This April, the Mobile Marketing Association published the first of its kind report, giving the industry a really good grasp on how the mobile ad market is doing these days. One of the reason why this survey is successful in providing an objective picture of the aforementioned mobile market, is the significance of the companies that participated in contributing data to it – such as Hulu, AdColony, BrightRoll and others.
The total volume of ad impressions analyzed was staggering – 559 million.
It’s well known fact that among the well established ad formats – text, image and video – the latter is the most efficient one. This report gives us actual numbers for how different video ad formats perform.
Skippable Video Ad Engagement – CTR
The first metric the survey sheds a light on is skippable video ad engagement. It is absolutely logical that skippable video ads had a better completion rate compared with non-skippable ads. For linear video ads non-skippable had 93%, skippable only 8%, forinterstitial – 92 % vs. 23% for respectively and for value exchanged non-skippable ads got 97%.
But, when we look at the Click-Through-Ratio (CTR), the difference between skippable and non-skippable ads is drastic. For non-skippable linear video ads CTR=2.4%, for skippable – 1.5%, for non-skippable interstitial video ad CTR=2.2%, for skippable CTR=1.4%.
Based on this, when we look at those two metrics the following implication emerges – skippable ads were more relevant for those people who decided not to skip. The fact that non-skippable ads had better completion rate misleads marketers because it is much more valuable to get views from people who had a choice to skip, but they did not.
As you can see from the completion rate chart below for both the iOS and Android platforms, the majority of viewers who saw skippable ads saw 25% of the video and then left, iPad ads showed the best performance among ads shown on iPhones, iPads and Android Phones.
Completion Rate for Different Ad Length
For all video ad length formats – 15, 15-30 and 31+ seconds, the difference between completion rate for non-skippable and skippable ads is about the same. In other words if people don’t want to watch ads, having shorter length video ad doesn’t give you any advantage, they will skip it as likely as they would skip a longer one.
When we compare different video ad lengths in terms of CTR the picture is really clear – video ads with the length of +31 seconds have a significantly lower CTR. This observation reinforces the fact that people get bored with ads longer than 30 seconds and are less likely to be engaged and propelled towards any action.
Hour of Day – Device
For both a smartphone and tablet there is the pattern of a significant viewing drop from 12 am till 5 am, which is certainly not a surprise – people are suppose to sleeping during these hours! The peak time for smartphones and tablets is 8-11 pm, which is the prime time TV time window.
The interesting takeaway lies in the difference between the number of views for smartphones and tables from 12 am till 2 am, there is big drop for smartphones and a flat area for tablets. It looks like this is the time spot when people put their smartphones next to their bed and go to sleep but make themselves comfortable to play with their iPads.
Ad Performance
Among the metrics present in this report, there are some that show the difference between video ad performance on smartphones and tablets. Knowing that tablets are devices that people use heavily for content consumption we can deduce that during TV prime time (8-11 pm) people are less likely to click on a video ad. On the graph we can see a sudden drop in CTR during this period. For smartphones we can see a stable 2% CTR during the same period.
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