embedded in real operating models. 

Unilever, one of the world’s largest advertisers with annual media spend exceeding US$8 billion, has publicly confirmed that attention metrics are integrated into its global media planning. Working with Mindshare and Lumen Research, Unilever reported over 30% improvement in brand recall after reallocating spend toward consistently high-attention placements, without increasing overall budgets. 

At the platform level, Meta Platforms has disclosed that time spent viewing ads is a stronger predictor of conversion and brand outcomes than impressions alone, leading to increased weighting of attention-related signals within its ad delivery systems. Google has similarly expanded engagement and attention modelling within YouTube, where internal studies show that ads securing five seconds or more of active attention drive materially higher ad recall and consideration lift. 

Among growth-stage companies, UK-based digital bank Monzo has discussed its use of attention-based creative testing at industry forums. By optimising video assets using second-by-second attention-decay data, Monzo improved ad recall by more than 20% while maintaining flat media spend. 

Mid-market retailers such as Kmart Australia have worked with Amplified Intelligence to demonstrate that campaigns optimised for attention delivered approximately 40% higher sales lift per impression than reach-optimised campaigns. 

From measurement to planning and pricing transformation 

The strategic impact of attention analytics becomes clear when it reshapes how media is planned, bought, and evaluated. 

Leading agency groups increasingly negotiate inventory using attention-adjusted CPMs, shifting the value discussion from cost per thousand impressions to cost per attentive second. WARC analysis indicates that brands adopting attention-weighted buying reduced effective media waste by 25% to 35% in digital video campaigns. 

Creative development has also moved upstream. Attention diagnostics reveal precise disengagement points, enabling data-driven optimisation of pacing, format selection, and branding cues. Lumen Research has shown that combining early brand recognition with sustained attention improves brand attribution accuracy by more than 20%. 

When integrated into marketing mix models, attention metrics significantly improve the explanatory power of upper-funnel channels that have historically been under-credited due to weak exposure proxies. 

Organisational and governance implications  

Implementing attention analytics is a governance decision, not a tooling upgrade. Metrics must be standardised across partners, integrated into BI systems, and aligned with procurement logic that goes beyond lowest-Cost Per Mile (CPM) thinking. Early findings often challenge entrenched assumptions about channel performance, particularly for high-reach, low-attention inventory. 

Organisations that succeed treat attention as a strategic KPI, embedding it into planning cycles, creative evaluation, and performance reviews, and supporting it with clear executive sponsorship. 

Attention as the New Accountability Standard 

Attention analytics has moved beyond experimentation because the economics of modern marketing now demand it. With advertising supply expanding faster than human cognitive capacity, effectiveness is determined not by how much media is bought, but by how much attention is genuinely earned. 

Across categories and company scales, closer attention consistently correlates with stronger brand lift, improved sales efficiency, and reduced media effectiveness leakage. As AI-driven buying systems accelerate optimisation at scale, attention provides the essential human signal that anchors automation in real consumer impact rather than proxy metrics. 

For organisations serious about marketing accountability, attention is no longer a mere complement. It is the most defensible, commercially grounded standard for evaluating whether marketing investment is creating real, sustained value.