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Really, how many people will wait on a delayed video stream due to blocks on the pre-roll ad? Now it’s possible to find out and to make publishers aware of the technical difficulties that are diminishing the audiences for their ads in real-time. Video ads now make up a big chunk of advertising budgets. According to one ad spending forecast, video ad spending was poised to grow almost 30 percent to $27.82 billion in 2018, amounting to a quarter of digital ad spending in the US.
With that much money involved, people do want to know that the video ads are getting viewed by their target audience. But it’s been a challenge to ascertain that until now. At this year’s CES, Conviva, a real-time measurement and intelligence platform for streaming TV, unveiled Conviva Ad Insights. It’s the first analytics platform to give publishers real-time visibility into the video ads they’re delivering, allowing them to detect ads that are failing to play, playing at a poor rate, or are simply causing consumers to abandon videos, and address these issues in real time to ensure the best viewing experience possible for consumers.
Alp Pekkocak, Conviva’s VP of product marketing, explained that the solution was tested on streaming TV platforms, including CBS. The partnership not only helped them validate the solution but “helped uncover more use cases and refine the product.” He identified two primary use cases for their solution.
- Ascertaining that the ads are delivered to the intended audience and if not, discovering the cause of the failure.
- Gaining insight into the quality of the viewing experience, determined by whether it starts immediately or only after a delay of several seconds.
“Our solution provides real-time insight into delivery issues,” Pekkocak said. That extends into identifying the errors as well as their root causes. It also answers the question, “How many people leave content if exposed to an ad delay?” Even a delay of a few seconds can translate into a significant drop off in the audience. That’s one of the surprising findings they were able to report after their testing of the solutions. Huiyan Wong , senior product marketing manager for Conviva Ad Insights shared some of their most revealing insights:
- Pre-roll video ad delays up to 5 seconds caused 13.6 percent of viewers to abandon content
- 3.1 percent of all video ads failed to start
- Ad blockers interrupted up to 40 percent of ad requests in some implementations.
That could all add up to a lot of potentially lost ad revenue, which is why it is important for publishers to know what is happening and what they can do to prevent the drop off of viewers. They also capture various “time-based metrics,” Wong said, which “addresses a lot of core problems” that can crop up in the complex ecosystem surrounding video ad delivery. “Continuous measurement is key to capturing anything that can go wrong,” she said.
Getting that data insight in real-time allows publishers “to deliver a better viewing experience,” and prevent the audience from leaving the content by fixing the technical difficulties that cause the problems and delays, recovering the loss of viewers that can represent their revenue stream.
