Research Article on Measuring Attention in Social Media Receives the Journal of Advertising Best Article Award 2025
How can organizations measure more efficiently in the future whether their social media posts are actually noticed? In their publication, researchers at the Chair of Marketing provide an answer to this question by validating viewport measurement.
In 2025, Daniel Bruns, Julian Felix Kopka, Lennart Borgmann, Steffen Prior and Tobias Langner published their findings on measuring attention to social media posts in the Journal of Advertising. This alone already represents a major success: published by the American Academy of Advertising, the journal currently ranks first among more than 200 academic journals in the field of communication research.
“Even the nomination for the award left us overwhelmed; actually winning the prize in the end came as a complete surprise. In today’s media environment, attention has become the hardest currency of all: without it, any message loses its impact. This makes us all the more pleased that our research can help make attention easier and more cost-effective to measure in the future,” emphasizes Professor Tobias Langner.
Study explores an alternative to the gold standard
For social media posts to be effective, they must capture the audience’s attention. Competition on social media platforms is particularly intense. For companies, this increases the pressure to understand their own performance.
“In advertising research, so-called eye-tracking methods are regarded as the gold standard for measuring users’ attention,” explains Steffen Prior. In such studies, participants wear special glasses while looking at a screen; these glasses record their eye movements. This provides valuable insights into which content is viewed and for how long, and thus also into how advertising budgets can be allocated more efficiently.
The challenge is that this method can usually only be applied in studies with a small number of participants. As a result, large-scale studies designed to assess attention are hardly feasible.
Real-time data
This is where computer-based methods such as so-called viewport tracking come into play. “Put simply, they can be used to determine how long specific content remains visible on the screen before it disappears from the viewport — for example, when it is scrolled past on a smartphone,” explains Julian Kopka. These methods run automatically in the background while a website is being visited or a social media feed is being viewed, providing real-time data without the need for an elaborate study design involving special glasses.
In their award-winning study, the Wuppertal team examined whether this computer-based method can match eye-tracking and provide reliable insights into how attention is gained and sustained. “Just because something appears on my screen does not necessarily mean that I actually notice it and interact with it,” explains Lennart Borgmann.
Who is scrolling and how?
In their study, the researchers focused on social media environments. Owing to their structure, these environments exhibit specific characteristics that make the use of computer-based methods particularly attractive. In addition, empirical evidence on the use of this method in connection with social media content had previously been lacking.
For the study, the team recreated an Instagram feed. Participants were then asked to scroll through the content on their own smartphones, just as they would in everyday life. While doing so, they wore eye-tracking glasses, and viewport measurement was run in the background. At the end, participants completed a survey that asked, among other things, which messages they could recall.
Results
The comparison of the data shows that viewport measurement is a practical, reliable and useful tool for social media communication. Although it is not as precise as eye-tracking methods, it produces similarly meaningful results and therefore offers a faster and more cost-effective option that makes larger-scale attention studies possible.
“Viewport measurement does not replace eye-tracking, but it offers a practical alternative. Some questions still remain unanswered. Our study shows that it is worth pursuing them in order to gain an even better understanding of this method for measuring attention in social media environments and to refine it further,” Daniel Bruns concludes.
Link to the study
Bruns, D., Kopka, J. F., Borgmann, L., Prior, S., & Langner, T. (2025). Measuring Gaining and Holding Attention to Social Media Ads with Viewport Logging: A Validation Study Using Mobile Eye-Tracking. Journal of Advertising, 54(5), 655–672. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2025.2524186
