If you’re in the advertising space, you know video ads are the most effective way to grab the attention of your target audience.
With the increasing popularity of platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, video ads offer an exciting opportunity to drive customer engagement. This guide will explore key strategies and techniques to help you create video ads and get the highest ROI (return on investment).
1. Define Your Campaign Goals
If you want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, boost sales, or promote a specific product, set clear and specific goals for your video ad campaigns.
Programmatic video ad campaigns succeed with clear direction and stable goals. Therefore, define your objectives at the outset and select the right performance metrics (KPIs): video completion rates (VCR) for awareness, click-through rates (CTR) for driving traffic, or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for conversions.
Furthermore, avoid changing campaign objectives in the middle of your campaign. Shifting goals halfway through a programmatic campaign forces the machine learning algorithms to recalibrate, which can disrupt the optimization process. This can delay the campaign’s ability to meet its KPIs and may ultimately prevent you from realizing your desired results.
Staying focused on your goals throughout the campaign helps the machine learning model optimize the delivery, leading to a more effective and successful programmatic strategy.
2. Use Audience Insights
Data-driven insights can help you precisely define your audience and deliver highly relevant content across the right platforms.
For your programmatic video ad campaigns, you can use demographic data, behaviors, and contextual signals to show your ad in the most engaging context.
Partner with a platform that offers precise targeting based on user interests, location, and past interactions, allowing you to reach the right people.
Check out our full suite of advertiser products and features
3. Create Engaging and Relevant Video Content
To truly resonate with your audience, video content should go beyond surface-level appeal and connect with viewers on a deeper, more meaningful level. Below are several key considerations that will enhance the performance of your video campaigns:
First Impressions Matter
Most viewers decide within the first few moments if they’ll continue watching, so you need to make a powerful first impression. Include attention-grabbing visuals, an unexpected or visually stunning opening, or ask a thought-provoking question.
A strong opening sets the stage for the rest of the video and encourages engagement. Avoid long intros or generic content that wastes time. Viewers should immediately know what the ad is about and why they should care.
Tell a Story
Consumers are naturally drawn to stories because they evoke emotions and provide context. Showcase the benefits of your product, share customer success stories, or create an emotionally charged narrative to humanize your brand.
For instance, instead of just listing features, show how your product solves real-life problems or enhances a user’s lifestyle. You might want to create scenarios where your audience can imagine themselves as part of the story. This builds empathy, reinforces your value proposition, and drives trust.
Use a narrative structure that introduces a problem, builds tension, and provides your product’s solution. This approach keeps viewers engaged and makes your message more memorable.
Craft a Compelling Call-to-Action (CTA)
Even the most engaging video can fall short of its potential without a clear CTA. Your CTA should be direct, urgent, and easy to act on. Instead of a generic “learn more,” use language that tells the viewer exactly what to do next: “Shop now and get 20% off,” or “Sign up for exclusive offers.” The CTA should align with the objective of your campaign and be placed prominently.
If you’re running a shorter video, place your CTA at the end for maximum impact, making sure it’s clear how the viewer will benefit from taking action. Additionally, you could consider using interactive elements like buttons or swipe-up features in platforms that allow them, making it even easier for users to convert on the spot.
Use Real-Time Targeting for Maximum Relevance
Real-time targeting can help you tailor your videos to specific demographics, behaviors, or user interests. By analyzing past interactions and user data, you deliver your video ad to individuals most likely to find it relevant and engaging.
4. Optimize for Mobile Viewing
As mobile video consumption continues to take over, you must optimize your video ads for smaller screens. Here’s how:
Vertical Video Format
Studies show that vertical videos outperform horizontal ones on mobile platforms, where users naturally scroll and consume content in a vertical feed. Vertical videos take up more screen real estate, allowing for a more immersive, full-screen experience that captures attention better than landscape videos.
Furthermore, your key visuals, branding, and messages should be centered in the frame. This prevents essential content from being cropped or hidden in the letterboxing of landscape videos.
Fast Loading Times
Slow-loading content is one of the leading causes of user abandonment, especially on mobile networks where connectivity can be inconsistent. When users encounter buffering or long wait times, they are likely to skip or abandon the video entirely, leading to a high bounce rate.
Tools like H.264 video compression can balance file size and video quality, ensuring a smoother viewing experience. Additionally, video resolution should be optimized for mobile screens. A bigger resolution might unnecessarily increase the file size.
Finally, a video hosting platform or Content Delivery Network (CDN) that serves videos from servers closer to the user’s geographical location will help speed up load times and improve playback performance.
Captions and Subtitles
There is a growing trend of users watching videos without sound, particularly in public or work environments. Research indicates that 75% of people watch videos on social media with the sound off. This presents a challenge for advertisers, as the audio may carry important messages that are critical to understanding the ad. To counter this, including captions or subtitles is essential for delivering the message effectively, regardless of whether the sound is on or off.
Captions should be clear, concise, and easy to read on small mobile screens. For example, in fast-paced ads or ads with heavy visuals, captions should appear at the right time to reinforce the message and align with the visual flow.
Besides accessibility, captions can also increase engagement. Many mobile users will actively turn on captions to better follow the content, especially in noisy or crowded environments.
Video Length and Attention Span
Mobile users have short attention spans, with many only watching a video for a few seconds. That said, get to the point quickly and grab the viewer’s attention in the first few seconds. The hook should be clear and compelling, showcasing the most important part of the message upfront to encourage viewers to watch the rest of the ad.
Interactive Features
Mobile video ads can be more engaging when they contain interactive elements like swipe-up features, polls, or clickable links. These interactive features encourage the viewer to take immediate action and engage more deeply with the content.
For example, TikTok’s native features allow users to shop directly through video ads or interact with branded filters and challenges, making the ad experience feel more integrated with the platform.
Adding interactive elements to your video, such as “tap to learn more” or “swipe to shop,” can significantly enhance user engagement.
5. Use Data to Fine-Tune Targeting
Video ad campaigns require ongoing optimization to reach the right audience at the right time. Deep Contextual™ by JWP Connatix is a powerful tool for enhancing video targeting with real-time contextual insights, especially important in a cookieless environment.
Deep Contextual™ combines deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing to analyze video content on a granular level. The proprietary technology indexes hundreds of categories and subcategories, recognizes objects, identifies brands and famous faces, and flags sensitive content. By applying human-like reasoning, Deep Contextual™ resolves contextual ambiguity and ensures that your ads are placed in the most relevant environments.
This advanced targeting capability helps advertisers align ads with real-time consumer interest for increased engagement.
The results? Deep Contextual™ has been proven to boost key metrics, with campaigns showing a +17% increase in viewability, +11% increase in view-through rate (VCR), and +37% increase in click-through rate (CTR).
With over 500 direct publisher partnerships across 4,000 sites, Deep Contextual™ provides premium video inventory at scale, enabling smarter ad placement and higher ROI.
6. Monitor ROI and Adjust Accordingly
Consistent monitoring and optimization will keep your video ad campaign on track to achieve ROI goals. Use actionable performance analytics to track which videos and categories are driving the best results. With these insights, you can adjust your creative, targeting, and budget allocation to improve campaign performance.
7. Guarantee Brand Safety
Finally, your video ads must be displayed in a brand-safe environment. With JWP Connatix’s GARM brand safety certification, you can rest assured that your video ads will only run on safe, high-quality content. JWP analyzes the content of each video—not just the page—to provide a safe experience for both advertisers and viewers.
Conclusion
Optimizing video ad campaigns for higher ROI requires a strategic blend of understanding your audience, crafting engaging content, using advanced targeting, and leveraging data insights.
By following these best practices, you can improve your video ad campaign performance, boost engagement, and achieve a higher return on investment. As the digital advertising industry moves forward, these strategies and tools will ensure that your video ads remain impactful.
Contact us today and let’s chat about how we can help you reach your advertising goals.