Study Shows What Works for Online Video Advertising

New York, New York (November 18, 2009) -- Eyeblaster, a provider of integrated digital advertising solutions, announced today its latest video findings, indicating that online video advertising outperforms next to email and editorial content such as news, finance, sports, music , but lags in social networks and gaming environments.

The study also confirms that video advertising boosts engagement—doubling Dwell Time and increasing Dwell Rate by 20%. As a result, video yields double the ROI of non-video Rich Media. Download the complete study, Online Video Advertising: Doubles Engagement, Boosts ROI, at http://bit.ly/EB_Research_OnlineVideo.

As marketers increasingly leverage online video, this new research, analyzing billions of impressions, provides insight into what, where, when and why video advertising engages users online. An examination of users’ behavior by frequency of exposure shows that campaigns with video advertising achieve better results with fewer exposures when compared to rich media campaigns without video. For example, users exposed to an ad with video twice achieve the same Dwell Rate of users exposed to a non-video ad three times.

“When it comes to online advertising, savvy marketers are using video to work both ends of the consumer funnel to drive results,” said Gal Trifon, CEO and Co-founder at Eyeblaster. “Online video advertising provokes engagement and Eyeblaster’s data demonstrates that users are more compelled to play with an ad that contains video. A blend of In-Stream, In-Banner and Floating ads allows advertisers to engage their target audience regardless of where they spend their time online.”

In the last four years, the growth of video impressions has outpaced rich media growth by 60%. Eyeblaster’s data suggests that since the beginning of 2006 to Q2 2009, video impressions have increased more than seven times in the US market and tenfold worldwide.

Key highlights from the video report include:

* In-Stream video ads have the highest proportion of ads fully played compared to any other format.

* Creative decisions play a significant role in ad performance: Rollover user-initiated video performs best followed by auto-initiated video; click user-initiated performs worst.

* Weekdays from 9am to 5pm is users’ preferred time to watch In-Banner and Floating video ads.

* Relatively few users un-mute video ads; auto-initiated video has the highest un-mute rate.

* An increase of video length by five seconds reduces Video Fully Played rate by 2.8%, on average.

For a complete list of video best practices and a deeper analysis of video environments and ad performance, download the complete research report here: http://bit.ly/EB_Research_OnlineVideo.

*The Dwell metric measures key interactions including time the mouse was over an ad, user-initiated video duration, user-initiated expansion duration and any other custom interaction duration. Unintentional dwell instances lasting less than one second are excluded in the calculation. Dwell Rate is the cumulative instances of where a user interacted with the ad divided by served impressions.

Source: Eyeblaster