No more silos: Why marketers must holistically measure performance across video platforms

Agency marketers have a measurement problem. For too long, the advertising industry has been managing and measuring video campaigns in silos. One agency team may manage Facebook video buys, while another team — that might sit on the opposite end of the building — handles the YouTube campaigns. Strategies might be shared in an initial kick-off call, but after that, in-flight performance results are rarely traded between teams. At best, Excel sheets are cobbled together in a wrap-up report in an attempt to tell a holistic, integrated campaign story.
But this presents a significant problem. By evaluating each platform’s performance individually rather than measuring across platforms, marketers can’t properly evaluate the impact of their media spend. And when marketers are in the dark about how their disparate video campaigns relate, they can’t optimize their performance — or reallocate their budgets — accordingly to achieve peak performance.
Instead, they could well be unknowingly wasting ad spend on targeting parameters — and even video platforms — that aren’t achieving their campaign goals. As an industry, we need to do better. Of course, reorganizing an agency’s entire organizational structure can’t happen overnight, but there’s a significant case to be made for why it needs to happen, and why digital video buying should be centralized within a single team.
A holistic view of video advertising allows marketers to properly leverage the strengths of each platform. For example, marketers can take advantage of longer viewing sessions on YouTube through long-form content, and increase engagement through video optimized for mobile and muted playback on Facebook. After all, audiences aren’t watching video solely on one platform — and marketers’ strategies should reflect that.
In a recent campaign for a sunscreen brand, we were able to use cross-platform optimizations to better achieve the brand’s goal of raising awareness and driving in-store sales. In-flight, we shifted YouTube budgets toward desktop viewers, and Facebook budgets toward mobile viewers, when these audiences proved they were most likely to view the entire video ad, thus signaling product interest. As a result, we were able to deliver a staggering 600% return on ad spend for the sunscreen brand, which we measured by in-store sales in locations targeted by the campaign compared to sales at untouched locations.
Change is never easy, but marketers can better drive performance and reach their business goals by managing and measuring video campaigns holistically. If quality is what you’re after, it’s the only way forward.
For more insights on how Pixability drove in-store sales for a sunscreen brand, download our recent case study.