Video content in mobile rich media ads

By Matevž Klanjšek

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Mobile is increasingly becoming a regular part of digital advertising campaigns. The industry largely agrees on its unique user experience, credibility and efficacy. On mobile, users interact with content differently than they do online and ads are no exception. As such, there is a whole range of ad formats specifically designed for mobile devices. But what about the content of these ads? Should it be different too?

Mobile is increasingly becoming a regular part of digital advertising campaigns. The industry largely agrees on its unique user experience, credibility and efficacy. On mobile, users interact with content differently than they do online and ads are no exception. As such, there is a whole range of ad formats specifically designed for mobile devices. But what about the content of these ads? Should it be different too?

At Celtra, we’ve always been firm believers that advertising content should be produced specifically for mobile or at least edited for it. Surely content that’s simply borrowed from other media and reused in mobile ads can’t perform as well as something designed for mobile. And it doesn’t, but it still performs well enough. At least video.

In our study we’ve been particularly interested in the relation between video type and length and its performance, specifically the attention span and completion rates. We researched over 150 ads with video content running on AdCreator in Q4, a balanced sample of different ad formats run across different publishers and networks.

The first results were pleasantly surprising. The average completion rate was almost 50% – this means that users who started watching the video indeed watched it! It might sound like the most normal thing, but it’s actually a big deal, considering that user interaction on mobile devices is known for short attention spans and very selective behavior. To make things even better, 15% of users who interacted with the ad decided to watch the video, making it the most successful content in mobile ads.

Observing the user attention span offered even more interesting insights. Since we recently released a new powerful video analytics for AdCreator that allows for super granular (per second) attention span tracking, we could see exactly where users were dropping off, an insight that a standard quartile attention span tracking cannot offer. One interesting observation was that a lot of videos include brand or corporate logos or disclaimers in the last couple of seconds. Users would watch the video till that point and then drop off. Quartile tracking doesn’t detect that and simply reports lower last quartile, whereas per second tracking clearly indicates that event and offers much more realistic picture. It also allows you to see how how users are rewinding the video and which parts of the video are the most interesting.

Looking into the relation between video length (chart 1) and content type (chart 2) and completion rate was perhaps the most informing. Videos that are included in mobile ads largely fall into one of these three categories: video commercials, movie trailers (or other entertainment content) and video presentations. Completion rates are quite consistent across all three types with trailers performing slightly better than the other two.

Video attention span per length

But when this data is crossed with attention span numbers for different video lengths, a much more interesting picture emerges. Very short videos (shorter than 30 seconds) which are almost exclusively reused classic TV commercials have the lowest completion rate (35.8%). Longer videos (30 – 60 seconds) are the best performing ones. These are typically movie trailers and other high quality content. Yet longer videos (longer than 60 seconds) mostly belong to the video presentation category and their performance is only slightly below the movie trailers. Surprisingly, attention span and completion rates even rise a bit as the videos get very long (150 seconds and longer).

Video attention span per content

Evidently, users are not too keen to watch commercials they’ve already seen on TV in their mobile ads again. But they are happy to watch movie trailers and video presentations which are often times produced specifically for mobile. Regardless the video length, quality and original content is sticky and works best. Advertisers are starting to notice and we believe that in the future more and more video content will be produced with mobile in mind, making this most popular feature in mobile ads even more effective.
 

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