Looking for tips to help improve the performance of your video ads?

This could be worth a look – Meta recently partnered with Analytic Partners to analyze over 500 ads, across 70+ campaigns, in order to glean insight into key best practices, strategies and tips to help improve your video marketing approach.

You can download the full 12-page report here, but in this post, we’ll take a look at some of the highlights.

First off, the research underlines a key point that you’ve likely heard and read many times before – return on investment for video ads is over 5x higher when a brand logo is used in the ad, and is highest when the logo is shown within the first two seconds.

That’s even more important with short-form video clips, highlighting the need to make your branding known quickly, in order to establish connection, and professionalism, in your approach.

There are, of course, always some variances in this, depending on the format you choose to go with, but visible branding is important.

As is showing the product:

“ROI was 2.3x higher when the product appears in the ad within the first two seconds [while] ROI was 36% higher than when the product is easily noticed but not the primary focus.”

So the product you’re advertising needs to be shown, and it should be present in much of your video ad. Again, the presentation format will play a role here, but showcasing your brand and product is key.

The research also shows that placing your products within lifestyle situations, such as sporting events or celebrations, saw ROI increase by 26%.

Consumers want to see the practical value of your product in their daily life, which basic promotions cannot do. Worth factoring into your planning.

The data also shows that mobile-optimized campaigns deliver 1.9x the ROI of non mobile-optimized assets, while creating ads for a sound off environment leads to a 4.8x improvement over ads not built for sound off.

TikTok has flipped this, at least in some ways, with the majority of TikTok users scrolling through the app with sound on. But it is worth considering the context within which your ads will be viewed, and how building for sound off is important to ensure maximum engagement.

The research also shows that enabling additional placements for your video ads (i.e. Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, in-stream and Reels) can help you reach more people, with campaigns that include more than eight placements being 3x more effective than those with between one and three.

The data also suggests that exposure frequency is another important element:

“ROI is highest when a campaign has an average weekly frequency between 1 and 1.5 - for example, a six week campaign that had a frequency of between 6 and 9. An average weekly frequency of one achieves ROI 22% higher than a campaign with a frequency between 0.5 and 1.”

These are some interesting pointers to consider in your campaign planning – and while there are always exceptions, again, dependent on your presentation format, these notes could help to point you in the right direction, in order to get more for your video ad spend.

You can download Meta’s full ‘Video Advertising Essentials: Best Practices For Boosting ROI’ report here.