Video Advertising on Social Media: Facebook and YouTube

“Within five years, Facebook will be mostly video.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, Inc.

The world's largest social media company puts video-first, and so should you - as there is clear evidence in data that video drives user engagement - and more so than all other media. At the same time video is hard to get 'right', and Google Search text ads and even banners are easier to tackle - for you but also for your competitors. Complexity tends to be where the opportunity is at. This book is for those who want to seize the video opportunity to drive business results.

Powered by sound, sight and measurement - and amplified by networking - video ads on social media are your most powerful tool to drive measurable business results in a way beyond vague ‘branding’. No longer limited to the happy few with huge budgets like in the TV era, online video is an opportunity open to all.

In the book Video Advertising, author Mark A. Jansen shares learnings from running hundreds of YouTube and Facebook video campaigns. Experience gained from being at the media sales side at YouTube (Google) as well as advertiser client-side. Google and Facebook now earn over 80% of global online advertising budgets, so there is a very large chance you will end up running social video on either Facebook or YouTube - or both.

Time and time again, performance marketers say they are having a hard time measuring the ROI of online video (eConsultancy, Marketing Budgets 2015). A whopping 39% use the word ‘poor’ to describe their ability to measure of ROI for online video. Compare that to the status of paid search as the top digital channel for ability to measure success: over half of respondents (52%) rated their ability to measure ROI from PPC as ‘good’, while another 35% rated it as ‘okay’. Clearly, social video advertising suffers from a measurement challenge, and this book gives you clear pointers on how to solve this challenge.

By the time you reach the conclusion of this book, you will be running highly effective social video campaigns, be able to define an appropriate online video campaign measurement plan that follows from the overarching marketing goal, and then demonstrate that your investment in video campaigns is achieving a positive ROI. Use this to convince budget decision makers and prove that your online video campaigns are adding to top-line growth.

This book seeks to:
- Guide the reader through the social video advertising landscape, help you set your objectives and pick the right video platform for your objectives
- Establish that although social video is often seen as the ‘cousin of TV’, the real value of social video advertising is unlocked through combining targeting and analytics capabilities of the online channel, with the creative power of sound, sight and motion known from TV
- Provide insight into the different social video ad formats available to the advertiser
- Introducing the ‘CAM’ measurement framework, including relevant social video ad KPI’s for conversion tracking advertisers
- Provide guidelines for the production of effective social video ad content
- Provide insight into the viral mechanisms you can use to drive organic free distribution

The reader is assumed to have a background in performance marketing and to be a heavy user of conversion tracking to measure outcomes and optimize ad results. This book is most relevant for those whose website or app is a fundamental, ‘core’ part of the business. The measurement framework in this book assumes you are an online pure play company. This brings the associated benefits of having easy access to timely data on user behavior in your digital product and how your ads drives this behavior.