Mobile Phones Lead in Q1 Video Ad Impressions, Click-Through Rates

May 29, 2018

Mobile devices – particularly mobile phones – continue to outpace other devices in video ad impressions, though their dominance is receding at the hands of connected TV devices, reports Extreme Reach in its Q1 2018 Video Advertising Benchmark Report. For the quarter mobile phones comprised 33% of video ad impressions served by Extreme Reach, down from 39% in Q4 2017.

That decline certainly didn’t come at the hands of desktops, which dropped share yet again. Desktops accounted for just 24% share of video ad impressions in Q1, per Extreme Reach’s data, down from 41% a year earlier.

Instead it was connected TV devices – such as smart TVs, Roku, Apple TV, and Playstation – that saw increased consumption. These jumped to 31% share of video ad impressions, just trailing mobile phones and more than double their share from Q4 2017 (15%).

Data from FreeWheel has previously found a similar pattern, with connected TV devices emerging as the top devices for premium video ad views.

It’s quite possible that connected TV devices will continue to gain share of video consumption, as smart TVs are representing an ever-greater proportion of TVs sold in the US.

Mobiles Take Over in Click-Through Rates

Reversing a yearlong trend in 2017, video ad click-through rates actually increased on a quarter-over-quarter basis in Q1, per Extreme Reach’s report. Even so, the overall 0.26% click-through rate in Q1 was far below the rate from the year-earlier period (0.45%).

Although click-through rates seem to have ceded their prioritization to completion rates, they’re worth noting due to a shift among devices. This past quarter mobiles topped desktops in video ad click-through rates for the first time in at least a year. Both mobile phones (0.43%) and tablets (0.42%) sported a click-through rate substantially higher than that of desktops (0.3%).

Other Highlights

In other notable results from the analysis:

  • Average video ad completion rates jumped to 81%, up from 68% in Q4 2017 and above the year-earlier period’s rate of 73%;
  • Somewhat surprisingly, completion rates were higher for 30-seconds ads (86%) than for 15-second ads (80%) and for 6-second ads (74%);
  • Completion rates remained higher on connected TV devices than on any other devices;
  • 6-second ads represented 3.1% of all video ad impressions, down from 5.2% during the previous quarter, but up from 0.4% during the year-earlier period;
  • The average viewability and viewable completion rates both increased on a quarter-over-quarter basis; and
  • Levels of video ad fraud declined, as filtered general invalid traffic reached a new low of 3.7%.
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