Online video ads get more clicks than static ads

South Africa’s bandwidth premium is of course a significant obstacle to advertisers who would like to use more than the old static banners or animated gifs. Indeed local web surfers are likely to avoid or resent any imbedded ads that chew voraciously into their meagre bandwidth rations.

When Flash animation banners first started appearing a few years ago, they were contentious even in the USA, though the concern there was that such ads were slowing down the browsing experience rather than using up any allocated download quota. Delivery technologies have moved on, and typical download speeds in the US have lifted from being approximately what South Africans experience today to anywhere from 4 Mbps to 45Mbps, and online video has come into its own. But is a video ad more effective than a conventional ad?

DoubleClick studied 2.7 billion online video ad impressions for 300 campaigns, comparing them with data for non-video ads, and concluded that video ads are significantly more powerful than most other formats. They found web surfers are twice as likely to click the “play” button in video ads as they are to click through standard static image ads, though they rarely watch the video more than two-thirds of the way through. Those clicking the “play” button typically watched 10 seconds of 15 second videos and 19 seconds of 30 second videos.

Obviously the lesson, as with most things on the web, is to front-load your message rather than building to a punch-line.

The actual click-through rate for video ads ranged from 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent, compared with click-through rates for static image ads of between 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent.

Of course it’s not just a numbers game – the quality of your creative is clearly important contributor to click-through rates, as is the relevance of the ad content to its positioning. And click-through rates themselves are irrelevant if your conversion rates let you down. But it seems clear that video ads online are finally starting to have an impact on brand awareness and traffic generation.