The Mobile Marketing Association published its first Mobile Video Benchmark Study this week, aggregating 559 million ad impressions served in March 2013 by a number of different publishers such as BrightRoll, Hulu and Brightcove.
The report shows some interesting performance metrics for skippable versus non-skippable video ads, which accounted for 32 percent and 68 percent of the impression volume, respectively.
Not surprising, completions rates for skippable video ads were significantly lower than non-skippable ads, which, by their nature, have completion rates in the 90th percentile. Completion rates for skippable linear video ads were just 8 percent. Skippable interstitial video ads fared better with completion rates of 23 percent.
Strong Engagement Rates For Skippable Ads
What is surprising, however, is that click-through rates (CTR) for skippable ads did not exhibit the same dramatic differences from non-skippable ads. CTRs for skippable ads were lower, but not substantially so. Skippable linear video ads had CTR of 1.50%, while interstitial skippable ads had engagement rates of 1.41 percent.
Source: Mobile Marketing Association 2013
Value exchange video ads offer incentives for users to watch the ads in full, so it’s not particularly shocking to see they also have the highest engagement rates.
Click-through rates were lower for both skippable and non-skippable ads that were longer than 30 seconds. The highest CTRs (2.5 percent for non-skippable, 1.9 percent for skippable) were seen on ads that ranged in duration from 16 to 30 seconds.
The MMA looked at completion rates by quartile. The report shows that more than half of users who skipped an ad watched the first 25 percent of the video. Yet, whether that’s because users weren’t able to skip an ad until that point isn’t included in the data. Roughly 30 percent continued to watch through the halfway mark before skipping. Completion rates were highest on iOS Tablets.
Completion Rates For Skippable Video Ads
As is often the case with other forms of digital advertising, CTRs dropped off significantly with excessive frequency.
More than three-quarters of the ad impressions included in the data ran in-app, with nearly half (46 percent) running on phones. Just 7 percent of impressions ran on the mobile web on phones and a mere 2 percent ran on the mobile web on tablets. Apple iOS devices accounted for 82 percent of the impression volume.
The report is available for download here.
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