CARLSBAD, Calif., Sept. 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Some exciting new research has emerged for online publishers about the effect that user behavior has on digital ad revenue. The data was captured by Ezoic, a testing and machine learning platform for digital publishers. The new research suggests that improving certain website visitor intent metrics may offer significant financial benefits to digital publishers over time.

Recent Ezoic studies have shown that actual user intent may have a much more important impact on ad revenue than the traditional user experience metrics.  “Metrics like bounce rate, session duration, and pageviews per visit have a direct correlation to revenue, but they can be manipulated or misleading. When we are able to measure when visitors are genuinely engaged in the content, we see improvements in ad earnings,” says Ezoic Data Scientist, Dr. Greg Starek.

“The traditional metrics publishers have used to determine if users are having good or bad experience aren’t telling the whole truth. We’ve witnessed a phenomenon that we call Fake UX. It’s essentially the artificial inflation of these common user experience metrics, and it has a negative impact on revenue,” Starek continued.

Ezoic CCO, John Cole, revealed that advertiser metrics like average click-through-rates, viewability percentages, and campaign performance metrics are often negatively affected by Fake UX. “Fake UX hurts these metrics and publishers see a decrease in overall session earnings over time,” said Cole.

“Publishers are doing everything they can to improve the way visitors engage with their content. This is where testing becomes critical, because we’ve seen a lot of damage done by publishers to their own digital properties. Unfortunately, if you don’t fully-understand how visitor behavior impacts revenue, even sophisticated testing could lead you in the wrong direction long term,” claimed Chief Customer Officer, John Cole.

The new research suggests that evaluating engagement metrics like navigation bounces, engagement time, and engaged pageviews per visit offer increased insight into how visitors interact with content. “Being able to measure the difference between when a visitor is reading content versus waiting for a page to load, or navigating to a new page that they want to visit versus accidentally swiping to another page on a mobile device, for example, is actually critically important,” says Dr. Starek. Traditional metrics do not always show this kind of granularity according to Ezoic’s research team.

This new data is included in several new case studies available on Ezoic’s website. Publishers who are interested in looking at engagement metrics on their site and testing how different website elements affect them, can start by joining the Ezoic platform. “We built Ezoic so that publishers could stop guessing about this kind of stuff. The data is there to test so that publishers can deliver all visitors better experiences. We simply want to help publishers leverage that information in an actionable way,” Cole finished.

ABOUT EZOIC

Ezoic is an award-winning machine learning platform for online publishers.  Ezoic allows any web publisher to automatically enhance user experiences for every visitor; using artificial intelligence to tailor each website experience to each type of visitor.  Ezoic is headquartered in San Diego CA with an office in Newcastle and London, U.K.  The company works with tens of thousands of online publishers and websites that reach billions of visitors per month.

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SOURCE Ezoic