Mobile video advertising: what’s the real ROI of video ad creatives?

Video advertising is without a doubt a powerful format for mobile app promotion. The captivating format makes it possible for apps to tell their story or share their offering in a quick and engaging manner, and there are lots of compelling statistics already supporting the fact that video is the future of mobile marketing ad creative strategies. Like the one that says video has a 96% increase in click-through rate on social, or the fact that video is the consumer-reported favorite type of content.

But in an industry obsessed with ROI and strapped with often tight margins, many app marketers are left wondering if the added cost and effort of creating video ads is worth the investment. The app marketing experts at Asana Rebel, Runtastic, Scoot, Yousician and Free2Move shared some details of their current strategies, tactics, and tips for getting the most out of their video ad spend. Check out their insight below to get an in-depth look into this mobile marketing trend.

Have video ad creatives taken over mobile user acquisition? What’s the real ROI?

“For us, increasing our video ads has been 100% worth it. Our ads are now ranging around 80-90% video. Ss a fitness app, our product is very visual, so we built a great team of video editors and producers in-house to make video content our focus. We found that it generates the most engagement and brings better results for almost all channels.

Additionally, we found that creative variety is important, but the rate of change required to get the maximum results varies depending on factors. In paid social for example, we test new creatives and concepts every week. In other channels, like UAC, I found that is better to avoid big changes too often, otherwise it can negatively affect campaign performance.  We always change creatives if they start to lose performance or traffic (as the later is a prime indicator of fatigue). Sometimes after a time period, we are able to reuse old top-performing assets and test them again – pure recycling that allows us to get extra use out of each creative.” -Thais Brizolara,  User Acquisition Manager at Asana Rebel.

 

“At this point, most of our ads are videos, and in the fitness vertical it’s quickly becoming the standard. But we don’t always choose video over static images without considering the channel. For example, on Twitter, we often use more static images because their performance is on par with video, but the effort and resources spent on producing images are much less. On Facebook, however, 92% of our creatives are video, with the rest being single static images, slideshows and carousel ads. This split reflects each ad format’s performance on Facebook, and video is clearly winning out. At the moment, we are also testing whether adding a playable ad to our assets’ portfolio will help us improve the performance of our Facebook campaigns.

Our video ad sets or campaigns usually consist of a set of videos that perform well, are quite generic (in terms of copy and visuals) and are not tied to a specific “campaign” or season. In addition to these top performers, from time to time we add in new videos (usually more niche concepts, designed for a more specific target audience) that we’re testing. Such a setup helps us reduce ad fatigue.

The frequency of us producing new video concepts depends on the availability of resources that we have in-house. Overall, we don’t come up with new video concepts very often and try to get the most of the existing assets by tweaking and testing them in order to reach top performance, rather than creating new concepts every 2 weeks. Usually (during high season with high spending) we come up with a new concept every 3-5 weeks. We try to quickly test new creatives in a couple of markets (soft launch-style), and then localize it for multiple markets if the performance is good, or make tweaks (to the copy or visuals that appear in the first seconds) if the performance is lower than expected.” –Ekaterina Shpadareva, User Acquisition and ASO Manager at Runtastic.

 

“At the moment we work with static images more than video, although every time we have launched a video ad we have seen good results. Especially for Social, where Instagram Stories are becoming the top-performing format and you need to have dynamic and creative content in order to make the most out of it. 

The issue is that we need to change our ads quite often (changing ads every 1 to 2 weeks) so investing as much time, energy and effort as video creative require is not possible for us at this time, at the pace we move. Regardless of format, our best performing ads are those that show a use case of our service. To us, showing how people use our product to make their lives better works because potential users identify with the  pain point and get the idea to use our solution to solve it.” –Anna Juan Sala, Marketing Manager at Scoot Networks.

 

“We have been using and testing video a lot for our campaigns, especially for the social native channels, but we choose video formats based on the platform and the placement we are aiming for. On Instagram stories and Snapchat for example, we almost exclusively use video. But for the Facebook and Instagram feeds – where we have more format options – we always upload a video as well as creatives in other formats, to see which one performs best (though it is usually the video).

In particular at Free2Move we’ve seen great success with the Slideshow Ad format from Facebook, that allows you to create videos starting from multiple photos, and showcase them at the speed and with the music you prefer. This kind of format works particularly well for us because with it we can show all the different sharing services that are available in our app – one per slide – and then add a phone with the call to action at the end to make it clear what the product is about.” – Lorenzo Rossi, Head of Marketing at Free2Move.

 

“Nearly all of our creative are video. We find the medium is the best way to quickly communicate what our app does and evoke the feeling of playing an instrument. Because Yousician is an app that works in conjunction with playing an actual physical instrument, if we only showed the app screen or images of someone holding a real instrument while looking at a phone, it wouldn’t really communicate effectively what is going on or convey the fact that the app listens along and gives realtime feedback when real instruments are played.” –Sam McLellan, Head of Growth at Yousician.