What You Need To Know Before Launching An Online Video Ad On Facebook And Youtube
Have you been seeing a lot of videos on your Facebook News Feed lately? Or that even at the middle of watching a web series on YouTube, there's an ad?
Social media platforms and apps have been more video friendly this year and you'll be seeing more of that in the next four years. Video marketing today has simply exploded, to put it simply, and we've already covered this growing industry in our previous blog post (Why You Should Post Videos On Social Media). Facebook has recently updated its Video features and has reached a peak of 8 million views daily by March 2016, up by 100% in less than a year. YouTube, on the other hand, has long been the go-to site for all things and happenings that can be caught on video—from web series, music videos, to several user-generated contents. That's just part of the reason why these two giants remain as top options for online video advertisements: people are there and they keep coming back.
If you were to take advantage of that fact and interested in running a video ad, which platform will give you the best value for your money?
Here's the takeaway from an experiment (https://moz.com/blog/facebook-vs-youtube) wherein a 20-second video was advertised on both platforms with the same budget at the same period of time.
- Facebook and YouTube have a different charging system and employs different methods on what counts as views.
- Facebook and YouTube both use the metric “hours watched” instead of views, but how they charge for advertising differs.
- YouTube charges per view, while Facebook uses CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions).
- Their view values are different. Facebook counts it as 1 view after 3 seconds. YouTube counts a full duration of a video shorter than 30 seconds as 1 view. The count for 1 view also starts after 30 seconds of a longer video.
How is this important? The results of the study can guide you in choosing what would work best for your campaign. Determine the goal of your video campaign. Are you aiming for more impressions? Or is it your aim to get a certain message across? The study determined which platform gave them the best value for money with these metrics: impressions, overall watched time, and quality time watched.
Facebook can give you more impressions for the same budget as YouTube. If you just need more people to view your video, this is the platform for you. The video automatically plays as you scroll down the News Feed.
Facebook also wins when it comes to overall watched. It has a replay feature after the full duration of the video, which could have contributed to this. The group explains, though, that this is simply their approximation since there are no tools that can exactly measure that at the moment.
YouTube can be the cheaper option if your goal is to achieve a higher quality time watched. According to the group, a “quality timed watched” is your assigned point where the message, main purpose, or main call-to-action line has been reached or viewed. They also noted that in their experiment, the YouTube ad has higher completed views than in Facebook.
Do be reminded that the results should not be taken as a golden rule. Every campaign will have different factors to consider such as length of video, demographics, and keywords used.
Let us know how you launched your campaigns. Which platform suits your goal the best? Feel free to discuss the merits of the metrics used in the experiment and how it went for you!
Bonus data:
- Did you know that Cisco's recent forecast indicate that in 2020, about 82% of the global internet consumer traffic will be from videos? Business Insider further strengthened this forecast with a study revealing that videos are replacing static-display advertisements. It is speculated to take 41% of the total desktop display-related spending in 2020. Visit this website to learn more about the
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