Study: Online video has high interaction rate

If marketers aren't already experimenting with online video ads, they should be. That is according to DoubleClick. According to their new study, Internet users are more likely to click the "Play" button on a video ad than they are to click-through on a display ad.

by Kristina Knight

According to the study, roughly 8% of users are playing online video ads, hovering their mouse over the ads or in some other way interacting with the video. Researchers also found that video ads are more likely (0.32%) to be played than display ads are to be clicked upon.

Another good sign for online video ads, according to DoubleClick, is that most ads play 2/3 of the way through. For embedded ads as opposed to streaming content, most ads run between 15 and 30 seconds, and most users watch the ads for an average of 19 seconds (for 30 seconds ads) and 10 seconds (for 15 second ads).

"What's particularly exciting about these types of campaign performance benchmarks is that they provide marketers with an important leap forward in measuring audience engagement... interaction rate, play rate, video completion rate and so on, give advertisers much greater insight into how consumers are actually engaging with the ads and their brands," said Marianne Caponnetto, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for DoubleClick.

The click-through rate is also better for video. Online video ad click-throughs range from 0.4% to 0.74%. By comparison, the average click through rate of standard JPG or GIF ads is 0.1% to 0.2%.