If you’re focusing your video campaigns on viewability alone, you’re losing sight of the bigger picture.
One of the most common traps video advertisers fall into is to focus on a single metric. Indeed, with so many different ways to measure digital campaigns, it can be extremely tempting to choose one KPI and do everything you can to optimize for it—even if that means ignoring other metrics that might provide a more accurate or insightful representation of campaign performance.
When it comes to video and branding, viewability is a foundational metric, but there’s still the question of whether or not your video ad was effective to reach the right audience with the right message. While there’s a standard for viewability, it’s not a comprehensive metric for brand impact.
As many advertisers know, there’s little consensus on what viewable impressions really are. How much of the ad does the user have to watch? Does the sound need to be on for the ad to be effective? Clearly, there’s a need to balance viewability and other KPIs in order to truly know what’s working, what’s not and why.
Focusing on quality impressions
Instead, viewability needs to be part of a bigger equation that combines different factors to create a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in terms of the quality of video placements.
Quality impressions incorporate four factors:
Brand Safety: What environments make sense for your ads to run in? It’s not just simply about being alongside questionable or controversial content. Brand safety should also ensure you don’t show up on sites where there’s a negative user experience.
Fraud Prevention: Yes, you want a zero-tolerance policy for fraud. But in the real world, what are you willing to tolerate? Not all impressions you’re getting will be legitimate, especially if you’re buying from aggregators.
Viewability: How do you define a viewable impression? If your brand message doesn’t come until 5 seconds into your video, it doesn’t make sense for your baseline to be 2 seconds of viewability.
Placement: Make sure the player size is large enough to effectively communicate your message. Also be cognizant of where on the page the player is located, as that also impacts the ability of your ad to be seen.
By aligning all these factors, your brand can minimize waste and maximize results. We recently worked with a global CPG brand to optimize to their ideal mix of all of the above factors—achieving an average 70 percent in-view rate on large video player inventory with less than 1 percent fraud and a 75 percent completion rate. As a result, the brand achieved heightened awareness for a new product line.
Moving into insights
Of course, metrics have no meaning without a clear connection to brand impact. You need to be able to optimize your strategy based on what’s working, what’s not and what you can do to improve it. Once you define quality impressions for your brand, you can dive deeper into insights and take action.
The same global CPG brand was looking to use digital video to drive high-value actions on its website. The first step was to understand the audience better. By diving into their detailed audience profile and using their first-party sales data against various third-party data segments, the brand uncovered that people who bought its gourmet cheese product fell into two distinct groups: corporate moms and male foodies—two targets it had not anticipated.
With this knowledge in hand, the brand created a personalized ad campaign for each target, reaching each audience with the right creative, on the right device, at the right time. This strategy proved effective, driving a 300 percent lift in conversions.
For video advertisers, the takeaway here is fairly simple: Metrics are good, but actionable insights are a whole lot better. By selecting the right mix of KPIs and aligning them to your campaign goals, you’ll find meaningful answers that can transform your business.
