Google ads
October 7, 2020Nikson
July 2020
Problem
Here’s a hard truth for publishers: If you aren’t taking advantage of video advertising, it’s going to be difficult to survive the next five or ten years. Why? Because everyone’s doing it. And audiences are loving it, meaning digital video ads are paying off big for publishers.
A few years ago, that might not have been the case, but times have changed. In 2020, an estimated 82 percent of all web traffic from consumers involved video.
With numbers like that, you’d think all publishers would jump on the video advertising train as fast as possible. That hasn’t exactly happened. Many publishers are still holding out in the familiar comfort of text, images and other mediums. What’s stopping them? Why is video advertising so hard for publishers?
Solution
First, let’s look a little harder at why publishers should be putting time into video advertising. Here are a few key benefits: Increased time on site. It’s true — people love to watch videos. They engage with them. Videos don’t ask as much of a viewer as text asks of a reader or a game asks of a player. More time on your site means more engagement with your content and, importantly, more impressions. A more dynamic brand personality. Who or what is your brand? Does the text on your site make it as clear as a video would? Probably not. One-dimensional text content can tell a story, but a video tells the same story — at a thousand words per minute it is great for brand awareness. Better SEO. Google and the other major search engines have been shifting to a heavier focus on video and visual content for years. There is no sign that text content is going to have a resurgence in the search engine rankings, either. Put simply, Google likes to see publishers posting videos, and it rewards them with better search rankings.
Video Feels Overwhelming for Publishers
For many publishers, video is the great unknown — the deep, scary pit that’s hungry for cash, time and manpower. These are the publishers who tend to stay in the race to the bottom that display banner ads have become.
Publishers Worry That Video Will Take Too Many Resources
Making videos is expensive, right? Sure. It can be. And that’s why many publishers are resisting video as hard as they can. Publishers have to be cautious with their money and other resources if they want to stay profitable.
