Why Shares Are Better Than Views When Judging An Ad’s Success

Measuring the effectiveness of adverts has been a problem for just about as long as advertising has existed.

Yes, you run an ad and your products fly off the shelves, and that is one measurement, but not all ads are designed to make us run into the nearest supermarket in a state of consumerist frenzy.

To combat this, the broadcast media companies developed ratings, while print ads use coded phone numbers so the advertiser can tell what ad prompted a call and so on and so forth.

But these methods are imprecise, and the cause of a lot of soul-searching (not to mention investment of budget in new research methods) in the industry. 

Online advertising has always been held up as a more accountable medium, but arguably if you’re basing your analysis solely on how many views an ad has received, although you may come up with some impressively high numbers, you still face the problem of having no idea how engaged your viewers were.

Are they actually watching? Or are they doing the online equivalent of making a cup of tea, even though they have voluntarily clicked play on a video? 

Shares, on the other hand, are the digital version of someone pausing an ad and calling out: “Oi, love, it’s the so-and-so ad I was telling you about, come and have a look.”

Unruly’s charts of the top viral videos of all time show that in terms of views, viral ads get watched less than, for example, music videos.

In fact, the top five most shared ads have received a total of around 135 million views to date compared with over a billion views for the top five most-shared videos overall.

No surprise there. but what is really interesting is that the share rate for ads is significantly higher than for the overall videos.

So every 48 times an ad is viewed, someone is moved to share it on Facebook, Twitter, a blog and so forth, compared with once every 58 views for the overall top five.

But why are shares so important? Well, shares show engagement. Shares show likeability.

In fact, shares might do a better job of getting your ad in front of a target audience than 50 media planners and a gigabyte of data ever could.

In other words, shares show how your ad is working, rather than how many eyeballs it has been in front of, something that other media have been trying to achieve for a long time, and a measurement that should be part of any analysis of advertising effectiveness.

Comments

[Classifieds]

very informative and simple post, it really added up my knowledge. Thanks!