How Should Video Ad Effectiveness Be Measured?
IAB UK recently launched National Anti Click-Through Rate Day, to highlight the industry’s over-reliance on vanity metrics for measuring digital ad effectiveness. This light-hearted message underlined a more serious need for advertisers to move away from CTR, which only provides a very narrow view on campaign success. To support this message, the IAB released a Measurement Toolkit, to help support advertisers as they transition to more robust effectiveness metrics.
Iab uk video steering group
The IAB Measurement Toolkit consolidates current best practices and provides guidance on measuring digital advertising in the context of other media. It sets out the main models and techniques that can be used to measure digital advertising, from big picture approaches (e.g. econometrics) to more granular analysis (e.g. attribution modelling), showing how they fit together and how to use them. The guide concludes with a set of practical templates and checklists for creating your own measurement strategy.
But in the context of video advertising, what does this mean? What practical steps can you take to explore other media metrics with your campaigns?
To explore this theme more fully, we asked members of the IAB Video Steering Committee for their views. Hopefully the views below will allow you to avoid becoming, in the IAB’s own words “a clickhead”.
Saint Betteridge, Commercial Director at Unruly
“CTRs for video ads are a misleading, and sometimes inaccurate measurement that doesn’t account for any emotional engagement with a brand. Clicks tend to come further down the purchasing funnel, while brand building is all about the power of the brand’s story and the emotion it evokes in the target audience. An emotionally powerful ad creates brand favorability that can lead to an in-store purchase, but this doesn’t happen instantly for most products, e.g. dwell time spent exploring car functionality online is a more accurate measurement of campaign success, as an instant impulse purchase is unlikely.
You’d be hard pressed to find any research that indicates that there is a link between CTR percentage and brand building. Nielsen research shows there’s virtually no relationship between click-through rates and brand opinion or offline sales.”
Matt White, Vice President at Quantcast
“The ad industry’s addiction to click-through rates (CTR) is a classic example of valuing what we can measure, not measuring what’s of value. Just because something works in one context, doesn’t mean it applies in another. CTR is a search metric, rarely a good proxy for display. Countless great campaigns have been mishandled at the measurement stage by sticking to the familiar; by not pushing harder to identify which metrics brands should be paying attention to. This unwillingness to go the extra mile is holding back digital brand advertising and limiting the ability of companies to grow through effective online campaigns that can’t be measured by click-throughs. Luckily, we’re seeing more and more progressive marketing leaders adapt. These are the ones that will be around in more than a year as these are the marketers that are building long term sustainable value, not chasing cheap clicks”
Andrew King, Director, Product Management at Innovid
“For brand building, the campaign goal should dictate the success metrics worth tracking. For instance, brand loyalty vs brand awareness in a new market may drive different KPI's. Here are three common areas to consider; attention, affinity and action. Attention will be measured through viewability, dwell time and ad engagement. Affinity represents how much the audience likes the content. This can be measured through social listening and sentiment analysis across comments, likes, mentions and shares. Action is your traditional conversion tracking. Did the audience call, sign-up or buy what is being promoted?”
Martin Salo, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Emotion AI company Realeyes
“Measuring attention, rather than clicks, and whether you managed to emotionally move your audience gives marketers a much better understanding of the effect their campaigns are having. Attention and emotion are universal across devices and different formats which may not even support clicks. They are also great at pinpointing precise moments, scenes and assets that are driving those results.”
For further insight into the most appropriate and effective measurement strategies for your campaign, download the IAB Measurement Toolkit.