SocialDisplay and Video / April 06, 2015 / By Erin Martin

[New Report] The State of Video Advertising: Facebook’s Rise to Dominance

Today Mixpo is excited to announce our report, The State of Video: Facebook’s Rise to Dominance, that unveils the latest trends behind social video advertising and how Facebook, in particular, is a ripe opportunity for advertisers looking to reach video consuming audiences.

In this 18-page report, you’ll see data that includes:

• The percentage of digital advertising budgets being spent on social channels
• A look at two Facebook video advertising campaigns that breaks down CPM, CTR, CPC, video view rate and cost per video view by types of targeting
• The top social networks being used to run video advertising campaigns
• How important social advertising is to advertisers in their digital media mix

Did you know? Last year, more advertisers ran video campaigns on YouTube than Facebook, but in 2015 that trend is expected to flip with more advertisers planning to run video ads in Facebook than in YouTube. Even though Facebook is largely considered a social marketing opportunity, our report uncovered that 83% of companies do not consider the social team the primary strategy driver for ads run in social. When we asked what the most important metrics are for social video ads, traditional video metrics like video views and completion rates didn’t even make the top three. Also included in the report: digital budget allocation to social ads, top social networks used to run video ads, case studies, and success metrics most important to advertisers.

Social video ads: More than just another way to distribute your TV spot

Video is the fastest growing form of digital advertising, forecasted to represent 80-90% of global consumer Internet traffic by 2018*, and now the top social networks are becoming the leading digital video consumption channels.

For advertisers however, social video represents more than just an opportunity to distribute their TV spots in more channels; social networks also deliver interaction, retargeting, lookalike targeting, and people-based attribution. Perhaps the most significant differentiator of video ads on Facebook and Twitter is their people-based marketing advantage.

The People-Based Advantage

People-based marketing is the ability to leverage individual user IDs for targeting and attribution, without having to actually provide the user data to the advertisers. Some of the key advantages to this approach are:

• Retargeting that works across devices, without dependency on 3rd party cookies that expire or get deleted
• Persistent behavioral data at the individual level from inside and out-side of Facebook that drives more e executive lookalike modeling
• True attribution based on view through and/or click through; even in mobile including mobile apps
• No personally identifiable information (PII) is created by or passed to the advertiser, eliminating liability for privacy protection

New opportunities means growing pains

Even though over 80% of our respondents considered social advertising to be important or very important, we’re still seeing a disproportionately low percentage of digital budgets going toward social compared to how much time users are spending in social (almost half of our respondents spend less than 10% of their digital media budget in social).

Advertisers solely focused on video views on social will be throwing away audience and attribution equity. Yet, advertisers who want to leverage the capabilities identified above will quickly feel the pain of audience management and people-based attribution strategies.

“The advertisers we talk to are all generally interested in running video ads in social. What we see holding them back is a lack of experience,” from Justin Kistner, vice president of marketing at Mixpo, “We created this report to not only give advertisers more insights on the macro trends, but also specific, tactical knowledge from actual campaigns.”

Advertisers that want to take advantage of the new capabilities from Facebook, Twitter, and other people-based marketing platforms require new approaches to planning, execution, and management.

Download the full report, which includes Facebook campaign performance data and survey results from over 125 advertiser, agency, and publisher executives, here.

*Source: Cisco Systems; comScore 2014