Your online video ad is running on quality sites that target the right audience. But the ad just isn’t getting much response. What’s the problem? How can you fix it? And what’s a good strategy for creating ads that perform better in the future?
These are the questions Harry Gold raises in a recent ClickZ article.
You can have the best media plan in the world, says Gold. The success of your ad, however, rests ultimately on how well the creative answers a couple of key consumer questions:
- How are you going to help me?
- What do you have for me right now?
“Basically,” says Gold, “people are looking for the benefits and offers in your ads.” His advice? “…Make sure you have an arsenal of benefits and offers to test in your campaigns and use this as the basis for your creative testing.”
Great advice, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, for you, the advertiser, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Does each benefit and offer in the arsenal require its own unique creative? How can you test different versions cost effectively? How can you easily monitor performance and turn it into information you can carry into the design of future ads?
Building on Gold’s advice about testing benefits and offers, here are 3 quick, easy, and concrete steps you can follow to boost the performance of your online video ads.
Step 1. Develop benefit and offer lists
Interactive offers in video ad
Before you run a campaign, take Gold’s advice and do some brainstorming. Develop 2 lists. One list includes what Gold calls “the ways that your product really helps your target audience.” The other includes “offers you can make and fulfill right on the spot.”
For example, an auto dealer might list “zero percent APR financing” as a benefit and “sign up for a test drive” as an offer.
Winnow and sift the lists until you have a manageable collection of the most attractive benefits and offers.
Tip As you brainstorm, don’t let pre-conceived ideas about what’s possible limit the offers you come up with. Online video ads can include printable coupons, surveys, forms, links to more in-depth video content, and much more. In addition, you can target different audiences with benefits and offers that update on-the-fly based on a viewer’s geographic location.
Step 2. Create a unique ad for each compelling benefit-offer combination
On the face of it, this step sounds prohibitively expensive. But if you run your campaign through a dynamic video ad platform, it’s a quick, cost-effective process.
Here’s how it works:
- Upload a 15- or 30-second TV spot to create the master ad. This master forms the basis for each unique version.
- Make copies of the master. Creating copies is as simple as pressing a Copy button.
- Make each version unique by layering interactive benefit and offer overlays on top of the underlying video.
Step 3: Set up ad rotation and auto-optimization
Auto optimize to improve ROI
The only way to really learn which benefits and offers customers respond to is by giving these customers the chance to respond. In a video ad platform that is truly dynamic, you can integrate performance testing into the process of running a campaign.
By rotating different versions of a video ad through the same Player, you discover which version results in the best view rate, clickthrough rate, or percent of video viewed.
After a specified number of impressions, the platform automatically eliminates poor performers and optimizes on the best performing version.
As Gold points out, running ads on the right properties aimed at the right audience gets you only so far. It’s delivering the right benefits and offers that makes the audience respond.
More information
Learn more today about using a dynamic video ad platform to boost your video ad performance.
Mixpo customer discovering auto optimization for the first time? Visit the Client Resources home page now and search for “copy,” “overlays,” and “auto optimize.”
