Is analytics the key to successful online campaigns?
Luke Aviet, UK managing director at online content distributor goviral, explains how we can use analytics technology to target online video campaigns more effectively – and even to re-work TV commercials.
In 2010, brands in the UK are expected to have spent around £70 million creating content specifically for online distribution and certain projections see this figure rising 100 per cent every year until 2014. This increasing expenditure, marking a shift away from simply reformatting ads created for television, shows that there is a greater awareness of the fact that online content needs a different approach to be successful.
What has driven this realisation? Clearly the growth of digital and social media means there is a certain inevitability that greater emphasis will be placed on creating video content that is specifically for the internet. But what is adding fuel to this fire is the ability of content distributors like goviral to deliver strong analytics that help brands understand what works on line.
After 50 years, and more, of TV, broadcasters, brands and agencies, have developed a vast knowledge bank of how consumers interact with ads. The data and expertise plays a crucial part in developing campaigns. Advertisers generally know what results a TV campaign will deliver before it launches. It is against this that the case for specific video content tailormade for the web has had to be made. Until very recently our industry was simply not up to the fight.
Today, things have definitely begun to change. goviral, and others including of course YouTube, have been investing significantly in developing technology that can track users interaction with online content. This has enabled us to better understand different audiences across age, income, geographies and when, where and how they interact with different forms of online video. We are also able to track shifts in behaviour, noting for example that the rate of interaction with branded video content on Facebook has risen this year from 1.19 interactions per 1,000 video views in Q1 to 2.27 in Q2. In Q3, the increase was even more dramatic rising to 5.64 interactions per 1,000 views. It has also showed us that Twitter, so far, is still struggling to become a platform for sharing video content.
So how does this knowledge help to create better online branded video? Firstly, it means brands can test campaigns far more rigourously before fully launching. Trying different creative executions, different durations, calls to action and environments, can provide insights that mean a new campaign delivers significantly improved ROI for brands. This creates the virtuous circle of generating more investment in creating online video.
The data we are able to extract from our analytics technology has improved to such an extent that we have now even reached the stage where brands have taken the insights we have provided from testing and used it to make changes to their TV ads. Our ability to see how favourably or unfavourably audiences react to certain content is starting to have an impact beyond the online world and continues to blur the lines between TV and online video.
Of course when all is said and done, with online video as with TV, space has to be left for creativity and risk. We all know too well the many stories of TV ads or even products that bombed in testing and then went on to be great successes. Nothing beats an inspirational idea. Yet, we also know that most branded online videos, like most TV ads, are not going to be a seminal work of genius. Yet the costs to produce and distribute the content are there and analytics plays an integral part in ensuring brands go into their distribution strategy with the best possible video they can.