Placement Optimisation and How it Can Improve Your Online Video Advertising

As we all know, different types of ads are more effective in different environments. An advertisement that works well in a magazine may not work as well on television. This translates to digital advertising, as well: not all video ad formats works well on Facebook.

Facebook recently commissioned MetrixLab to research why this is. The findings were clear: video ads designed with Facebook’s news feed in mind worked just fine, but traditional TV commercials did not.

From this study, MatrixLab recommended four things for Facebook advertising:

1. Introduce your brand identity/logo within the first 3 seconds

2. Show the brand for at least half of the video

3. The Goldilocks principle: make the video as short as possible but also as long as it needs to be

4. Feature your message immediately for those who ‘swipe away’

Placement Optimisation

Placement optimisation utilizes Facebook and Instagram to reduce a campaign’s CPM (Cost Per Mille; i.e. cost per thousand impressions). This method increases efficiency by finding people in a target audience on either Facebook or Instagram.

In essence, Placement Optimization increases efficiency by finding people in a target audience on either Facebook or Instagram, depending on which is less expensive at that point in time. Cost for advertising on Facebook and Instagram are based on supply and demand. If you were to increase your audience reach only on Facebook, then your average advertising cost will increase, all else being equal. By switching between Instagram and Facebook, Placement Optimisation allows you to increase your audience while controlling your average CPM – essentially it’s letting you have your cake and eat it too!



Do Different Platforms Need Different Ads/Does Placement Optimisation Work?

The next step in MatrixLab’s analysis was to understand if the same creative rules applied to both Facebook and Instagram. By looking at 80 video ads across both social medias, they found a crucial correlation in performance: this means that ads that perform well in one feed will generally perform well in the other.

Additionally, MatrixLab also found that ads that were feed-proofed (specifically created with Facebook or Instagram in mind) did better than ads that were non-optimized (weren’t created with Facebook and Instagram in mind).

They also found that feed-proofed video is more likely to create optimal performance on both Facebook and Instagram in regards to ad recognition and message-take-out, and that it was more likely people would watch the video for longer.

Platform Still Matters

In summary, to maximise the performance of ad campaigns, advertisers should use video that incorporates the brand identity within the first 3 seconds of video, keeps the brand identity present for at least half of the video’s duration, use adequate time, and feature the takaway message up-front. It is also recommended to adopt Placement Optimisation to improve cost-efficiency.