It’s no secret that Facebook’s video ads have changed the social media marketing landscape. But a recent update makes it easier than ever to build even more promising audiences and reach out to your most engaged users.
Facebook now allows advertisers to create audiences based on the duration of time an individual spent watching your video. This long-awaited targeting option will allow business owners to refine their audiences and generate even stronger leads with retargeting.
This is a game-changer
This new feature allows you to target individuals based on the actual level of interest they have expressed (amount of time watching your video). Before this update, you might have been left with a pool of individuals who at one point expressed some interest in your product (this figure was merely a group of individuals that viewed any portion of your video, whether they viewed it purposely or not). Take the following scenario, for instance:
Imagine you have one person who has viewed your video twice and another who has viewed it once. In the past, we would typically assume based on number of views that person A is a stronger lead. However, now that we can view how long each individual watched the video, we can develop a higher-quality audience.
With the new feature, we can target person A who viewed the video twice: once for three seconds and once for 10 seconds. We can also target to person B, who watched at least 95% of the video. Who’s the better lead?
Before we were able to view duration, we probably would have concluded that Person A was the person to target since they viewed the video twice. But because we can now see that Person B practically watched the ad in its entirety while Person A only watched for a few seconds, it is clear that Person B is the stronger lead.
We know that depending on the content of the video, the importance of duration watched will vary. If your call to action appears within the first seven seconds of a 20 second video ad, you’re not necessarily going to want to target people that watched it in its entirety. At that point, the conversion rate will be a more significant factor in developing your audience.
Advertisers also have the ability to utilize the audience collected from video ads, allowing them to further distill the pool of potential leads and zero in on a group of ideal prospects for future campaigns. These leads can also then be utilized to generate subscribers for different advertising endeavors such as newsletters and email ad campaigns.
These innovations demonstrate the role that content plays in generating sales and enables advertisers to increase conversion rates using hard data provided by Facebook. The potential to boost overall sales using these features is high and business owners should be eager to forge these new waters.
As the great Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert (leads) into (sales).
Are you taking advantage of all of the advanced targeting options Facebook offers? Our social media team can help!
