Today, the budget and effort for mobile advertising are increasing in direct proportion to mobile market importance, including revenue as well. According to Facebook’s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2015 Results, mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 80% of advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2015, up from 69% of advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2014. As you can easily recognize, every day, thousands of videos come from apps and mobile websites. It also brings the development of specific video content for the mobile environment by large publishers. Concurrently, video views on mobile devices continue to rise.
The video advertising format is more dynamic than other formats and can convey the information or message easily to the users. It is also growing quickly as an ad format on mobile like native advertising, and it will be the future of mobile advertising. Having looked at the high engagement rates, it is especially suitable for advertising games or well-established brands. According to VentureBeat, mobile video ad spending tripled in 2015, whereas the global spend on video rose from 20 percent of ad spend in Q1 to an astonishing 71 percent of total mobile ad spend in Q3.
Do you wonder about the reasons for its power and this rapid increase? What drives higher install rates? There are good reasons for making the video advertising format star:
- The main and most important reason is that users’ habits are changing rapidly in digital and mobile; they expect to see more dynamic, creative ad contents.
- You can deliver highly viewable mobile video ads with full-screen
- You can also reach highly engaged and specific content viewers.
- Not finished yet! You can get 3x higher lift in viewer engagement than other ad formats thanks to video ads.
- Finally, you can complement your desktop video advertising campaigns with mobile to expand reach.
As you can recognize, mobile video advertising has many advantages for both the advertiser and user. Let’s make video ads’ features clearer. Video ads occur during natural pauses in apps, such as between levels in a mobile game. They are usually around 15-30 seconds, sometimes longer. As mobile advertising evolves, in-app incentivized videos become more popular. Naturally, video ads have pros and cons like other ad formats.
Pros: As we mentioned above, video ads are becoming more popular day by day. They are a great source of revenue for app developers. According to Adweek, advertisers serve 17 million impressions nightly. Meanwhile, even though non-skippable videos definitely interrupt the user experience, users seem to accept it! Skippable ads represented 32 percent of all impressions. Moreover, video ads have an average of 13.64% CTR on mobile.
Cons: We all know that the average attention of the user is shrinking to 8 seconds. At this point, non-skippable ads may be irritating besides its advantage. Another study shows that “viewer abandonment” notes that almost a fifth of viewers click out of a video in the first 10 seconds. To prevent this situation, if you incorporate video ads into your app, you should use short, simple and impressive videos. Don’t forget, users absorb the most information in the first few seconds and tune out the rest of the message.
There are also some leading ad networks like Vdopia, YuMe, Vungle, AdColony which are creating solutions for mobile video advertising, you can check them. Finally, don’t forget that gathering data and analyzing your app are the most important pieces of the puzzle in every phase. You should track the power of your video ads and its returns as well.
