In case you haven’t heard, Facebook now has a video ad platform, and one might wonder what the big deal is, but if you’re Google’s YouTube, you’ll be really worried.
However, for brands who are considering where to place their video ads, there are a few things to consider. According to Kevin Lange, Senior VP-social media at Starcom Media Vest, “You have to look at all the factors….You have to look at targeting, cost and, most importantly, how your audiences are engaging with content,”
- Audience
Most of the people who visit YouTube, go there for videos, and the platform recorded 4billion video views per day, as at 2012. Facebook has however found a way to integrate videos into their social network, and now records an average of 3billion video views per day.
- Targeting
In order for a person to watch a video on Facebook, the person needs to be logged in to his or her account. This helps advertisers to specifically target the audience they want their videos to appear to, and although, YouTube offers similar targeting categories, it cannot match Facebook’s specificity at scale.
- Cost
In addition to selling video ads directly, Facebook and YouTube each offer self-serve tools, but they work in different ways. For both, an advertiser enters a budget and who it’s targeting. Facebook’s tool offers a fixed cost per thousand impressions and estimated impressions per day. YouTube asks the brand to enter the maximum it would pay for a completed view. YouTube then estimates the average cost per view and how many views a day.
What a brand spends may be less than its budget, depending on how many impressions Facebook can serve (even if they aren’t fully watched) and how many views YouTube can deliver. Facebook’s self-serve tool also sells video ads through auctions. Overall, the two products don’t differ greatly in price when factoring in variables like goals and valued metrics, according to. Lange.
- Autoplay vs. Skippable
Price and cost are not the same thing.”One huge pro of YouTube’s skippable TrueView ads is that advertisers are only charged when the viewer views the entire ad, resulting in a more accurate cost per view,” Mr. Cronin said. Facebook charges advertisers by the view and starts counting views after a video has played for three seconds.
“With Facebook, especially with it being autoplay and three seconds considered a view, it’s important to make sure the reported views are translating,” Mr. Lange said. Facebook reports details like how many views lasted for 50%, 75% and 100% of the video, so that advertisers can calculate the effective cost of an autoplay ad.