• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, December 12, 2013

There’s no lack of stats about online video ad watching or online video ad revenues; just about every thing that can be counted is counted, and remarkably, depending on who’s doing the counting, the numbers are different.

I know this is not news, but I mention it because every time I am tempted to be impressed with some number, I find out it needs a lot asterisks, and rear-view mirror adjustments.

Part of the reason it happens, of course, is because terms get defined a little differently from digital firm to digital firm.  Now, for example, Austin-based  Invodo has just released its E-Commerce Video Benchmarks Report for Q2 and Q3. It says, for starters, that online shoppers who view video are 1.81% more likely to buy than people who don’t.  

Then, Invodo touts the engagement rate of e-commerce online video ads, claiming that “more than two in three video viewers watch to 80% completion,” which on the face of it is fantastic, except that’s only counting the people who choose to watch the video in the first place. And the view rate, we find out, is 12.1%  of e-commerce shoppers, according to Invodo’s study.

Still that's pretty great. Only a small number willingly jump at the chance to experience an ad in any medium, of course. (And even the willing 80% don’t watch all the way through, Invodo explains, because usually that has stuff like the sponsor’s logo and tagline. But presumably by then, the ad has done its selling.)

My takeaway is that advertisers better announce themselves upfront and make their product special from the get-go because no one is watching at the end. Again, that’s not totally new info either. But if you’re at an e-commerce site, you’re in the store and you’re shopping. Videos aimed at you, that describe or demonstrate a product should work. So the idea of solid engagement makes sense.   

But what the heck is engagement? Last year the IAB enlisted Radar Research  to look into that seemingly simple question. For people inclined to contemplate the inquiry, it’s a pretty cool report and at times you can sort of sense the frustration of Marissa Gluck, who wrote it, to come to grips with this semantic monster.

She wrote, at one point, “In the complicated argot of digital advertising, the concept of ‘engagement’ is perhaps the least understood while simultaneously one of the most overused. Publishers, advertisers and agencies all cite engagement as a crucial variable in the success of ad campaigns, yet there is no industry consensus on exactly how to define engagement. Definitions tend to be ambiguous, and too often engagement is used as a catchall for multiple behaviors.”

Her general caveat emptor is for advertiser, marketer and agency to define what kind of engagement they’re all talking about before anybody gets their nose, or budget, out of whack.  

 But in this Invodo report, seeing how consumers work, as interpreted in the short abstract  Invodo provided, is pretty interesting because it shows how time, trust and comprehension seem to work all together toward a sale.

 Invodo says retailers are expanding their video vistas, creating email campaigns and social media off-shoots, which just seems logical. A lot of the video experience is stunningly logical, good and bad.

Like, it’s not surprising that for consumer electronics and apparel, the engagement rate is higher than videos for other types of products. That’s logical, too.

And consumers give a 4.13 “grade” (on a scale of 5) to e-commerce videos, which seems to indicate a level of satisfaction that the videos they see are reasonably helpful and truthful (and they basically gave the same grade last year).  It’s the kind of data, at a time of the year that I’m shopping a lot online, that I’ll keep a mental note to observe. Maybe, so should you.

pj@mediapost.com