Video accounts for a large portion of the advertising spend of major national advertisers, with marketers contending that video has higher conversion rates than other content. When it comes to video, advertisers are still turning to social media platforms, with Pixability’s State of Digital Advertising Report [download page] revealing that the majority of agencies run campaigns on Facebook (90%), YouTube (88%) and Instagram (88%).
Pixability analyzed data from campaigns that ran on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Fire TV, and other connected television channels through their PixabilityONE platform. From this analysis, Pixability found that Facebook delivers the best click-through rates (CTR) at an average of 1.15%, followed by Instagram (0.47%) and YouTube (0.11%).
One notable finding from the report is that older consumers are more apt to click on video ads than younger consumers. Indeed, the average CTR for consumers 65 years and older on Facebook and Instagram is 3.42% and 1.8%, respectively. Meanwhile, those consumers between 55-64-years-old have an average CTR of 2.38% on Facebook and 1.73% on Instagram. This is far higher than the comparable CTR rates for the youngest group of adults (18-24-year-olds), which averaged 1.05% on Facebook and 0.46% on Instagram.
In contrast to Facebook and Instagram, YouTube videos appear to have low CTR across all age groups. The highest was an average of 0.13%, which was shared by those across the 25-54-year-old age brackets.
The good news for advertisers is that cost-per-view (CPV) has fallen for both Facebook and YouTube. YouTube’s CPV fell by one-third (32.5%) between 2018 and 2019, while Facebook’s dropped by 11.4% year-on-year. However, as Instagram becomes an advertising platform to reckon with, its CPV rose slightly in 2019 by 4.5%.
Impressions Much Higher Among Younger Adults
Although video ad click-through rates are generally higher among older adults on these platforms, the majority of impressions continue to come from youth. Instagram, in particular, sees more than two-thirds (69%) of its video ad impressions come from adults 18-34-years-old, while YouTube skews a bit older with almost two-thirds (65% share) of impressions coming from 25-44-year olds.
The same isn’t true for Facebook – which is becoming less of a youth-oriented platform, as evidenced by MarketingCharts’ own Media Audience Demographics report. Adults ages 35 years and older account for nearly 3 in 5 (58% share) Facebook video ad impressions, per Pixability’s data.
Meanwhile, mobile represented a majority of video ad impressions on Instagram (98%), Facebook (81%) and YouTube (64%), a finding in contrast to other platforms that see much larger shares for CTV.
View-to-Completion Rates Rise
Click-through rate is only one metric used to measure the success of a campaign. View-to-completion rates are another. In fact, as far back as 2012, data from Vindico argued that completion rates are a better metric to measure a video ad’s success than CTR.
With that in mind, Pixability found that completion rates for Facebook and Instagram have risen considerably year-on-year. Facebook video view ad completion rate blossomed by 240% between 2018 and 2019 while Instagram’s video ad completion rate rose 190%. Although YouTube’s completion rate rose 20% in that time period, the rise is modest by comparison.
The full report can be downloaded here.
About the Data: Figures are based on campaigns that ran on the named social media platforms through the PixabilityONE platform.
