Since day one, online video advertising has had a key area where it excels, one objective that it nails every time. Online video ads are the MVP of branding - of telling your story, your promise, to your people. Why? Because it’s video. Video tells a story better than any other medium. It captures imaginations and paints a picture of a brand. 

But there are other goals, other priorities that video can nail in addition to branding. At Visibl, we focused on the three types of connections/outcomes that work best with video content. They are Reach, Viewability, and Click Throughs.

And in order to explain these we are going to use an analogy. (Just go with it, promise it works.) Imagine that the entire internet is the city of San Diego during the summer and your brand video is an idea for a new superhero… and off we go.  

1. Reach

Reach is optimized for ...well, reaching people. It’s the best way to get your video in front of the most possible people as quickly as possible. With this as the priority we find places where your target customers are online and serve them your video without being super picky about the size or position of the video player. This optimization will typically make your budget spend the quickest and get you the most impressions.

In our analogy, we would have found your target audience at … Comic Con (duh). So now we are at Comic Con with your new idea for a superhero. If we are optimizing for reach, this would mean that you would simply grab a megaphone, head into the convention, and announce the story to everyone in the main hall, from the aging Wolverines to the overly bare princess Leia's and everyone (in your target) in between. Lots and lots of people would hear the message. Some might only hear parts of it, some might cluster around to learn more - but at the end of the day, you will have quickly told a large group of your target about this new superhero. BOOM!

2. Viewability

Viewability is all about quality over quantity. Like your picky roommate in college, this optimization hasstandards. When a campaign is optimized for this, Visibl taps into the killer connections we have (aka our proprietary viewability strategy) and gets your video in some of the most prime spots online. It's all about page placement here. This means the video player/location that will house your video (known in the media buying world as “inventory”) will most likely be larger, more central, and overall better positioned on websites.

This would be like going into Comic Con and giving a presentation about your new superhero idea on stage right before the new Star Wars cast start their panel discussion. That is some views. Not as many people as out in the big hall, but all of these people are watching, straining to see the stage, clamoring to get closer. BAM!

3. Click Throughs

Oh how marketing analysts love the click throughs. And we do too. We should say that in general, the characteristics about video that make it so superb in the realm of brand awareness are the same characteristics that make it slightly less ideal for click throughs. BUT that does not mean that video cannot lace up some gloves and jump in swinging, it just requires a little more brilliance on our part. (Don’t mind if we do.)

We optimize for click throughs by focusing on a high performing mix of placement channels, delivery windows, and devices. So you could say, this would be like if you headed into Comic Con to spread the word about your new superhero by giving the keynote speech at a special talk on new comic book ideas. This will be the least number of people, but they are very, very into what you are talking about and probably already planning their matching costumes.

We suggest that every video, no matter the outcome it is optimized for, has a strong Call to Action at the end, but this is the one goal where it is essentially mandatory. Share your brand message and then get them to click! POW!

KEY METRICS FOR REFERENCE:

• REACH: The metric for this optimization the number of impressions. As we said above, reach is about reaching your people, you will get the highest number of impressions for your budget with this one.

• VIEWABILITY: The way you can measure this outcome is through the “in-view rate” metric. The in-view rate tracks the amount of times your video has loaded in the in-view portion of a website. When NOT optimized for reach, an average campaign can expect to see about 20% to 30% in-view rate. When Visibl optimizes your campaign for viewability you can expect anywhere from 50%  and above (we have had some campaigns get 80% viewability. Yes, we are that good.)

• CLICK THROUGHS: It is industry standard to get about 0.1% to 0.2% of CTR, or click through rate (yeah,the numbers are low, but those clicks are valuable). When Visibl uses our unique trading algorithm (still in beta) to optimize for highly targeted click throughs we are seeing CTRs at 5 to 15x the national average. No joke.

AT THE END OF THE DAY...

All of these goal strategies are powerful tools that can get your brand message out to your target in just the right way depending on what your brand needs and your marketing strategy. And turns out they all get you to Comic Con. :)

So go get 'em, you Batman of advertising - we are happily your Robin, just don’t make us wear spandex.

- The Visibl Team