Updating Video Ad Metrics to Better Match the Ways People Watch

Facebook Business

July 31, 2018

The way people watch and interact with video is changing rapidly. People can shop from videos, watch together with their friends or chat with a business directly from a video, all on mobile. That’s why we offer different video advertising solutions designed to fit the ways people are consuming video content across our platforms.

How people consume video advertising

But we know that understanding the impact of video ads can be challenging. That’s why today, we’re updating some of our video ad metrics to evolve our reporting of duration—the total amount of time a video was viewed—to focus more on consumption, the number of unrepeated seconds people watch. We’re also introducing new reporting for video plays and removing some metrics to simplify reporting.

Measuring unrepeated seconds

When people watch video ads on Facebook, they’re able to rewind the video just as they can with video posts from friends and family in News Feed. This is a different experience from most pre or mid-roll ads on other platforms, where people are not able to pause or rewatch parts of a video ad. We offer metrics such as 3-Second Video Views and 10-Second Video Views, and these metrics previously included the seconds people might rewind or rewatch a video when they see it in News Feed.

Businesses have told us they'd prefer that these two metrics only count unrepeated seconds watched to more accurately measure consumption, so we’ll be updating how we calculate these two metrics across all video reporting in Ads Manager and Page Insights to no longer incorporate watch seconds from rewinding.

Introducing Video Plays

Marketers have also told us that they want a better way to measure when someone sees a video playing, which happens on average 70% of the time for videos in News Feed, versus when someone sees a video ad that has not played. Last year, we shared how videos may not always play when an impression is reported due to someone’s settings, network or behavior. For example, if a person has autoplay turned off, their phone has low battery or they're in an area of low connectivity, videos—including video ads—would not autoplay. That’s why we give marketers a way to design a custom thumbnail to maximize the impact of their video ads by controlling what people see when their ad does not play.

Example of a custom ad thumbnail for low connectivity

Example of a video ad that is served, but does not autoplay due to low connectivity. Here, a custom thumbnail is delivered within the frame.

And while our research shows that every part of a video view—from initial impression to a complete view and everything in between—drives value, we want to help advertisers better understand the difference between impressions and plays. So today, we’re also announcing a new Video Plays metric in Ads Manager and the Ads API. We know marketers want choice and third party verification in measuring their Facebook ads, so businesses will soon be able to work with Oracle Data Cloud's Moat Measurement products to measure the number of video ads that start to play. We'll continue working with other partners to enable more third-party verification.

Removing redundant and infrequently-used video metrics

In an effort to simplify ad metrics and make it easier to understand how your ad performed, we’re removing 30-Second Video View and Video Percentage Watched because they are redundant with other metrics we offer and are used infrequently. You can learn more about which metrics to use in their places here.

These metric updates will be rolling out globally to all advertisers over the next couple weeks. You can find more details on these changes in this one-sheeter or in the Advertiser Help Center.

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