Video Views Campaign

In social media & YouTube paid advertising, one of many campaign objectives we can set on the Ad Manager is the Video Views. With this goal, advertisers can reach their audience by displaying a video ad. One of the things the ad manager will try to do is to deliver your video to a potential audience who have an interest in watching the video, and the better the Targeting the more effective the results.

We see many videos with millions of views counted and displayed underneath them. It is very important to understand the mechanism of calculating these views. The views are combined for both Organic views and Paid views, and in as few as 2 seconds a view will be counted, and it can go up to 30 seconds or more, but the low range of 2 to 6 seconds is the most common measure for views counts across the various social platforms, websites, and video platforms.

Accordingly, the views big numbers can be misleading, the longer the video length is. For instance, if your video is 90 seconds long, then your views will be counted (in average) after 2-6 seconds on social platforms, and 15-30 seconds on video platforms. Let’s assume that you have gained a 1,000,000 view via a paid campaign (Promoted Post – Video Views Campaign). If you are running the normal video views campaign, then some of these views will come from a 2-6 second view only of your 90 seconds video, and the rest of the 84-88 seconds were not viewed at all. This means that some of your viewers didn’t watch all what you wanted to deliver, and that you are paying for 2 seconds only out of the whole 90 seconds of the video length.

Therefore, it is very important to do the following:

• Know the pros and cons of each platform’s ad manager offering
• Try to avoid lengthy videos for promotion
• Consider adding teasers if you must use a lengthy video
• Get the creative to be customized
• Choose to pay for longer than 2 seconds even if it cost more per view
• Put the efforts to define and select your audience in the Ad Manager
• Focus on the Completed View Through Rate as a performance indicator, instead of Number of Views or View Through Rate