Facebook Video Ads Make Facebook Your Top Performing Digital Channel

Video is the fastest growing format on the Internet.  According to Cisco Systems, video will represent 80-90% of global consumer Internet traffic by 2018. Consumer generated video sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and the like are now joined by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the other leading social networks who are all vying to be the undisputed leader of video consumption.  Facebook, in particular, has been a fast emerging player in video having rocketed into a leadership position.

In August of last year, comScore found that for the first time Facebook had more video views than You-Tube on desktop.  Since that time, the two have been battling it out month by month for the top spot. Facebook’s meteoric rise is driven by their growth in video views per person, which have nearly doubled in the year to January 2015. With Facebook’s reported video views exceeding three billion per day in January of 2015, a figure that had tripled since September of 2014, it means comScore’s desktop numbers only represent one tenth of Facebook’s total video views (the rest are via mobile).  As is the case with emerging channels, marketers will eventually follow to reach these new video audiences.

Facebook Video Ads Are Very Successful

To better understand the metrics that advertisers are focused on for video ads run in social, Mixpo asked respondents to list the three metrics most important to them.   The most important metrics were – engagement 47%, shares 43%, conversions 40%, time spend watching 38%, views 34% and click through rate 30%.

This indicates that the expectation for a video ad run in social is to deliver more than just a video view. In fact, conversions were ranked as higher importance than a view itself and so they should be.

When done right, Facebook advertising click-through and conversion rates rival that of search ads (adwords). Combine that with much lower media costs and it’s easy to see why Facebook is the top performing digital channel for many marketers.

Justin Kistner of Mixpo said that they tested the use of video creative to drive traffic to a landing page.  Although the Facebook video ad had a high click-through rate, it was from clicks to play the video, not clicks to the landing page which is the desired for conversion to a customer.

There are 2 ways to avoid this: 

• retargeting people who watched the video improved click-through and conversion rates, or
• placing the video on your landing page – once someone is on your landing page, they are more likely to take multiple actions and maintain your conversion rate.  

In fact, you really should do both Place the video on your landi9ng page and retarget that video/landing page and get the 3-10 times extra conversion rate.

A video helps to build trust, provide information and generally convert your visitor into a customer based on your landing pager needs.

Facebook’s People-Based Advantage

Perhaps the most significant differentiator of video ads on Facebook is the people-based marketing advantage. People-based marketing is the ability to leverage individual user IDs for targeting and attribution, without having to actually provide the user data to the advertisers.

Some of the key advantages to this approach are: 

• retargeting that works across devices, without dependency on cookies that expire or get deleted
• persistent behavioural data at the individual level from inside and outside of Facebook that drives more effective lookalike modelling
• true attribution based on view through and/or click-through; even in mobile including mobile apps
• no personally identifiable information (PII) is created by or passed to the advertiser, eliminating liability for privacy protection. 

In an Adweek article, Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital, really captured the significance of the people-based marketing advantage, “When you have that much known information, tied to analytics and an ad server, you can start doing messaging”.

The top social networks are becoming the leading digital video consumption channels. For advertisers, social networks also deliver interaction, retargeting, lookalike targeting, and people-based attribution.

It is essential to build on the people-based marketing foundation necessary to unlock the value of the new video advertising ecosystem.

Download Mixpo’s full State of Video Advertising  report  here for more info.

Patterson Digital Marketing will soon begin to use Facebook Video Ads on a landing page AND retarget them or its own lead acquisition.  It will also shortly begin to do the same for our clients.