Has video taken over mobile advertising? Analyzing the benefits and ROI

Video advertising is without a doubt a powerful format for mobile app
promotion. The captivating format makes it possible for apps to tell their
story or share ideas in a quick and engaging manner, and there are lots
of compelling statistics already supporting the fact that video is the future
of mobile marketing ad creative strategies. Like the one that says video
has a 96% increase in click-through rate on social, or the fact that video
is the consumer-reported favorite type of content.
But in the performance marketing space, marketers need to generate
real results while dealing with often tight margins, and many app
marketers are left wondering if the added cost and effort of creating
video ads is worth the investment.
Do the benefits of video ads outweigh the cost? In the following
discussion, the app marketing experts at Asana Rebel, Runtastic, Scoot,
Yousician, and Free2Move shared some details of their current video
advertising strategies, exploring how much they are currently investing in
the format and sharing tactics for getting the most out of their video ad
spend.
Check out their insight below to get an in-depth look into the state of
mobile video ads and get a real understanding of the mobile marketing
trend.
 

Have video ad creatives taken over? Analysis of the
benefits and ROI
 
Asana Rebel
“For us, increasing our video ads has been 100% worth it. Our ads are
now ranging around 80-90% video. Ss a fitness app, our product is very
visual, so we built a great team of video editors and producers in-house
to make video content our focus. We found that it generates the most
engagement and brings better results for almost all channels.
Additionally, we found that creative variety is important, but the rate of
change required to get the maximum results varies depending on
factors. In paid social for example, we test new creatives and concepts
every week. In other channels, like UAC, I found that is better to avoid
big changes too often, otherwise it can negatively affect campaign
performance. 
We always change creatives if they start to lose performance or traffic
(as the later is a prime indicator of fatigue). Sometimes after a time
period, we are able to reuse old top-performing assets and test them
again – pure recycling that allows us to get extra use out of each
creative.” -Thais Brizolara,  User Acquisition Manager at Asana
Rebel.
 
, Runtastic
“At this point, most of our ads are videos, and in the fitness vertical it’s
quickly becoming the standard. But we don’t always choose video over
static images without considering the channel. For example, on Twitter,
we often use more static images because their performance is on par
with video, but the effort and resources spent on producing images are
much less.

On Facebook, however, 92% of our creatives are video, with the rest
being single static images, slideshows and carousel ads. This split
reflects each ad format’s performance on Facebook, and video is clearly
winning out. At the moment, we are also testing whether adding a
playable ad to our assets’ portfolio will help us improve the performance
of our Facebook campaigns.
Our video ad sets or campaigns usually consist of a set of videos that
perform well, are quite generic (in terms of copy and visuals) and are not
tied to a specific “campaign” or season. In addition to these top
performers, from time to time we add in new videos (usually more niche
concepts, designed for a more specific target audience) that we’re
testing. Such a setup helps us reduce ad fatigue.
The frequency of us producing new video concepts depends on the
availability of resources that we have in-house. Overall, we don’t come
up with new video concepts very often and try to get the most of the
existing assets by tweaking and testing them in order to reach top
performance, rather than creating new concepts every 2 weeks. Usually
(during high season with high spending) we come up with a new concept
every 3-5 weeks.
We try to quickly test new creatives in a couple of markets (soft launch-
style), and then localize it for multiple markets if the performance is
good, or make tweaks (to the copy or visuals that appear in the first
seconds) if the performance is lower than expected.” –Ekaterina
Shpadareva, User Acquisition and ASO Manager at Runtastic.
 
Scoot
“At the moment we work with static images more than video, although
every time we have launched a video ad we have seen good results.
Especially for Social, where Instagram Stories are becoming the top-
performing format and you need to have dynamic and creative content in
order to make the most out of it. 

The issue is that we need to change our ads quite often (changing ads
every 1 to 2 weeks) so investing as much time, energy and effort as
video creative require is not possible for us at this time, at the pace we
move. Regardless of format, our best performing ads are those that
show a use case of our service.
For us, showing how people use our product to make their lives better
works because potential users identify with the  pain point and get the
idea to use our solution to solve it.” –Anna Juan Sala, Marketing
Manager at Scoot Networks.
 
Free2Move
“We have been using and testing video a lot for our campaigns,
especially for the social native channels, but we choose video formats
based on the platform and the placement we are aiming for. On
Instagram stories and Snapchat for example, we almost exclusively use
video. But for the Facebook and Instagram feeds – where we have more
format options – we always upload a video as well as creatives in other
formats, to see which one performs best (though it is usually the video).
In particular at Free2Move we’ve seen great success with the Slideshow
Ad format from Facebook, that allows you to create videos starting from
multiple photos, and showcase them at the speed and with the music
you prefer. This kind of format works particularly well for us because with
it we can show all the different sharing services that are available in our
app – one per slide – and then add a phone with the call to action at the
end to make it clear what the product is about.” – Lorenzo Rossi, Head
of Marketing at Free2Move.