close

Category: Blog

Video Monetization: Best Practices for Publishers

By Rinat Avrina | July 2, 2019

When it comes to monetizing videos, publishers need to stay on top of emerging technologies and best practices. Video monetization can be tricky, but is worth it considering the large investment of time and money that is inherent in video content creation. 

Quality content that resonates with a target audience takes a lot of time and investment to create, so it’s important to leverage that content as much as you can and give it the best opportunity to return on that investment.

Download the complete guide to video monetization

Below we’ll go over a few actionable hints and tips publishers can use to monetize their video in 2019.

Prioritizing Viewability

Advertisers are looking for effective messaging, and this cannot be achieved if the users will not see their ads. Viewability is defined as a video being at least 50% viewable on the user’s screen and playing for at least 2 seconds. In terms of monetization for the publisher, it is a simple equation; better viewability = higher revenue. Many advertiser campaigns will not even bid on unviewable opportunities.

As a publisher, there are a few measures you can take to improve viewability with direct impact on user experience: 

Tech – Pay close attention to the loading times of your page and the video player. By increasing the speed at which a video is loaded, the viewability is directly impacted, as there are more chances for the user to actually view it. 

A responsive website and video player optimized for mobile devices does the same. According to eMarketer, mobile ad spend will surpass TV in the largest ad market this year and it will account for 69.9% of all digital advertising.  Optimizing your website for mobile in particular has been shown to increase viewability rates, due to the smaller screen size when compared to desktop.

Content – Know your audience, and serve them relevant content that they will want to consume. This will make it more likely to keep your users engaged with your videos and thereby create viewable opportunities to serve ads.

Placement – When it comes to video player placement, looking at your metrics will be very useful. Choose your most trafficked web pages and test placing dedicated video placements on them. Follow best practices, but test and optimize whatever placements you can. 

Centering your video player in a prominent, well-trafficked area on your website will expose it to more viewers, increasing the viewability rate.

You may be surprised to find out, for example, that while above-the-fold can be reserved as premium inventory, below-the-fold can prove just as viable of an option for buyers, depending on the content of the page. Understanding the way your users are consuming your content is the key.

Size – Video player size can also be a significant factor. According to our research of millions of video impressions at Primis, increasing a player’s size improves the viewability rate by approximately 15%, which can lead to an estimated 25% increase in CPM. 

Keep in mind that location remains paramount regardless of size. So, you can have a larger player, but, if it’s located where users can’t see it, it will not necessarily generate higher revenue.  

Video Header Bidding

After you’ve established your relationships with your demand partners, Video Header Bidding is one of the best options to grow and maximize the revenue you can make with them. Unlike the traditional waterfall method, which calls the demand partners one by one, header bidding sends parallel asynchronous requests, giving an equal shot to your demand partners to bid on the opportunity to serve an ad.

The process includes finding a Header Bidding vendor and placing their wrapper (snippet of Javascript code) on your webpage, which will send bid requests to multiple demand partners at once. In most cases the SSPs and Ad Exchanges on the receiving side of the bid have themselves multiple demand partners bidding for the opportunity. The highest bid will win the option to serve an ad on your site and the whole process should take up to three seconds. 

Download the complete guide to video monetization

Using header bidding often increases overall revenue by giving the option for lower tier partners to bid on the opportunity along with high tier partners, thereby generating the highest possible CPM. The method can also help you discover the small, but still quality, partners that can generate nice revenue. Header bidding can also generate higher fill rates for each opportunity, as you have all partners competing, which ensures greater demand coverage.

Opt-Outs

Regardless of which approach you use, waterfall or header bidding, it’s important to constantly prune your demand sources. 

This means looking at the metrics and deprioritizing or removing any demand sources with high opt-out/time-out rates. If you are sticking to the waterfall method, this means pushing the low-quality demand sources further down the waterfall. 

Keeping Up With Video Monetization

Getting the most out of displaying videos on your website requires some strategic planning in terms of content and placement. But, no less important is choosing the best monetization methods that fit your needs, and ongoing vetting of the partners and methods you are using. 

Remember, in a constantly changing monetization and publishing landscape you must always keep updated with the latest technological innovations to get the most out of your digital assets.

By Rinat Avrina | July 2, 2019

GDPR Explained: What We Learned After a Year of Data Protection

By Dan Sharon | June 25, 2019

One of the hottest topics in the industry these days is how to handle and manage users’ private information in the Adtech ecosystem, especially in the context of the EU. At Primis, we have taken diligent strides to make sure that we are completely compliant with all of the GDPR’s stipulations. But, how has the set of international regulations affected the market as a whole?

The Evolution of GDPR Compliance

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation for European law on data protection and privacy for all EU citizens. As it is a very progressive litigation, compliance is a work in progress, evolving as our ecosystem matures. This means that there are many more developments to come.

So, what do we know up to this point, just over a year after the GDPR came into force? Data is power, and even more so when it comes to the data of high paying users around the web. Every brand is searching for the right user, the one that will pay the most attention to the ad and show interest.

However, how do we get this chance to present the right ad to the right user? How can we reach exactly those desirable users? Through data and consent.

To simplify the idea behind GDPR, in today’s data-driven world, a user must give explicit consent to use his personal data and, if he doesn’t, vendors cannot obtain his data. As a result, without given consent advertisers cannot reach the right users, so many are reducing their ad spend in those scenarios.

Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF)

The aim of the GDPR is to protect the privacy of all EU citizens and prevent data breaches. One of the key products of the data privacy regulation is the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF).

The Transparency and Consent Framework is a publishing standard by IAB Europe meant to reconcile the Adtech ecosystem with GDPR regulations. TCF is the largest collaborative effort with organisations and professionals in the digital advertising and publishing industries to provide solutions to key GDPR and ePrivacy Directive compliance challenges. 

From a user’s point of view, the experience is very similar to the current standard for web browsing in Europe, where there are already general cookie notifications and opt-in requests. But, instead of just giving a cookie-tracking alert, the new process includes which vendors a publisher works with, what data is collected and how it’s used. All of this information is disclosed through the CMP.

Understanding the CMP

Consent Management Platforms (or CMPs) are tools that let publishers control consent and pass this consent to Adtech vendors.

Under GDPR, third party vendors need to have an explicit user opt-in to apply any data for advertising. Consent of the user must be clear and provided in an understandable and easily accessible form, with the purpose of data processing attached to that consent.

Download the complete guide to video monetization

Regarding our practices at Primis, once we are working with a publisher, we recommend that they implement a CMP that is GDPR compliant. Not all the CMP’s are authorized and it’s better to pick any CMP vendor from the IAB list.

After a CMP is implemented, and a user has given or not given his consent to use his personal data, Primis has fully support to identify the consent, and to pass it to our advertising partners through the supply chain.  

This process is mandatory to ensure that all of our publishers are GDPR compliant and working under all the necessary guidelines. Meanwhile, they are protecting their visitors from others being able to use their personal data without consent, while simultaneously keeping their business safe from potential lawsuits in the future. And, most importantly, advertisers won’t reduce their ad spending due to a lack of data privacy protection. 

Looking to the Future of GDPR

After a year of GDPR, TCF and CMP, the user privacy momentum is not showing any signs of slowing down. In California, there is an impending GDPR look-alike called The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and everyone is wondering if the rest of the US will follow suit. In the non-goverment sector, Apple and Google are limiting cookie tracking of online user behaviour in order to protect user data. In an ever changing digital landscape, all digital players must keep changing and adapting themselves to the new realities. 

By Dan Sharon | June 25, 2019

Contextual Targeting Makes a Comeback

By Omri Polak | June 17, 2019

Everybody likes a good comeback story – every Rocky movie, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando in The Godfather, John Travolta in Pulp Fiction to name a few – and, since last year, the Ad-Tech industry has a comeback of its own. Say hello (again) to contextual targeting, a term which returned to center stage over the past few years (in fact, we’ve found quantifiable success with contextual targeting for publishers, but more on that later) after enjoying a glorified bloom during the stone age of the internet. You know, those magical days of dial-up internet, Alta Vista and AOL, better known as the 90’s.

Download the publisher's guide to privacy in 2020

Back in those days, contextual targeting was a method that ensured, for example, that car ads would run on the relevant section of the site (automotive). It migrated onto the web from print media, but lost its appeal along the way when user-data driven marketing took over the industry, mostly thanks to more accurate measurement ability. So, what caused this aforementioned comeback? The answer is divided into two aspects moving in opposite directions.

Why Contextual Targeting Is Back In Fashion

On one side, we have the pro-privacy shift of the industry, exemplified and amplified by the EU’s GPDR and Apple’s ITP. These changes are limiting the targeting capabilities marketers have at their disposal, which necessitates finding other alternatives.

On the other side, the technological developments of recent years, like better machine learning and A.I. allowing for more processing and in a faster way, have helped contextual targeting improve by leaps and bounds from its ancient predecessor. In April, The New York Times announced that it will offer contextual targeting to advertisers.

I think that, without a doubt, our theme this year was context… We think there are all kinds of ways we can unlock new types of targeting for publishers based on content rather than audience.

Allison Murphy
VP of Ad Innovation, The New York Times.

The comeback of context does not apply to advertisers alone, so publishers shouldn’t miss this golden opportunity. First of all, the abundance of content, better organized and categorized than ever before, allows them to offer advertisers plenty of ad opportunities. Besides that, when applied to content, contextual targeting can be much more useful.

Think about it. The user is already in a content consumption state of mind, so let’s use all the tools we have in order to help him discover relevant content. This time around, we can harness the data to prove it.

Contextual Targeting In Action

Lately, after updating our contextual targeting abilities, we at Primis saw dramatic rises in user engagement metrics across our network of publishers. The stats below were compiled over a two week period from a number of sites, all belonging to one publisher. They demonstrate the difference in performance of our unit when playing content chosen using our new and improved contextual targeting mechanism compared to the site’s control playlist.

 

contextual targeting

 

Obviously, the first stat to pop out is the 143% increase that Domain B enjoyed over the documented period. The other domains also had success using contextual targeting, Domain A is leading the pack (97%), Domain F (85%), Domain A (73%) and Domain D (72%) follow close behind. As you can see, the positive outcomes are hard to ignore.

Download the complete guide to video monetization

Don’t Call It A Comeback

While contextual targeting originally hit its stride in the 90’s, it’s back with a vengeance, like Keanu Reeves or Charles Barkley. Now, the difference is that this contextual technology can be applied to publisher content in addition to advertising. In the end, there are two primary components that are essential for contextual targeting; great content, and a lot of it.

By Omri Polak | June 17, 2019

Video Discovery: How to Distribute and Monetize Video Content Effectively

By Simcha Weil | May 5, 2019

Remember the first time you fell down a YouTube rabbit hole? Maybe it was a satisfying loop of unboxing videos. Or, maybe you were pulled into the YouTube beauty vlogger world. Or, maybe you just wanted to learn a new skill and ended up learning ten.

Chances are, some version of this has happened to you. Whether on YouTube, binge-watching a show on Netflix, or some other type of video feed, we know that video is a highly engaging content format — especially when it’s personalized for your tastes.

These ‘rabbit holes,’ or times when we’re highly engaged in video recommendations, are exactly what we’re aiming for when we implement video discovery.

Video discovery is a type of content discovery: a form of native advertising that prompts a user to discover more content, specifically video.

Download the complete guide to video monetization

This is important because video is hard to recommend. It requires even more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to power algorithms that focus specifically on context and viewer habits.

But before we get into those, let’s take a deeper dive into video discovery and why it’s taken the advertising world by storm.

Why is Video Such a Big Deal?

Video is currently the most accessible and most powerful form of content and advertising on the web — and it’s become difficult to ignore.

It’s simple, really. Video is a big deal because people are watching it. When they’re watching branded videos, they’re more likely to buy products, according to 90% of those surveyed by HubSpot. So, search engines pay attention to these trends and send more traffic to sites with video.

It’s offering the right video that can be the tough part — how are publishers supposed to recommend personalized video content in real-time?

How Video Discovery Works (When it’s Done Right)

An important factor in Video Discovery is that it is a native offering also in appearance, which means it’s non-disruptive to the viewer.

Native advertising techniques work because they give users a feeling that they’re not watching an ad – the video unit is an integral part of the site.

Eyal Bezalel
Primis, Co-CEO

When video is an integral part of the site, people enjoy the viewing experience even more. And, when that video content is intelligently targeted for their needs, well, it’s a match made in heaven.

In order for an algorithm to be powerful enough to make this sort of intelligent recommendation, it’s going to have to take several things into account:

  • Context. The page alongside the video will need to be scanned in order to know whether or not the content matches the environment.
  • Data. To be truly intelligent, algorithms need massive amounts of data and are often powered by some of the world’s largest third-party data companies like Acxiom.
  • Engagement. At the intersection of content and user data lies engagement, and both items are needed to provide an engagement score to each user and video combination (millions of combinations per second). If the score matches with a video, the video is shown.

Viewers, Publishers, and Advertisers All Stand to Profit

Through the incorporation of both video advertising and a publisher’s own editorial video, the optimal environment for engaging with video is created:

  • The publisher is provided a way to easily match their content with the right user, match video ads with the right user, and match them in the right combination for each individual viewer. This allows them a new source of revenue, and a new way to delight, and therefore retain, users.
  • The advertiser gets to reach users in an environment alongside content that’s truly engaging.
  • The user gets to engage with great content in which they’re actually interested, in a non-intrusive way.

There’s one caveat: you have to pick a video discovery platform that takes all of these opportunities into account.

Your Options to Get In the Game

You’ve probably already heard of some video discovery options. YouTube provides the opportunity for advertisers to reach viewers with pre-roll ads, and for publishers to reach new viewers, with one catch: they all have to let YouTube own the audience.

Providers like Teads, Vidyard, and AdMogul provide great outstream options, but they don’t provide publishers with the option to add video content to their websites.

Providers that are only supplying outstream solutions are essentially offering publishers who don’t have enough video content a video unit in the middle of the page to close this gap. Meanwhile, video discovery gives publishers the option for both monetization and engagement with their own editorial videos. Viewers enjoy the website, stay longer, and view more pages, which is something that outstream advertising can never offer.

What’s Next: Tackling Scale, OTT, and Production Obstacles

There are many obstacles that publishers and advertisers still need to face in the video space, but there are a select few that stand out.

The first is the problem of return on investment due to scale. This is the biggest problem publishers face today when it comes to driving traffic to their own video content.

Publishers spend a lot of time and resources creating and producing videos, but they don’t always distribute them with enough scale to get a good return on investment. In this sense, creating new video inventory for publishers in a native user-friendly unit, and increasing the number of times each video is shown, can make video a profitable source of income.

The industry has figured out how to serve relevant content at the right time. The next step will be the right place.

You see this trend on all major platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Hulu – you name it – they all invest heavily in tech to match the right recommendation for each user, to increase consumption. At Primis we try to help our publishers do exactly that, but on publisher sites, not YouTube. Our tech looks at addressable data, contextual matching, and historical engagement metrics and utilizes machine learning algorithms to match every user with the best content – for them. This then allows publishers to delight their users, retain them, and increase revenue.

Eyal Bezalel
Primis, Co-CEO

Finally, distribution. Video can get expensive, and in order for production costs to stay manageable, distribution has to get even more effective. Videos that don’t reach the right people aren’t worth the cost.

Content distribution requires more than just a tech solution. A publisher needs a big and deep library of content to speak to the diverse interests of their users.

In the digital publishing and advertising landscapes we are always looking for the next product which will provide a better experience for users, and better ROI for publishers. Now, after video has completely taken over, and content discovery advertising is on nearly every site, it is finally time to merge the two with Video Discovery.

Download the complete guide to video monetization

By Simcha Weil | May 5, 2019

The Definitive Guide to Content Discovery

By Jacob Simkovich | May 2, 2019

We’re all fighting for our audiences. Publishers and marketers alike seek not only to increase the number of people they reach, but also to increase the number of valuable interactions they have with the people that come across their content and products.

The digital publishing industry has taken a lot of twists and turns over the last couple of decades. Long story short, we’ve now landed in a world where content shock is real, it’s noisier online, and it’s getting harder and more expensive to capture new audiences. In the midst of the fight to capture, monetize and keep new audiences, a new type of advertising has emerged with a bang: native advertising.

According to the Native Advertising Institute (the authority on the matter), native advertising matches the form, feel, and function of the content of the media on which it appears.

This could mean a lot of things — an editorial partnership between a brand and a publisher, an in-feed social media ad, sponsored content, and of course, content discovery.

Content discovery is a specific type of native advertising that prompts the site visitor to discover a new piece of editorial content, branded (or sponsored) content, or video.

It’s an effective way to distribute content because of the highly engaging user experience. The environment in which content is shown is familiar, and therefore, not disruptive like other forms of advertising.

And as content discovery grows up, the importance of video content in capturing and engaging audiences has become clear.

A Brief History of Content Discovery

Publishers have always been the masters of attracting interested, engaged and loyal viewers, and marketers have always been the masters of convincing publishers to sell them some of that airtime (or view time if you’re reading, of course).

Native advertising emerged in response to the need to find publishers, products, events and groups people didn’t know about, and thus can’t search for (unlike search and social where you need to choose what to search and who to follow). Now discovery platforms could make recommendations based on sophisticated algorithms and help people discover new topics that might interest them.

Download the complete guide to video monetization

Content discovery allows publishers to access those same powerful algorithms they access on search and social channels. This helps keep visitors on-site engaging with editorial content to increase loyalty, while consuming sponsored content and video to drive revenue.

In short, content discovery gives publishers control over their audience’s experience, and marketers an opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience in a non-intrusive way.

How Content Discovery Works

Content discovery is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) based algorithms that not only understand people online, but learn about their behaviors in order to show them the most relevant and engaging content.

These machine learning algorithms study content and assign the content scores based on their success in engaging audiences across the internet. The compatibility of these videos to a given web page is assured by a combination of contextual matching, geographic targeting, and other advanced analysis methods.

When the discovery algorithms see this information, they learn from it and make recommendations of content that they know the audience will like.

The Rise of Video Discovery

Video has come into play because it’s impossible to ignore its effectiveness when it comes to engaging consumers and audiences.

It’s not just effective, it’s officially bigger online than it is on TV. Just to run through a few numbers:

–  85% of all internet users in the US alone watch online video content monthly on any of their devices. (Statista)
–  54% of consumers want to see more video content from brands and businesses they support. (Hubspot)
–  The average user spends 88% more time on a website with video. (Forbes)

It’s hard to argue with that kind of data.

Still not convinced? Here’s an example from Primis Co-CEO Eyal Betzalel:

Video is booming all over: OTT, connected TV, apps, web and mobile web. But video alone is not enough to keep users engaged. It’s the ability to deliver users the right content, at the right time in the right place. Take Netflix for example. There’s so much content, most users just scroll through what Netflix recommends. It works because Netflix serves up good video content that’s relevant and increases video consumption.

Eyal Bezalel
Primis Co-CEO

YouTube is also a great example of this — they know the importance of understanding their audience’s habits first and showing them recommendations second. This is why advertisers want to advertise so much on YouTube — viewers are highly engaged and paying attention.

All major platforms invest heavily in tech, in order to match the right recommendation for each user, to increase consumption. Publishers should be striving to emulate Netflix and YouTube’s models — they should enhance and extend online experiences by helping users discover engaging, high-quality video content based on their viewing habits.

What’s Next for the Industry?

It’s clear that video is here to stay. It’s effective, and it pays for publishers to implement ways to sell video supply.

The next big hurdles will be data (as always) and context. Publishers shouldn’t be distributing video with technologies that don’t take viewer habits into account.

Content must be merged with technology to produce a truly effective consumer experience… video service providers can better predict when their subscribers or customers will leave their service or content and help them to understand how to better capture their attention. This is also important for marketers when determining where to put their promotional spend and who to target in order to retain key customers.

Chris Ambrozic
Vice President of Product Management
TiVo for MarTechSeries

The bottom line is that the next generation of video discovery tools should be able to make the right recommendations based on more than just interests and previous behavior.

Regular publishers want to follow the big video companies and recommend video content, but they don’t have the tech resources to build the same recommendation engines that YouTube, Netflix and other big tech companies have. So, we will see publishers running towards third party vendors to fill the tech void and get the same video discovery engine running on their sites to increase video consumption and revenue like the big tech companies do.

By Jacob Simkovich | May 2, 2019

Is Ad Tech Consolidation Killing Programmatic?

By Rotem Shaul | March 28, 2019
As featured on AdExchanger

 

Programmatic advertising has grown by hundreds of percentage points, and as the industry has matured, market consolidation has commenced.

Many vendors are too small and cannot compete with the industry’s maturing tech and big players’ data. Others are in a M&A frenzy to get better technology, sales efficiency or data to position better themselves in the market.

From Jan 2016 to April 2018, advertisers reduced the number of demand-side platforms (DSPs) to 4.2 from 7.1, a 40% decline, according to eMarketer.

For some, the trend can seem natural, but there is a big downside for the whole programmatic industry and DSPs: M&As are self-annihilating the programmatic industry.

There are thousands of brands competing in online ad auctions, but somehow supply-side platforms (SSPs) get fewer and fewer competing bids as the years go by. This is not because there are fewer buyers that want the inventory – it’s mostly because the number of DSPs has decreased over time.

The real value of each impression is not being valued according to the real supply and demand out there. It is heavily affected by the number of DSPs that represent the demand.

The Auction

In order to demonstrate this, we need to better understand the Vickrey Auction, also known as second-price auction, where the highest bidder pays the second-highest bid.

Is Ad Tech Consolidation Killing Programmatic? How the market is supposed to work.

In a perfect world, the brands would compete against each other, and brand A would win the impression and pay $8. However, in a consolidated world, the scenario is increasingly becoming like this:

Is Ad Tech Consolidation Killing Programmatic? How the market actually works.

The impression sold for $3, because the SSP set a floor. If the publisher used a $9 floor, it would have tripled its income. Setting floors on a whim is not a recipe for an efficient market.

The waste is huge. SSPs and publishers build teams and technologies trying to predict the best floors to use, attempting to find the sweet spot to simultaneously optimizing fill rates and CPMs.

With hundreds of thousands of domains selling billions of impressions to tens of thousands of buyers, one would expect that the market would support itself by engineering an auction that helps determine the true value of each impression, without people manually setting floors and investing in prediction algorithms to find the right floors.

First-Price Auction?

In a first-price auction, buyers know that if everyone bids the highest bid on a desirable impression, it might work out well for that one impression, but in the long term all buyers will lose. Buyers will have to try to adjust their bids and behavior to the market and not always bid the most they can.

Download the complete guide to video monetization

So with first-price auctions, buyers will spend as much effort trying to determine how much they want to bid as sellers trying to identify the optimal price floors. We are not solving the problem – we’re just passing it on to someone else.

Solving the Problem

One easy engineering solution that would dramatically increase competition is to break down the bid activity of DSPs to trading desks so that each trading desk will get a different seat ID and bid separately, even while using the same technology provider. An SSP can send DSPs bid requests per each instance and get different bids:

Is Ad Tech Consolidation Killing Programmatic? How the market can work.

As shown above, if the DSPs created different seat IDs for each trading desk, the market would get a better view of the true demand and supply. There is no reason why all trading desks should compete under the same bid as they do now.

The setup should also be quite simple – no need to change bidding algorithms or integrations.

The fact that people are optimizing floors manually and companies are building tech to predict the best floors per geo, device, etc., should be a wakeup call for everyone. The open market is not doing its job; consolidation is here to stay and we need to change the bidding mechanism so the market will function properly. Shifting the problem from the seller to the buyer doesn’t solve anything.

We need to work together and find a better solution that will automatically determine a fair value for each impression in a way that represents the true demand and supply, as seen by trading desks, brands and publishers.

 

By Rotem Shaul | March 28, 2019

The Five Rules for Engaging Your Users With Video

By Simcha Weil | March 28, 2019

In the chaotic world we are living in, and with an overload of stimuli and information, catching users’ attention is getting harder and harder. On the other hand, users are craving good entertainment, and there is no level of engagement quite like video engagement. This is not just a feeling, the stats are very clear; the growth in digital video viewership is unstoppable with a global average of 67 minutes of daily digital video consumption per user, and an expected growth rate of 25% by 2020!

Download the complete guide to video monetization

So users are looking for it, and usually finding it on social behemoths like YouTube and Facebook, but some great digital publishers are doing a great job as well. We’ve gathered here a few tips from the pros on what you can do to get your users attention in this highly competitive area.

Video Engagement From Start to Finish

Keeping them interested with a good story is important (and you can read all about it here), but first make sure they‘ll give it a bit of attention. This means –

    1. A Catchy Title

      The importance of the title cannot be exaggerated, you know you click on clickbait every day, so do your users. Stimulate curiosity and leave questions unanswered, that way users will just have to click to bridge the knowledge gap.

    2. An Eye Catching Thumbnail

      You’ve probably heard a million times “don’t judge a book by its cover”, which may be solid advice, but arguably the most neglected. Pictures with eye-pleasing visuals, hinting on what the user will see inside will do the trick.

    3. Relevance Relevance Relevance

      We all know about banner blindness and one of the main reasons for it is that humans block out information that is not relevant to them. Either make it contextually relevant to the article, or match it specifically to the users’ interest, and you can raise engagement by up to 300%.

    4. All in the Start

      We’ve heard a million times about the importance of first impression in inter-relations instances such as dating and interviews, and the same goes for videos. The stats tell us that users decide within the first 8 seconds if they’re going to give the video a chance. Put the main point right in the start, and cut right to the chase.

    5. A Perfect Fit

      Of course, if it’s a huge video player high-jacking the users’ whole browser, then he’s bound to get engaged; yet probably in a bad way. On the other hand, a tiny player on the bottom and to the side will miss him entirely. So instead of disrupting through an intrusive unit, use a perfectly fitting video unit; that way it can be fairly big to capture users attention, and at the same time offering an uninterrupted user journey. This lets the content do the magic of capturing their attention, instead of video units that are out of place and out of flow.

Now That You’re a Video Engagement Master…

Now you’ve mastered video engagement with a good title and a catchy cover photo, used technology to match the users’ interest perfectly, put your content in the perfect placement, and you want to know what’s next. How to tell a good story and keep him engaged? How to make sure he watches another one, and stays on page? Subscribe below to get our next articles.

By Simcha Weil | March 28, 2019
Linkedin