In a recent survey of advertising agencies, Response and Brand Lift were the second and third most valuable results they wanted from online video advertising campaigns. (See the first article in this series for an in depth discussion of the number one most valuable result—Completed Views.)
Here in Part 3 of our series, we’re going show you how to get your online video campaigns to drive so much added value from response and brand lift that it helps triple your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or more.
How the “Multiplier Effect” doubles your ad spend value
Massive added value comes from what we call the “multiplier effect” that online video campaigns produce in other paid, earned and owned media such as search and social activity, which often see spikes of 15 to as much as 100 percent or more during campaigns.
As you’d guess, established brands with a lot of ongoing TV advertising exposure usually don’t see as much of a lift in search activity during video ad campaigns on a percentage increase basis, but its value is significant relative to the amount they spend on paid search advertising and SEO.
On Nationwide’s side
For example, when we ran the initial pilot campaign for Nationwide Insurance, we saw searches increase an average of 15% in the locations where the video ad versions ran featuring photos of the local agents. Not especially earth-shattering when you look at it on the surface but when you consider Nationwide spent more than $11 million on Internet search in 2014, an essentially free 15% increase in search activity could add up to substantial added value.
At the other end of the spectrum, brands that aren’t as well exposed can see more than 100 percent increases in search activity during and shortly after video advertising campaigns.
For example, a foreign food brand that spent less than $250,000 total on advertising in the U.S. in 2014 ran a month-long nationwide product promo campaign with us in support of a small TV buy and saw brand search queries jump 164%.
It all starts with analytics
We measure brand lift and effects of video advertising on other media by benchmarking their activity prior to, during and after campaigns. In most cases, integrating with advertisers’ Google analytics accounts, social media accounts and other third party tools such as brand lift surveys enables us to measure the multiplier effect on key paid, earned and owned media.
And the clicks are free
Because online video ads can be interactive, part of the added value related to response are the clicks that an ad’s offer generates. It follows then, that a best practice for online video advertising is to include an offer and call to action that specifies a click action, such as “Click to download the half-price coupon.”
For highly competitive categories and keywords, these clicks can produce significant added value. But it’s also important to remember that direct clicks from the ad represent only a fraction of the impact video ads typically have on response and consumer action.
Much of the response to an ad occurs outside the video ad view session, when viewers take action on their own to visit the brand’s website or search for the product featured in the ad.
But wait, there’s more!
One of the key brand exposure metrics we report for the video campaigns run on our platform is Total View Time (TVT), i.e., the total amount of time your video ad is viewed throughout the campaign, measured in days and hours. It includes completed views, partial views and other views, such as those that occur on your YouTube channel that were not the result of your campaign media spend.
This is a powerful metric no other medium can deliver—including TV—and it serves to give the advertiser a strong sense of how much added value exposure their brand or product receives. For example, in a recent 21-day campaign flight we ran for a healthcare client, the TVT was 16 days and 14 hours!
Video ad campaigns produce enormous added value around these key Response and Brand Lift KPIs that many advertisers and agencies target with their media spends. Elements like the “multiplier effect,” free clicks and TVT produce measurable increases in search and social activity, brand recall and favorability, website traffic and, ultimately, sales.
Video advertising’s added value story gains further credence in the final installment of our four-part series, How to Triple the Value of Your Media Spend, so stay tuned!
And BTW, if you’d like a shareable PDF version of the Google success story featuring our Nationwide Insurance campaign cited in this article, just select this button: