Why Online Video is Perfect for Preformance Advertising

Not too long ago I published a post called “why online video
advertising will never work” I would actually like to take some of it back. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that the expectation
that online video advertising will become even close to TV advertising in revenue will prove wrong due to the nature of the use of the internet. 

However, what we started seeing recently in EyeView is that video is a very powerful tool to increase click quality and click value. More specifically, our stats show that users who have been exposed to promotional video content before or after the click on the banner where 10%-50% more likely to convert (buy, register, download, ...) when compared to users  who weren't exposed to the video content. This means that while video is not a good tool for online display advertising or for improving CTR (click through rate) it is a great tool for performance advertising or affiliate marketing.

To understand this, lets get into the mind of a user. As long as the user is browsing an interesting news article he will respond quite negatively to something as dominant as a promotional video and will probably try to close it as soon as possible if not even browse out of the website completely. However, once the user showed some initial interest by moving his mouse over a banner or clicking on a banner, he is already expecting to receive a sales pitch and this is where the video is a perfect tool for getting the user excited about the product and driving him to take action.

To conclude, while video is probably not going to revolutionize display advertising it might have a chance for doing that in performance advertising.