4 Mistakes You May be Making with Your Video Ads

You have probably heard a laundry list of reasons why video should be a big part of your digital ad strategy. For good reason – video drives 82% of global internet traffic.

You know the stats, which is exactly why you already use video ads.

But you may still be making a few simple mistakes that could be jeopardizing your video ad strategy. Here are the 4 most common blunders and how you can fix them.

When you hit record on a video, which way are you holding your phone or camera? Let me guess – horizontally?

We often default to horizontal videos because it’s how we watch videos on TV and on streaming platforms like YouTube or Rumble. Filming videos horizontally feels right, but it isn’t the best option for digital ads on every platform.

More than 75% of video views happen on mobile devices. Nearly all smartphones are designed to be used vertically, and 94% of the time that’s exactly how we are holding them. In fact, one study showed that only about 14% of people will go through the effort of turning their phones to watch a horizontal video.

Vertical videos don’t just look better, they perform better too.

Research shows that viewers are 9x more likely to watch a vertical video to completion.

We’ve tested every common dimension of video for our clients on Meta. When we placed horizontal, square, and vertical videos head-to-head in one ad set for a client, the vertical video netted 74% of the leads in the campaign.

If you need video ads that can be used across traditional and digital platforms, just be sure to film a wide enough shot that you can crop it to use horizontally and vertically.

One major benefit of video ads is being able to share more information than you can with a single picture and a sentence or two of accompanying text.

The downside? We tend to make video ads longer than they need to be, cramming in unnecessary information simply because we can.

Meta recommends videos that are 15 seconds or less. YouTube’s six-second ads are consistently among our top-performing creatives.

Shorter video ads not only keep your message crisp, they open up the amount of available inventory you can access, driving down the cost of impressions for your campaign.

Regardless of the ad length, you may not even have that long to hook your viewer, so think about how you can grab their attention within the first few seconds of your video.

And whatever you do, don’t put all the important need-to-know information at the very end of the video.

You can make the most cinematic TV ad of all time, but that doesn’t mean it will deliver the same kind of results on digital. There are a few reasons for this:

TV ads can serve as a great source of inspiration for digital ads and can certainly be repurposed with a few key changes. But simply uploading the same video file and throwing a bunch of money behind it probably isn’t going to yield the best return on investment.

When resources are limited, a DIY video ad strategy can save you a ton…but it can also cost you dearly in the long run if you don’t know what you’re doing.

On the other hand, hiring a team of experts to handle the nitty gritty details is a big investment – one that can pay off dividends.

Want to leave the execution, planning, and placement of your video ads to someone else? Reach out to IMGE today and let us take it from here.