Advertisers measure the effectiveness of the video ad campaign using a metric VCR [Video Completion Rate]. A higher VCR means, most percent of users fully watched your video ads from start to end. On the other hand, a lower VCR means most of the users did not see your video ad completely. In this situation, you have to optimize your video ad campaign to improve the VCR. Here, I explained about the video completion rate. Also, I have explained the optimization strategies to improve the VCR.
The Completion Rate is a percentage that indicates how much percentage of people who saw your advertisement watched your video ad completely. This percentage is very important to understand the effectiveness of your video ad campaign. Above 70% completion rate is considered a good completion rate.
SRIDARAN BASKARAN
Brands can use different formats of advertisements in digital advertising. Display, Video are the two common formats of advertisements. Mostly, the display campaign’s performance is measured using CTR (Click Through Rate) and the video campaign’s performance is measured using VCR (Video Completion Rate). Ad server or 3rd party verification providers can measure the video completion rate. The video completion rate helps to determine the campaign success of the video advertising campaign.
Table Of Contents:
- What Is Video Completion Rate? What is the formula to calculate VCR?
- How to improve the VCR of your campaign?
- Conclusion
What Is Video Completion Rate? What is the formula to calculate VCR?
The video completion rate is a percentage that indicates how much percentage of users who seen your ads completely watch your video from start to end.
VCR = Complete Views /Impressions
For example, if your video ad campaign served 1000 impressions and 700 complete views. Then the VCR of your campaign is 70%.
VCR = 700/1000
A good VCR for a video ad campaign is about 70%. Some good campaigns also receives above 90% Completion Rate.
Other than the completion rate below metrics also important in video ad campaigns,
> 25% Complete
> 50% Complete
>75% Complete
> 100% Complete (Complete Views)
25% Complete : The number of viewers watched 25% percent of the video ad.
50% Complete : The number of viewers watched 50% percent of the video ad.
75% Complete : The number of viewers watched 75% percent of the video ad.
100% Complete : The number of viewers watched 100% percent of the video ad.
Getting higher completion rate for a video campaign that has a longer video ad is difficult. In this situation, the other metrics will be helpful to understand the performance of the ad campaign.
How To Optimize The Video Ad Campaign To Improve The Video Completion Rate?
A higher completion rate is the expected goal for every video ad campaign. But, achieving a higher completion rate is not an easy task. Here, I will provide suggestions to improve the completion rate for your video ad campaign.
Find The Expected Completion Rate: Normally client provides the expected completion rate in the media plan. So, you can get the completion rate from the media plan.
Video Ad Length: Video ad length is also an important factor for a higher completion rate. For a long video ad, it’s very difficult to receive a higher completion rate. Less than 30 seconds of video is good for receiving a higher completion rate. If your client is providing longer videos then you should explain to them the difficulties of getting a higher completion rate. In this situation, you can report other complete events 50% complete or 75% complete.
Set the completion rate goal in the ad campaign: You can set the completion rate goal in the platform. So, the platform automatically tries to achieve the goal. But, sometimes the platform can’t achieve the goal. At that time you should do campaign optimization to increase the completion rate.
Identify the low-performing inventory sources: Run the inventory level report for your ad campaign. Exclude the poor-performing inventory sources from your ad campaign and monitor the performance.
Identify the poor-performing sites/apps: Sometimes excluding the entire inventory source leads to low delivery issues. At that time, you can run a site-level report and exclude the poorly performing sites or apps.
Increase the bid price: Normally platform bids on a bid request depend upon the campaign goal. But, bid price plays an important role in winning the auction. If the competitor bid high then it can’t win the auction even though the bid is very valuable to achieve the goal. So, increase the bid price slightly and monitor the performance.
Pause the poor-performing ad: Video content is also very important for a higher completion rate. So, based on your performance report, pause the lower completion rate ads.
Change your audience: Demand side platforms provide you an opportunity to choose the audience category from various data providers. Each data provider is different. So, if your audience is not good for you then choose the audience from another data provider.
Budget Allocation: Mostly, video completion rate and conversion are the main performance goals. When you create the campaigns, try to differentiate by channels (Desktop, Mobile). Desktop mostly receives a higher completion rate and conversion than mobile. Sometimes mobile channels perform well. Based on your campaign performance allocate more budget towards the best performing channel. So that you can use the money more effectively.
Video Ad Content : Finally, elements of a video ad should be interesting, should be engageable to get better VCR. I wrote a detailed article that tells the importance of video ad content on VCR.
Conclusion
As I said above, the completion rate is the main goal of the video campaign. Many factors like channel, video length, bid price, audience l, etc should align to get a higher completion rate. Normally ad platforms try to get a higher completion rate for your video campaign. All you need to do is to provide enough user availability and bid price. Four or Five days after starting the campaign, check the performance and do the optimization per the above suggestions to improve the VCR.
Please share your optimization techniques to improve the VCR here to help us improve the knowledge.
Read More : How Does Video Content Impact On Completion Rate?
