Are You In A Find Or Discover Mood?

People do lots of different things on the web: from checking the weather, to reading the latest news story, or finding the next train home. Its diverse use is an opportunity for people to see hundreds of adverts a day, but just because ads can be seen doesn’t mean people are in the mood to see them.
When people are in the “right” mood, they can become more open to advertising, and in turn, brand messages. Mood matters, but how do we know what the “right” mood is?
Using natural browsing data from our panel of 500 households, we have found people are often in 1 of 2 moods when surfing the web : Find or Discover.
Sometimes, people are trying to find a specific piece of information quickly: what’s the weather going to be like this afternoon? Is my train home going to be delayed? What’s the synonym for “find”?
In this mood, there if often a sense of necessity (to find the answer) and urgency (quickly!) This means most attention goes to the task in hand : when trying to find a train time on nationalrail.co.uk, attention goes to the train time search area, rather than spreading across the entire page.

People are frequently open to discovering information by exploring a site : browsing the guardian.com/uk for interesting articles or goodhousekeeping.co.uk for a new recipe to try. When reading an article on theguardian.com/uk, people are on the hunt for other things to read with attention spreading across all parts of the page, and, importantly to the advertising.

Our natural browsing data shoes that sites where people are in discovery mood are much better for advertisers. People are much more likely to notice the ads (18% of viewable ads are noticed, compared to 13% for find sites) and spend longer looking at them (1.0 secs VS 0.8 secs).

Mood matters: Directing campaigns to sites which encourage discovery can lead to an attention premium for your digital advertising.