Assuming that people are more likely to click the longer they stay on a site, what dwell time do you think should be aimed for? Do you have stats about this relating to any specific sites?
I don't have any stats for this but I guess it totally depends upon the length of the article and the position of ad, say if you have an article which could be typically read in about 10 minutes and you have placed ads in the center of article, it could be said that you will get your visitor clicking on your ad after 5 minutes of their stay on that article page.
i have a video site where visitors stay on for an average of 11 minutes but doesn't convert into that many clicks
I think sometimes people click google ads because they didn't quite find what they were looking for on the your page, so they wouldn't have stayed long at all... then there's some that read all the page and want to read more. Or it could be that your page tells/shows them everything they need to know/want to see, so they have no incentive to click anything else. It is very difficult to know which ones are visiting your pages I guess. It's also a bit of a paradox in that all the time you spend thinking about this stuff, if you add it up it could be hours or even days wasted per month, you could have created more content for your site and got more clicks anyway.
I was interested in people's thoughts as I'm investigating the value of advertising space. The longer the dwell time the more valauable the site or page to advertisers who buy space as opposed to clicks.
so the more contextual the ads - or relevant to editorial - the higher the cost of advertising space?
The relevency doesn't relates to the cost of advertising, instead it's how tough the advertisers competition is.
In which case, which advertisers have the toughest competition? How do Financial Services, Mortgage, Overseas property, Organic Food, Travel, Investing, Jobs in Education, Education Supplies, Art & Interior Design sectors get on with space in front of ABC1 demographic? Could I have your thoughts?
As I said earlier the cost relates to advertisers competition. Lets say, there are 100 advertisers for the keyword "mortgage" all of them are very strong parties and they bid as high as $10 or more for 1 click or as low as $.10 per click, so the average would be good. On other hand, if there are 100 advertisers for the keyword "funny jokes" and all of them are week, the maximum bids could be $1/click and the lowest could be $0.01/click so you will get low per click prices. It depends upon the advertisers budget, like each industries have it's own budget, finance/mortgage related peoples have high marketing budget hence higher rate per click. Hope I help you understand it.