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Creative Insights Report: Spotlight on Gamified Ads

Taja Grubar Last updated: July 6, 2022

 

What can 25 billion ad impressions tell us about what effective creative looks like in media monetization? Turns out, a full report’s worth of insights! We recently published our second edition of our popular Creative Insights Report (read the blog post here) to gather benchmarks and insights on what is driving home impressions, and consequently, revenue.

Before we dive into the ins and outs of Gamified ads, here’s a quick recap of our research methodology:

  • Our aim was to discover which types of ad products perform best for each vertical and analyze what kind of ad experiences are best for driving key metrics
  • We looked at global Celtra for Media platform data from Q3-Q4 2021
  • Included Display, VAST video, VPAID video across desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps
  • Each analysis includes at least 10 creatives with a minimum of 100K impressions

Get the full report here.

Game on for gamified ads

This article will dive into a popular subset of creative: gamified. Gamified ads are interactive ad formats that borrow best-performing tactics to engage a user from the world of gaming. Think wiping a dirty windshield clean with your finger on mobile or playing a Tetris of chocolate bars.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gamified ad experiences are top performers when it comes to driving engagement. With a whopping 3.31% engagement rate (that’s almost triple that of video!), gamified ads are quite literally designed to have the user engage with the content. With 0.28% clickthrough rates, Gamfied aren’t quite the star performers to drive people on a site – but they do catch a user’s attention (or should we say thumb), when scrolling through the site.

What’s more, Gamified has by far the highest exposure time of all ad product families, coming in at 22.76 seconds.

Vertical-specific insights for gamified

E-comm and retail: when it comes to e-commerce and retail digital advertising creative, Gamified does the job when placed Mid-Funnel to drive engagement, raking in an average engagement rate of 4% and exposure time of 15 seconds. Motion helps encourage interaction so make sure to bake that into your Gamified e-commerce ads.

Entertainment and media: this vertical is a natural fit for gamified and similar to e-commerce, mid-funnel is the best place for Gamified entertainment experiences. The engagement rate here is also 4% and garners an average exposure time of 16 seconds. Gamified ads drive 6x higher engagement rate than the average of other ad products, so offering these for your entertainment clients is really a no-brainer.

Other verticals: CPG, food and beverage, quick-serve restaurant, and travel campaigns also benefit from Gamified ad experiences – curious to uncover performance benchmarks and where they work best? Download the full report here.

How to get started with Gamified?

Gamified ads are clearly a crowd-pleaser when it comes to engagement but designing motion-rich, well-thought experiences call for software that can deliver premium and unique ad products. Celtra’s platform for media owners and operators is one of the most popular solutions for building and activating high-performing ad suites that allow you to charge a premium CPM. If you’re interested in learning more, get in touch with Celtra today.