The Guide to Measuring the Effectiveness of Video Ads

Video is playing an increasingly important role in a brand’s marketing mix. In fact, eMarketer reports that in 2014 video ad spending increased 56 percent to $5.96 billion dollars. Most audience segments—including highly desirable consumers such as Millennials and Centennials—are watching more video during their time online, especially on mobile devices. Ad spending is migrating away from text and static visual images to video, which can easily convey more complex ideas and messaging. But how do brands know whether their video advertising strategies are effective? Here’s a closer look at what marketers need to consider about measuring the effectiveness of their video advertising campaigns.

The Importance of Data for Online Campaigns

Online advertising campaigns can take up a major part of a brand’s marketing spend. However, there are numerous benefits to online advertising. The results can be immediate and it’s possible to easily adjust campaigns based on real-time data.

Does your product launch need more support in a specific geographic region? Is brand recognition slipping for a certain product and you want to invest to achieve brand lift before back to school or the holiday season starts? Is a piece of creative not yielding the results that you hoped for? In any of these cases, access to analytics can help brands make strategic decisions about the future of campaigns. Experimentation, quick iterations and the ability to pivot in support of your business goals are all key to today’s advertising environment.

Video in particular can be a very effective medium for companies that are targeting a wide range of marketing goals. But developing the creative behind video ads and placing them in the best venues online is expensive. The right analytics and data can help ensure that you’re capturing the best ROI for your efforts, reaching your target audience and achieving specific campaign metrics.

Choosing the Right Analytics

Video advertising platforms often include some internal reporting capabilities that can help marketers measure factors such as:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Referrals
• Videos started
• Average time watched
• Videos completed
• Shares of video content on social networks

However, most of these platforms lack the capacity to help you move beyond basic statistics of how the public interacted with your ads. The information that brand marketers need most is what impact the video ad campaign had on their business goals. Solutions such as Instantly Ad Effectiveness? allow brands to go deeper into the analysis.

Some metrics to consider when looking at video ad campaigns include:

• Mind share: Did the video advertisement capture the attention of your target audience? Are people talking about it, sharing it and reacting to it? Did it make a splash?
• Brand awareness and sentiment: Did the ad contribute to a lift in brand awareness? Did it impact brand sentiment in a positive way? Did the video ads result in your brand being positioned as more likeable or falling higher in consumers’ rankings vis-à-vis competitors?
• Ad recall: Does the audience remember viewing the ad? What specifically do they recall?
• Purchase influence: Do people who saw the ad feel that it had a positive impact on their desire or intention to purchase a featured product or support your brand in a specific way? Did it ultimately drive sales?
• Engagement: Did viewers share your video on social media?
• Viewability: Recent studies have shown that video ads are often not seen for a wide variety of reasons. In some cases, they’re muted on the page and begin automatically. In others, there are browser or device issues. Tracking viewability is critical to ensuring that you’re truly getting appropriate campaign ROI.
• Completions: The number of people who start watching the video ad may not be the same as those that completed it. A video complete is someone who was interested enough to watch from start to finish. It’s important to know those numbers to understand if your creative is on point.

Video advertising—along with different forms of mobile advertising—represents the biggest trend in paid media today. No doubt, this is poised to increase in the years ahead as media increasingly moves toward visual and interactive formats. But in order for brands to capture the full value of their video advertising efforts, it’s key to have the right analytics in place. By collecting data and using that information to guide future investments and pivot current campaigns when needed, advertising can remain an important and effective element in every brand’s media mix.