• by Tameka Kee , March 20, 2008

A majority of media professionals who have made an online video buy in the past year have used a combination of three metrics to measure the effectiveness of the campaign--the number of unique viewers, an interaction measure (like length of time viewed), and a click assessment (as in cost-per-click or whether users clicked). That's according to data from a new study from Exponential Interactive, dubbed "The Trials and Tribulations of Online Video."

"People are starting to use consistent metrics for measuring their online video campaigns, and they seem to be satisfied with them," said Alistair Goodman, vice president of strategic marketing at Exponential Interactive, parent company of the Tribal Fusion ad network. "This shows that there is a growing understanding of what the key metrics are for measuring the effectiveness of these kinds of ads."

Exponential partnered with Chicago-based iModerate to conduct a combined quantitative and qualitative data study of 100 media professionals in mid-December 2007. Respondents had to be from an interactive agency (or one with a designated online division), and be a decision maker when it came to purchasing media for online ad campaigns. In addition, half of the respondents had to have purchased (or influenced the purchase) of online video ads within the past year.

"We used a very targeted online survey, and in the middle of it, we asked if they'd be willing to talk to someone about their answers," Goodman said. "If they were, we called them so we could get some verbatim comments. So there are qualitative insights in there in addition to the survey data."

And the hard data and verbatim quotes showed that there is still much uncertainty around the mostly underutilized ad model, particularly when it comes to how to best optimize it. Nearly half of all respondents that had purchased video said that they didn't know whether they'd used optimization--in terms of placement, for search, or even by manual tagging--at all. (The) strategy to target them has not been developed," said one respondent. Meanwhile, another buyer said, "I think we would like to get a better handle on how the online video ads stack up against other offline and online ads in terms of top and bottom line metrics."

But just because there is a growing consensus on the metrics being used to gauge campaign performance, doesn't mean that everyone is satisfied with the ones that are available. For example, the number of respondents who'd purchased video and used click-based metrics as a success barometer dwarfed the number who'd used view-through--but only 34% of them found those click-based metrics "very effective" in contrast to the almost 60% who found view-through "very effective." "(We're) still trying to determine ROI potential," said one respondent. "(We've been) unable to reasonably measure effectiveness," said another.

"One of the most notable findings for us was that if someone had bought video, it completely changed their perception of the ad format," Goodman said. "Folks who were thinking about buying were focused on how it would resonate with consumers and those that had already bought were concerned with a lot of the operational issues, things like metrics and the complexity of placing a buy at scale. So we as an industry still have a lot of work to do to be able to satisfy their needs."