Video Viewability Rises, but So Does Brand Risk

Digital video ad viewability is on the up. According to Q4 2014 research by Integral Ad Science, the percentage of US online video ads that were in-view that quarter reached 39.0%, a 9-percentage-point quarter-over-quarter increase. These figures exclude mobile.

While video ads still trailed other options, this was the biggest increase in points. Display ads purchased from networks and exchanges also saw quarter-over-quarter growth in viewability, from 36.7% to 42.6%, which the study suggested signaled “heightened user attention and/or increased adoption of viewability optimization technology.” Meanwhile, the viewability rate for display ads bought directly from publishers fell slightly to 52.7%, from 53.4% in Q3. As viewability rates experienced a strong increase in Q4 2014, US video ad completion rates while in-view did, too, rising 6 percentage points from Q3 2014 to 26.0%. 

Among lower completion levels, the differences weren’t huge: 30.7% in the first quartile, 28.8% at the midpoint and 27.5% for the third quartile. Unfortunately, an influx in user attention and ad demand comes with some issues, as well. Brand risk for video ads was up slightly between Q3 and Q4 2014, from 18.7% to 20.7%. Integral Ad Science reported an ad fraud rate of 10.6% for video. Along with brand safety, ad fraud and viewability have taken center stage among buyers this year, and they’re leading worries for video buyers. When an August 2014 study by Adap.tv asked US video buyers about their biggest concerns with video quality inventory, 62% of buyers cited ad viewability. 

A close 60% pointed to ad fraud such as bots and ad stacking. eMarketer estimates that US digital video ad spending, which includes advertising that appears on desktop and laptop computers as well as mobile phones and tablets, will rise by 30.4% this year, following impressive growth of 56.0% in 2014. With total expenditure of $7.77 billion in 2015, the format will capture the second-largest share of display ad spending, at 13.3%. The rise of mobile video will help push video ad expenditures to more than double between 2014 and 2018, from $5.96 billion to $12.82 billion.

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importance of Customer service

According to a survey poor customer service is eroding consumer loyalty and confidence in retail brands. 

• 30% of UK consumers have become less loyal to retail brands in the past five years.
• One-quarter of those customers identified poor service as the main reason for this decreased loyalty.
• Almost half of respondents (48%) said they had to repeat information during their last communication with a retailer.
• All age groups identified repetition as a problem; however, it occurs most frequently for customers under the age of 35—with one in 20 repeating themselves at least five times.
• Only 30% of these younger customers had their issue resolved after one interaction.
• By contrast, 64% of customers over the age of 65 did not have to repeat their complaint at all, feeling satisfied after first contact.
• Of those who feel less loyal to retail brands, 37% of 18 to 24 year olds cite service as the key factor versus just 20% of those aged 65 and older.

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6 Tips to Boost Your Twitter Conversations

1. Make Your Twitter Profile Inviting

When people are looking for your brand on Twitter, the first thing they’ll do is search for you, and check out your profile. If you want more followers, this is their first stop, so make it pop!

SpareFoot is an example of a Twitter profile done right. They’ve humanized their brand by showing employees having fun in their creative office space.

 

Are your Twitter pictures and bio compelling enough to follow?

If you’re not sure, give it a quick test. Is your bio concise and clear about your brand’s purpose? Does it include keywords that flow naturally in the description? Do your background and profile picture convey the message you want associated with your brand?

You can include elements that encourage an emotional connection with any audience. What those elements are will depend on your niche.

Pro Tip: Clear out all of the clutter! Avoid using too many hashtags and don’t overdo it with links and text.

2. Add Enticing Visual Content

Ninety percent of information transferred through the brain is visual. If you want your messages to get attention, include photos and videos with your tweets as often as possible.

When Twitter added in-stream previews of images, it increased overall engagement. The more you invest in visual content, the more retweets, favorites and click-throughs you’ll see.

A study by Buffer found that tweets with images get 150% more interaction.

In the example below, Sephora used calculated composition to include as much information as possible. A single picture shares a discount and product examples, as well as promotes a weekly feature.

Pro Tip: Remember that images use up about 26 of your 140 characters. Make adjustments to your tweets as necessary.

3. Keep Tweets Short and Simple

Clear messages demand simplicity.

Some businesses try to squeeze as much text as possible into their tweets. The result? Their message isn’t properly conveyed. If you waste words, you’ll probably waste followers too.

Twitter’s best practices guide cites a report by Buddy Media that found that the ideal tweet is 100 characters or fewer.

 

Pro Tip: Use medium-length tweets to get a 17% higher engagement rate.

4. Insert Retweetable Words

Twitter only gives you 140 characters to capture your audience’s attention and convince them to jump into your conversation. Since your audience is already overloaded with social updates, the right words can make or break that connection.

To find those power words, Dan Zarella from HubSpot analyzed the top 10,000 most retweeted tweets. He found 20 words that have the most potential for capturing your audience’s attention and turning your tweets into actions.

Pro Tip: Want to get the most out of your tweets? Add please, free, check out, how to or 10 to your tweets—those are a few of the top words Dan found to be most effective.

5. Ask Your Audience Questions

If you want to get people talking, ask them about themselves. Twitter users love to share their opinions, so why not give them a chance to express their feelings?

To keep things focused, stick to questions related to your niche. If your company sells shoes, ask your followers about the last pair of shoes they bought.

In the example above, Steve Madden stretched that advice a little bit. They posted a question about Saturday night, but paired it with a fabulous outfit featuring their shoes. “Who’s ready for Saturday night?” gets the conversation going while highlighting the product.

No matter how big or small your audience is, thank everyone who made the effort to answer your question. Show that there are real people behind your Twitter account and address everyone personally.

Pro Tip: Keep your questions conversational. Don’t talk to your followers like a robot, but like a friend.

6. Share Curated Content

Excellent content will improve your engagement, but that doesn’t mean you have to dedicate all of your time creating it from scratch.

Collect and share interesting content from other sites with your audience. Talk about it from your point of view, apply a consistent voice and show that you’re an expert in your field.

Curated content can be just as valuable as original content. In the example below, Wells Fargo tweets out a mix of original content and valuable links from other sites. They identify with their audience’s needs and find content that addresses those needs.

Pro Tip: Share a mix of curated links and information along with original tweets to make you the go-to brand for your niche.

Some Parting Thoughts

Twitter can be a struggle for any business, big or small. Getting back to basics can help you increase your follower count and overall interactions.

One of your first steps is creating an attention-worthy profile with compelling imagery. Anyone who stumbles across it should be able to get a sense of your company’s culture and products or services.

You may feel like you need to update your stream all of the time to keep up visibility, but if you don’t have a strong message, don’t tweet. Your followers won’t pay attention if your tweets lack authenticity and power.

Instead, focus on sharing intriguing visual content and stories that spark Twitter conversations around your brand or niche.

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Increase Purchase Intent Through Social Media Responsiveness

Shoppers who read brand responses that offer to refund, upgrade, or exchange products are 92% more likely to purchase

Offering refunds, upgrades or exchanges reduces the perceived risk of making a purchase decision.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Invest time in social listening to identify opportunities to provide customer service, and have a plan in place to resolve issues as quickly and directly as possible (you’ll see the benefit of this in the next stat).

Shoppers who see brand responses that provide closure to an issue, versus requiring additional actions, are 27% more likely to purchase

If prospective consumers can be witness to customer service issues through to resolution, it will give them an increased level of confidence that the brand will stand behind and support their products and/or services into the future. It will also give consumers insight into your customer service process, assuring them that if they have any future need for service that they will be well taken care of.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Provide the fastest and most direct customer service solutions possible, even if it costs more at a per-interaction level (of course you will need to calculate real costs and make a proper judgment for your business). This can ultimately yield greater returns by way of increased customer acquisition and reduced human resources required for customer service issues. If you can resolve an issue directly online or on social media and bypass a more traditional customer service phone line, do it.

When brands respond to product misuse with guiding explanations, shoppers who see the review responses are 186% more likely to purchase

Responding to reviews that exhibit common cases of product misuse can reassure otherwise trepidatious prospective customers that the quality of your product is sound.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Don’t let reviewers who are misusing your product negatively sway the purchase intent of future consumers. Offer those reviewers top-tier customer service to resolve their issues, but also take time to explain how proper use of your product can avoid recurring problems for any prospective consumer that could later be perusing reviews.

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Are Digital Dead Ends Sabotaging Your Conversion Rates?

By conducting a site audit as if you were an outside user, you can identify the dead ends in your website, fix them, and improve your conversion rates.

Digital dead ends are conversion killers. They act as obstacles, making it more difficult for your customers to end up where they (and you) would like them to be - clicking the button. Whether you're measuring by number of downloads, email newsletter sign-ups, or units sold, eradicating the dead ends in your brand's digital universe is a major key in optimizing conversion rates.

Matt Walsh, founder and experience director for Green Stone, defines a dead end as "any touch point that doesn't intelligently encourage a consumer's journey down the funnel through personalization and/or immediate engagement opportunities."

Audit Your Marketing Universe

The Difference Between Truth and Facts Is Vocabulary

In order to satisfy insights consumers, shift your vocabulary and draw them into the conversation with you.

A year and a half ago, I wrote "It's Not an Exact Science" for ClickZ. For those of you who want the "too long; didn't read" version, it goes like this: Get comfortable with fuzzy numbers.

The Internet may be the most measured, but not the most measurable.

• Direct mail is much more measurable 
• Direct sales is much more measurable
• Telemarketing is much more measurable 
• Infomercials are much more measurable

We thought:

• Advertising clicks delineate impression impact
• Search keywords reveal actual intent
• On-site behavior exposes individual desires
• Social media sentiment delivers exact brand sentiment

We were wrong.

Advertising and marketing are not exact sciences. Humans are not rational. Analysts are not accountants; we are statisticians. We deal in probabilities and likelihoods. We create models and "All models are wrong, but some are useful." 

Knowledge, cognition, ingenuity, creativity, and inspiration will always be in demand.

This article came back to me as I was contemplating the next step: So what can an analyst do about it? How do you change your behavior in order to make other people more understanding that we do not deal in facts? We actually do not know how many people actually showed up on our website or Facebook page and never will.

Our job is to get others to understand that we deal in probabilities and not facts. We are not Sergeant Joe Friday from Dragnet. ("Just the facts, ma'am.")

To do that, we need to change how we present insights to insights consumers. We should not offer proof. We should not try to win them over to the obvious by displaying the awesomeness of our logic. Instead, bring them along gently.

Insights consumers are pressed for time. They want answers. When we start to explain the unreliability of the data and the importance of the sample size, we lose them. That's when they tell you to just give them the data and they'll figure it out.

But we know these decision-makers are so thirsty for knowledge they will disregard our educated approach.

"Conducting data analysis is like drinking a fine wine. It is important to swirl and sniff the wine, to unpack the complex bouquet and to appreciate the experience. Gulping the wine doesn't work." - Daniel B. Wright

So here's my advice: Shift your vocabulary and draw them into the conversation. This second step is critical because they know more about their domain than the analyst. The analyst may know more about the data, but this is where correlation and statistical anomalies meet experience, gut feel, and common sense. Analysts do sometimes come to a conclusion based on the data that is simply a coincidence using a model that was not as useful as hoped.

The domain expert can look at a perfectly logical revelation and counter it with:

• "Of course movies starting with the letter A are more popular - we list them alphabetically."
• "Of course online sales took a jump the week in that region - there was a five-day blizzard."
• "Of course we sold more low-end laptops that day - our competitor's website was down."

Once you have a clearer understanding of their expertise, shift your vocabulary. Mimic the argot of the weather prognosticator who talks about a chance of showers. Use the vernacular or the gambler running the odds. Follow the lead of doctors who talk about relative health risks.

Don't let the business side of the house even think that you are giving them the absolute correct answer to a formula. Frame your insights in the language of probability:

• The data suggests...
• It seems more likely...
• One could conclude ...
• Based on the data, it feels like...
• If I were placing bets after seeing this ...

Image Source: Math Is Fun

And then, draw them into the supposition process.

• Doesn't that seem logical?
• Does that meet or challenge your thoughts?
• Do you think it means this or that?

It shouldn't take long to get them to see you as an advisor and not a report writer. And remember, the longer they refuse to listen to your informed opinion based on the data, the more likely they probably are to face a higher risk of losing their jobs.

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Trust is the Most Valuable Currency Online, Is It Your Top Priority?

Trust has been a factor in the human economy forever, and today is no different. But, the way trust can be evaluated has changed dramatically over the past 100+ years, and the web has accelerated this change dramatically. It has created a world in which trust is at a premium, and smart businesses are focusing substantial effort on creating it for themselves.

The Corner Store

A hundred or more years ago, you didn't have a lot of choices for where you shopped. You more or less went to the corner store. The store may have been run by a congenial fellow named Sam, and he and his wife might be over your house once a month or so for dinner.

You knew each other. Developing trust was easy.

Sam may be a tougher businessperson than Joe, over in the next town, but he can't be too tough. Trust goes both ways and Sam knows it. Everybody works to get along with Sam (and vice versa), partly because the community just couldn't work otherwise.

Fast Forward – The Shopping Mall

As urbanization grew, more shopping options become available. In time, shopping malls make the scene.

Shoppers have many options, and the people they interface with at the stores aren't the owner. The salespeople have a lot less at stake than Sam.

However, there is still a store owner. They will still work to make sure that their customers get well treated and feel good about the experience. Why? Because there are competitive options. Nothing forces anyone to shop in their store, and if word starts to get around that their store doesn't provide good value, that would really hurt business.

To make matters worse, the rent to pay for the store location is really stiff. Losing a few customers can do more than reduce profits, it can easily put the store owner in a hole. They depend on their reputation in the market to remain in business and make some money along the way.

Fast Forward Again – The Early Days of the Web

Then came the Internet and the Web. People could throw up websites easily and cheaply. If they were smart about SEO, they could rank quickly for their websites for almost any search term, and sell people stuff. Many of these sites were churn and burn sites, and as the owner could replace it quickly if it failed, they had nothing at stake.

In addition, they were faceless, with no identity associated with the business. Searchers assumed that the sites that ranked high in the search engines were good sites, but sadly it was not always the case. Many people got badly burned.

Perhaps the pinnacle of all this was the scam emails looking for help with tens of millions of dollars:

Fast Forward One More Time – The Loop is Closing

This breakdown of trust was an anomaly, and it is in the process of fixing itself. There are many factors at work in this correction. Three of these are:

1. Search Engine Algorithm Improvements: The search engines are doing a better job at weeding out the bad sites. Not a perfect job just yet, but they are making progress.
2. Social Media: More and more people are using one or more social media sites. Bad news travels fast in social media, and anyone with a complaint can get an audience. Building a reputation on social media sites takes time, and a lot of work, but it is one of the best ways to build an aura of "trustability" around yourself and your business.
3. Online Reviews: There are an increasing number of ways to review businesses online. You can use sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, or you can find reviews for businesses in Google Places. Many users make use of these mechanisms to evaluate a business before buying from them.

Generating Trust

One of the best ways to do this is to be visible. Like Sam and his corner store, make yourself accessible to others. You can do this by sharing useful and compelling content on your site, being active and engaging in social media, responding to complaints online, and proactively helping others online.

We won't get into what signals the search engines are measuring on social media here. But, I can tell you that if many people across the web trust you, somewhere along the way they will generate the signals the search engines are looking for, be it links, or something else.

Building trust online may just be your top priority. Remember, be like Sam.

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Online Video as the Modern Day Yellow Pages Ad

Remember Yellow Page’s “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking” slogan? That simple tag and the campaign surrounding it creatively expressed the value of the Yellow Pages for the average consumer: one book that contained the names, addresses and phone numbers of virtually every local business offering whatever particular good or service you were looking for. In fact, the slogan was considered good enough to earn an onorable mention in Ad Age’s 1999 Top 10 Slogans of the Century awards.

Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

Looking at the Yellow Pages effect through a modern day lens, one could even say that the Yellow Pages was the original search engine, as it provided a centralized means of search and discovery for countless millions of consumers. Over time, the utility and ubiquity of the Yellow Pages guaranteed its role as an essential element of the US commercial paradigm, and by extension, a powerful brand legitimizer. After all, how could you trust a company couldn’t be bothered to list themselves in the Yellow Pages?

From my perspective, the most effective Yellow Page Ads were the half or full page ones which usually contained one or more pictures of a particular company’s place of business, featured product, or even its owner. Such ads conveyed brand legitimacy and instilled a measure of semi-conscious trust in the mind of the consumer. I suppose this makes sense, as we humans tend to trust the tangible; we place more credence in that which we can see for ourselves- a picture is worth 1,000 words, and all that.

It’s too bad the technology wasn’t there for those Yellow Page ads to somehow have included video. After all, if a static (still) picture is worth 1000 words, surely a dynamic (moving) video must be worth a helluva lot more than that. Imagine the legitimacy and trust a brand could’ve garnered by embedding an in-ad video - perhaps a product feature, a how-to, an intimate walk through of the company’s digs or even a personal message from employees and owner(s).

Search Engine as Yellow Pages

Let’s extend the search-engine-as-Yellow-Pages analogy to its logical conclusion. If the search engine is the modern-day Yellow Pages, a brand’s website is its “ad,” and the written copy, images and videos housed on the website collectively form its content.

This is good news, for unlike businesses advertising in the original (offline) Yellow Pages, today’s brands are now able to use all kinds of content media - including video - to more effectively convey their brand message. This simple fact is not lost on the modern day consumer.

Today’s computer-literate, smartphone-toting consumers are increasingly turning to online video for entertainment and information discovery, two broad actions which both ultimately influence purchase decision. A new survey from Animoto designed to explore how online video impacts consumer decisions and drives brand engagement for small businesses bears this notion out. The survey found the positive impact of online video on consumer brand perception:

• 96% of respondents agreed that videos were helpful when making online purchases
• 71% of respondents said that watching video content leaves them with a positive impression of the brand
• 64% of respondents find it useful to watch videos to learn more about the company from whom they are considering making a purchase
• 58% of consumers consider companies that produce video content to be more trustworthy.
• 93% of respondents find video helpful for post-purchase instruction

The Value of Online Video for Brands

Taking a cue from the Animoto survey, here’s my take on the value of online video for brands:

• Builds brand trust and legitimacy with consumers
• Creates three-dimensional, intimate brand awareness (YouTube 2^nd largest search engine on earth)
• Helps brands efficiently convey large amounts of information quickly
• Drives purchase action and stimulates post-purchase consumer engagement

Perhaps most importantly, online videos can be made relatively quickly and inexpensively. Today’s consumers are not particularly sensitive to production quality - they are looking for substance over form. As any parent with a smartphone will attest, you have to be especially lame to not record videos of your children when it is so darn easy to do so. The same is true for brands. There is something fundamentally de-legitimizing about a company that can’t be bothered to press a few buttons and show themselves off to the world.

So get off yourself and hit the record button. It may just save your brand.

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