Performance Video: The Main Advertising Format Of The Last Time

Performance Video is a format that combines accurate calculation, deep analytics and emotional, engaging creatives. Its popularity has grown even during the pandemic, as it allows you to link advertising investments with business results. How to work with Performance Video? What to expect from the format in the future? Sber Marketing experts have collected answers to all the main questions in one text.

Performance Video: The Basics

What Is A Performance Video?

The format allows marketers to deeply segment the audience and offer each segment its creatives and placement options. This helps make advertising more effective, increase ROI and improve business performance. As a performance video campaign progresses, marketers monitor engagement levels, reach, targeted actions, and other metrics to quickly make creative and placement adjustments. Accordingly, performance videos solve specific business problems.

How The Format Is Developing In Russia

Experts called Performance video advertising the future of video promotion back in 2019. Since then, her position has strengthened. At the beginning of 2020, the Video and Performance segments were among the fastest growing in the Russian market: according to IAB Russia, in Q1 2020, they added 21.4% and 11.8%, respectively.

Growth continues: for example, in a recent Mail.ru Group report on advertising revenue in April–June, the company said that the performance segment made the greatest contribution — growth in all types of performance advertising was 69% year-on-year. Became so diverse that the IAB split into two parts: branding and performance. Analysts said that “video advertising began to be used by players not only to solve image problems but also as a sales tool” – therefore, since the end of 2020, measurements in the Russian market have begun to be carried out in a new way.

The budgets allocated for performance video advertising are growing. In 2020, advertisers spent 12.5 billion rubles on it, 33% more than in 2019. The out-stream segment grew especially actively — at the end of the year, it increased by 37%. Even though companies spent more on branding advertising (almost 24 billion rubles), the segment’s growth turned out to be less active: the category added 27% over the year.

Performance VS Branding Video

The Branding category is “traditional” video advertising. The main task of such advertising is to tell about the brand, increase awareness, and provide coverage. For a long time, the business impact of such videos was difficult to measure, and the videos themselves were not sales tools. Creatives in branding videos are aimed at emotional response and memorization.

The Performance Video segment directly affects the company’s business performance. They are less likely to solve image problems and more often call to register on the site, buy a product, download an application – to perform a targeted action. The approach to creatives in such campaigns is often useful: the team tests hundreds of video sequences, voiceovers, and calls to move until they find the best ones for each audience segment.

However, the line between performance and branding is blurring – brands have begun to combine approaches more often and choose the best from each.

Efficiency

According to Wyzowl, in 2020, 84% of respondents said that video advertising helped them generate more leads. Another 78% say that video advertising directly increased the number of purchases and orders. The development of attribution tools increased targeting accuracy, and new features of streaming platforms and social networks over the years have changed the attitude towards the format: if in 2015 only 33% of respondents believed that video advertising pays off, then in 2021, 87% already saw the positive impact of video on ROI.

Video Campaign Performance Tools

The main platforms for launching performance video campaigns are social networks and streaming services, especially YouTube, which has remained a key platform for seven years in a row. In 2020, 87% of brands used YouTube to run ads.

All major video advertising platforms have connected performance tools — a video can redirect a user to a landing page, open a registration form, a product card, or an app page in a store.

What In Practice

Performance video works especially well for e-commerce, edtech, banking, real estate — any companies for which targeted actions are important. Such brands can launch image campaigns in traditional media and performance – on streaming and social networks.

On our example: a SberMarketing case to promote the Dom Click service:

To reach the maximum audience, get more conversions and engagement, and reduce the cost of promotion, we used several different types of creatives and the performance features of YouTube TrueView in-stream and TrueView for Action. The TrueView for Action format is optimized to drive conversions — it automatically creates an end screen with a call to action.

TrueView in-stream made it possible to reach the target audience at a low cost per view. New users came to the service site, and the engagement and duration of viewing increased. A clear TrueView for Action call to action helped increase conversions by 5x while reducing their cost by 10x. The number of transitions to the Domclick website and the duration of the session have increased.

It was important to choose the right creatives depending on the goals — experiment and try different approaches. For example, videos with captions shot more broadly showed lower bounce rates, maximum session duration, and higher page depth on the site. Close-up videos without subtitles showed the best CTR and increased post-click conversions. The top San Jose video production companies will be able to advise you which creatives are the best for achieving your goal.

Summary

Performance Video is an indispensable format when brand marketing is tasked with motivating customers to visit a website, download an app, or purchase a product or service. For the Sber Marketing agency, this is one of the main tools that invariably brings good results to our clients and helps them achieve their business goals (and by the way, we welcome new clients – you can leave an application on our website). The Performance Video format can work at several funnel levels at once, providing both coverage and specific targeted actions.

It’s hard to predict precisely what ad analytics will look like in the future. But market experts agree that new analytics and attribution tools will appear to help maintain and even increase the effectiveness of campaigns using Performance video.

Also Read: How To Adapt TV Creatives For Performance Video Ads