With online video advertising budgets set to rise 22% globally in 2015, campaign managers and ad agencies are getting well-acquainted with the metrics of importance and how they interpret success.
On video, the key goal could range from a measure of engagement, brand recall or even the amount of times a clip drove a purchase. For ad agencies, the key is to work alongside clients to outline what makes a success or failure, and to tailor a campaign around the target in mind.
Yahoo-owned programmatic video advertising platform BrightRoll looked into various ways of defining success through the channel with its UK Agency Survey for 2015, finding that simply gaining views is more than enough reason for marketers to be happy.
Eyes on the prize
In the survey, polling respondents from over 70 ad agencies in the UK, BrightRoll discovered that completed views – i.e ones where the user has sat through the clip from start to finish – was the metric that mattered most to video campaign managers.
Completed views was listed as the most important stat by 31% of the group, above brand lift on 28%. Interestingly, conversions and sales impact were some way off in terms of importance, scoring 8% and 6% respectively.
A complete version of the table shows the overall value of a video attracting eyeballs, with the user’s action playing second fiddle.
On the client side, there is a huge uptake for being able to target the right audiences through video, ‘targeting’ voted for by 44%, which could form part of the reason why programmatic is such a popular ad-buying method in 2015.
Overall reach was voted for by 33% of the group, fitting in nicely with the 31% of agencies that cited completed views as their most important metric for gauging success. The poll also unearthed a few votes for ‘price relative to TV’, as 10% picked up on the occasional price difference between buying online and offline inventory.
The survey went on to highlight the role that mobile will have in driving video ad revenue over the next year. A graph shows 65% of agencies predicting video budgets dedicated to smartphone and tablets to see the biggest rise in 2015, followed by mobile display on 39%.