As digital video consumption continues to grow, brands are increasingly turning to online video ads. Past studies show that adding video ads to display campaigns improves performance, so now advertisers want to know how video delivers value on its own. To answer that question, the Facebook Marketing Science team commissioned Nielsen to analyze data on how video ads affect brand metrics. Here’s what they found.
Why measure?
Online channels like News Feed changed how people consume content, giving them the power to decide what content (including ads) warrants their attention. If they don’t like what they see, they scroll past it. And, even if they do stop long enough to see a video ad, people respond differently to videos. Some people see the video but don’t stick around to watch it. Others watch part of the video and move on. So how do you quantify the total value of a video ad online, where reach and views are often different?
How Nielsen measured
To find out how video delivers value for brands, Nielsen analyzed data from 173 of their BrandEffect studies that included digital video ads on Facebook.1 Each study used a test-and-control design to measure the video’s impact on three ad campaign metrics: ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase consideration.
Looking at the data, Nielsen divided video viewers in the test group by total length of video view, starting at zero seconds (since the initial static frame of a video is essentially a display ad and therefore counts as an impression).
Then, they used propensity scores to match people in the control group to each of the test groups based on view duration and measured estimated lift by comparing their poll responses about ad recall, brand awareness and purchase consideration.
What the research found
Results show that from the moment a video ad was viewed (even before one second), lift happened across ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase consideration. That means even people who never watched the video, but did see the impression, were still impacted by the ad. And, as expected, lift increased the longer people watch the ad.2
Then, our Marketing Science team looked at both the lift data from Nielsen and the number of people who watched for varying lengths of time to estimate campaign value at different lengths of view.
That data shows that people who watched under three seconds of the video ad created up to 47 percent of the total campaign value, and people who watched for fewer than 10 seconds created up to 74 percent, depending on the metric. That means that while lift continued to increase the longer people watched, people didn’t have to watch a whole video to be affected by the ad. Even video views under 10 seconds effectively build awareness and drive purchase intent.
What this means for marketers
As people consume digital content differently, it’s clear that video view counts alone don’t tell advertisers enough about the value driven from digital video ads. Marketers should experiment with shorter ad creative to drive value for their brand, keeping in mind that value increases the longer people watch. And, as always, advertisers should continue optimizing ads for campaign goals, but going forward, they also need to look deeper than view counts to measure total campaign value.
Every part of a video view—from the initial impression to a complete video view and everything in between—drives value. Understanding this helps advertisers build content and evaluate success.