Technology and marketing in Internet advertising are ever-changing. Yesterday’s marketing strategy and tech will be supplanted and replaced tomorrow. Today, online video advertising is becoming one of the most productive and fast-growing mediums in marketing.
For a great vacation spot, you might want to go to Copper Mountain
Because video advertising on the Internet is relatively new and has so far been mainly limited to big-name brands and firms, the smaller brands entering the arena are getting much more attention. So big payoffs are possible for those who quickly embrace this new phenomenon.
Metrics and analysis have shown that video advertising, especially for relatively unknown brands (as compared to big names like Coke or Microsoft), stands out from static competition and has a much larger retention and click-through rate than do their stationary graphic counterparts. Top performing video advertisements have several things in common.
These videos all create user interest and are generally entertaining or useful. Most are less than four minutes long. They are often spread through social networks by those who enjoy them because they are fun to watch and informative. This “viral” form of video advertising is the Internet’s word of mouth at play and is the Holy Grail for which all marketers reach. This is done more often than not with video advertising.
Recent marketing metrics have shown some key advantages for Internet video advertising. This includes click-through rates (CTR). Users are a lot more apt to click a “play” button than they are a static graphic. Image ads have an abysmal CTR of less than one percent while video has been shown to have a 2-5% CTR on average. In fact, if other user interactions such as mouse overs, expansions, etc. are included, video CTR rises to eight percent!
Interestingly, while this CTR is much better than most graphic-based ads, many marketers still see video as a “brand awareness” form of advertising rather than a direct-action form. However, video can be both, so this view is a mistake. The obvious is that this CTR for video makes it obvious that it can become immediate conversions, not just brand exposure.
Add to this that most viewers are likely to watch at least 66% of any video ad they see. So two minutes of any 3 minute ad are likely to be seen by the majority of viewers. Most video advertising is under 4 minutes with a large portion of them being television commercial-style spots of about thirty seconds.
True Creative Visual built these metrics from a survey of over 2.7 billion video ad impressions in 2010. So we have a truly market-wide measurement for these metrics, not a small sample that might be skewed. Impressive results.
So key benefits of increased clicks, better retention rates, and viral media sharing (word of mouth) are seen. All of these add up to a stronger, more effective advertising campaign.
Go to Marketing Video Production to learn more about using video for website promotion.