• by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, May 23, 2013

The age-old question about advertising is which half is working, but the more important one may be “Did this media buy drive sales?” Because the bottom line of any marketing effort is whether it resulted in an improvement to, well, the bottom line.

When it comes to online video, marketers naturally want to know if video ads drive sales. Video ad platform Videology studied more than 186 million online and mobile video impressions on campaigns for several consumer packaged goods advertisers (since CPG comprises 22% of total videos ad impressions) to determine whether video drove sales.

The tech shop did that by marrying its data with shopper data from Kantar Shopcom on sales figures such as penetration lift, unit velocity lift and sales velocity lift. Overall, online video campaigns drove a bump in sales velocity from 4% to 35%, depending on the campaign, Videology said. However, many campaigns are tied to promotional pricing, so video ads alone aren’t solely accountable for the rise. “Because of these pricing variations, lift in household penetration is an important, and in some ways, truer factor in gaging campaign performance,” Videology said. The company found that the number of homes buying a product after being exposed to the brand’s video ads ranged from 9% to 28%.

Meanwhile, video also brought a bump in unit velocity from 8.5% to as high as 30%. (As the number of homes buying the brand increases, then naturally more units are sold, equating to the unit velocity figure.

In addition, campaigns using audience targeting based on purchase data performed 20% better than demo targeting, but demo targeting still helped drive sales lift compared to campaigns that didn’t use it. Completed views of videos correlate to sales increases, but click-through rate had no correlation to sales.

For a specific example, Videology studied sales metrics for a skincare product introduced earlier this year and found that consumers who saw the video ad purchased 30% more units than those who didn’t. The brand had used audience targeting via purchase data and retargeting to those who had seen TV ads.

A packaged food brand wanted to grow its market share in weaker markets, so it used geo-targeted online video combined with purchase data to reach those markets. The result was a 14% lift in household penetration for those who saw the online video ad in the targeted areas, Videology said.