Author: Pathum Wanigasekara / Head of Paid and Optimization at Digivizer

Automatic Placements are recommended by social platforms to extend reach and lower your impression delivery costs. However – do they actually work and what does it mean for your brand?

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have added multiple ad placements in addition to their news feed. There is In-stream Video Advertising, Suggested Video, Stories, Messenger Ads and Audience Network.

All of these placements are built to drive efficiency through your media buys. However – do they actually work?

First of all: what are each of these placements?

• The in-stream video advertising placement allows you to deliver 5 – 15 second mid-roll video ads to people watching videos on Facebook and through Audience Network.
• The Suggested Videos placement offers an opportunity for advertisers to reach audiences by delivering video ads in a video feed on Facebook, specifically, the Suggested videos feed and the Facebook Watch feed.
• Facebook and Instagram Stories offers opportunities for advertisers to reach audiences by delivering content within organic stories either on Instagram or Facebook.

RELATED ARTICLE: Facebook’s new image format finally launches

• The Audience Network gives you a way to extend your reach away from social media entirely and into mobile apps and websites. Your ad can be displayed as either native, banner, or interstitial.

Pretty cool, right?

You’re probably thinking: “I’ve already tried these placements and they are working for me, so what’s wrong?”

It’s all about user experience.

At Digivizer, we have personally run ads for a client across the audience network and the retention rate has been approximately 90% throughout the video.

For a 60-second video, that’s amazing, right?

How did we get that considering a decent video on Facebook will get you a 10-15% completion rate?

You need to look at where your ad was placed and how much was delivered across different networks. How your content is being delivered will skew your results.

RELATED ARTICLE: How we achieve continuous learning in a fast-paced workplace

What we found is that across different placements your videos may or may not be skippable, or ads may be viewable but at the bottom of the page or are played within app advertising so a user gets extra game credits. These placements will obviously skew results favorably.

So why should I care if my results are good when the client is happy?

It all comes down to user experience. Being a potential forced view, how will your audience react? Will they turn away from the screen? Will they watch on in agony? Will they genuinely appreciate the content they’re watching?

Our best advice is to test each placement. If you spend enough money with the platforms, you could do a brand lift study with Facebook, Millward Brown or Nielsen to validate the results of your campaign.

Utilising The Digivizer Platform To Measure Results

As this format is not brand new, you can already view your results through the Digivizer platform.

Under Platform/Placement you will be able to see the differing placements – in this example Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network.

For videos, we recommend looking at the video view rate and benchmark against previous activity then compare against each of the other four platforms being utilized.

RELATED ARTICLE: Why using Google Analytics is crucial to Digital Marketers

If you were using static content delivered as an interstitial, banner ads or native we would measure results against the numbers of impressions, clicks, click-through rate and the percentage delivered across each platform.

Our Platform

We’re working to ensure the best of our technology is made available for the lowest per month price so it can be available to all businesses.  For US$89 per month, you’ll have all your owned, earned and paid social and search media data and insights at your fingertips.

You deserve to get the best out of your digital spend and we have the tools that remove the stress and pain from the process!

We remain committed to serving all businesses. Allow us to serve you!