Manage Social Video Advertising to Business Outcomes (Not VTR)

Social video platforms thrive on engagement, though advertisers need more than likes and views. Balancing platform metrics with sales-validated Attention data is crucial for driving real business outcomes beyond mere engagement. 

Key Takeaways 

• Platform metrics indicate impression delivery and user engagement though don't guarantee off-platform business results like sales 
• Optimizing for views or engagement alone can even deter brand performance 
• Advertisers should validate ad creative with Attention metrics before media spend, and consider sales studies to tune Attention models for better outcomes 

Social Video Platforms are in Large Part Creator Networks, Whose Lifeblood is Engagement 

Because of their extensive audience reach and engagement, social video platforms like Meta and YouTube are critical channels for advertisers to achieve business outcomes like sales and brand perception. Creators are the lifeblood of these platforms, because they drive user reach and engagement (i.e., likes and views), which creates opportunities to monetize with advertisers.  

 

Engagement Metrics are Not Business Outcomes; Sales and Brand Perception Lift Are 

Advertisers can leverage creator-led content to drive platform engagement, and platforms reward doing so with an abundance of engagement metrics and optimization tools. While important, engagement metrics alone are not business outcomes; it is possible to achieve high engagement absent of business outcomes. Sales and brand perception are real business outcomes. 

 
Advertisers Should Qualify Every Creative with Sales-Validated Attention Scoring, Before Activating in Paid Media 

A smart approach is to first qualify that every single ad creative meets key performance thresholds with sales-validated Attention metrics, then feed that proven set into the platforms with your campaign bidding goals. Advanced advertisers regularly perform sales incrementality or MMM studies to reinforce and tune their Creative Attention scoring models to link more precisely to outcomes on each unique platform. 
  
1. Platforms Are Effectively Creator Networks to Drive Engagement 

Platforms tend to optimize for creator content. Why? Because it is engaging to users, and is easily and instantly tracked through scrolling, mouse, playback and sharing actions. Acquiring and retaining creators is among the most critical ingredients for platforms to create more consumer reach and advertising inventory – and major platforms compete fiercely for creators. Creators also represent an economical source for new and diversified content to battle content wear-out and keep users engaged. Platforms deliver an abundance of response metrics to both creators and advertisers to reinforce the cycle of engaging and keeping users.  

2. Platform Engagement Metrics Are Not Business Outcomes  

User engagement may be a business outcome for an ad-supported social video platform, though it is not a business outcome for an advertiser. Sales and positive brand perceptions are outcomes, and advertisers should seek to invest their creative and media decisioning as much as possible to move the needle on these. Investing toward engagement alone may contribute to business outcomes but may not.   

Case In Point: Video view through rate (VTR) is a prominent media engagement metric that some advertisers optimize to. While important in understanding the mechanics of a platform, VTR alone is not an outcome. It is an indicator that there was an opportunity to see some duration of a video. 

VTR can be influenced by:   

• App feature gamification (i.e., an auto-play ad in feed) 
• Audience viewer demographics (i.e., people who tend to view more than others) 
• Surrounding context (i.e., an ad preceding an anticipated video scene) 
• Creative itself (i.e., consider an ad which drives sales or brand perception in the first seconds, despite little view duration)  

VTR can be understood as an optimization metric analogous to clickthrough rates (CTR). In the early days of Internet advertisers, some advertisers would optimize for CTR as an outcome, until it became well proven through behavioral and sales measurement that clickers were not necessarily buyers. Indeed, a click-through must occur to complete an online conversion (i.e., an online sale), though optimizing for clicks in absence of real business outcomes can lead to lots of expensive clicks that don’t convert.

Source: Nielsen 2012 CTR Mislead Brand Marketers Campaign Performance

At Realeyes, we recently witnessed this logic in play: a major brand advertiser omitted prominent branding from creative execution to drive higher engagement in the form of VTR, irrespective of any sales outcome. We later confirmed through an MMM study that engagement and short-term recall went up, while brand favorability and sales outcomes flattened or declined.  

3. Balance Media Engagement Metrics with Sales-Validated Outcome Metrics  

In a perfect world, an advertiser would invest every creative and media impression with a direct, measured understanding of contribution toward a sales outcome. In our imperfect world, where direct attribution is not possible most of the time, brand advertisers are relying more and more on Attention metrics. Why? Advertisers like Mars have validated that Visual Attention plus Emotive reactions to the ad creative is among the most reliable predictors that an ad will contribute to a future sale.  

Source: I-COM 2024, Mars Inc validation of ad Attention predictions to Sales Lift 

The relationship between ad Attention and ad engagement metrics sometimes is strong, and sometimes is not, depending on a range of factors including ones in the VTR case above. Attention and Emotive reactions to creative – which are measurable prerequisites to brand memory, encoding and latent sales – are simply not captured reliably in platform engagement metrics.  

A smart approach is to first qualify that every single ad creative meets key performance thresholds with sales-validated Attention metrics, then feed proven ads into the platforms with your campaign bidding goals. Advertisers then should perform periodic sales incrementally or MMM studies to reinforce and tune Attention scoring models to link more precisely to outcomes on each unique platform, as each platform behaves and performs differently.