You make money in various ways for Facebook each time you scroll through your feed. Every photo, like and status update across Facebook’s user base, over one billion strong, is worth something to them in some way, normally through advertising and analytics. One of the biggest ways Facebook makes money is through video advertising. Video advertising is a natural step for a site that serves its users over 100 million hours of videos per day, after all. Specifically, Facebook made a cool $17 billion from video ads in 2015 alone. It’s a lucrative market, to be sure, and a fairly fresh frontier for the mobile web and for Facebook. In order for video ads to continue being profitable, however, they have to continue to be effective. To that end, Facebook published a press release today outlining some updates that will be rolling out to video ads, as well as addressing some guidelines that advertisers can follow for maximum effectiveness, according to Facebook’s own analytics.
The biggest new feature is automatic captions. According to Facebook’s data, up to 44 percent of video ads out there don’t catch users’ attention because they make little sense without sound. When a user is scrolling through their feed, in most cases, video ads will play without sound until they’re clicked on. If a video isn’t visually striking or lacks a clear point without sound, it is usually scrolled past, being watched for less than a measly three seconds. According to Facebook’s data, users recall mobile feed content for an average of one quarter of a second after scrolling away from it. Essentially, this means that ads that fit the description above make very little impression, if any at all. Facebook is looking to change that with automated captions, as well as by advising advertisers to create a visually striking, easy to follow ad that will catch a user’s attention and perhaps even garner a push of the play button. Data indicates that over 70 percent of an ad’s total value is normally delivered within the first ten seconds, with up to 47 percent of total value lying in the first three seconds.
Additionally, Facebook has brought video ad analytics integration with Moat to primetime and allowed advertisers to see how many views with sound they managed to nab on their Ad Analytics page, as well as its old home on the Page Analytics page. To top it off, Facebook has switched on an option to allow ad developers to go from a customer seeing their product for the first time to a customer hitting the buy button in-ad, referred to as the “100% in-view buying option”. To see some of Facebook’s tips on effective video ads or read up on the new features and Facebook’s relevant data in detail, hit up the source link to read the original press release.