Conviva Leadership
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How are the most successful streaming companies in the world ensuring optimal ad delivery and performance? As some of the biggest players in the industry introduce ad-supported subscription tiers, new, data-driven strategies to optimize ad performance and increase revenue generation across every segment of their audience have become more important than ever.
Measuring Return on Your Ad Campaigns
There’s an art and a science to finding new ways to encourage viewers to engage with ads – and it’s often a balancing act. Streaming publishers are constantly searching for the right level of exposure that makes viewers aware of a brand and their message, while not oversaturating them with the same content.
Striking that right balance is critical for streaming publishers to ensure that ad-supported tiers maintain profitability, and that the viewer experience remains impeccable. This requires comprehensive ad impact measurement to understand how even the slightest tweak in your ad policies can impact viewer engagement and retention.
Optimizing for Experience
The first question is how can you use data to identify potential optimization opportunities in ad delivery? First, ad teams can quantifiably measure audience tolerance for ad exposure, broken down by segments. From there they can develop data-driven ad policies that ensure ad campaigns are optimized for the experience their viewers expect. However, with millions of unique viewers around the world, ad analysis across your entire footprint can create a massive data challenge.
That’s why Conviva offers in-depth functionality to help our customers take a closer look at the impact of their ad policies on individual viewer experience and unique viewer segments. With our ad impact analysis, you can develop segments based on ad load levels to experiment with potential policy changes and track how those changes might impact viewer behavior in real-time. This gives your team the flexibility to experiment with ad load, ad frequency, ad positions, and ad sequences, knowing that you can quantifiably measure how every change impacts viewer engagement and the overall performance of an ad campaign.
You can also segment your audience by Daily Average Frequency, allowing you to measure the saturation level for any segment or campaign. By segmenting viewers by Daily Average Frequency and Brand, you can analyze how many viewers are experiencing ‘over-frequency’ and negatively impacting engagement. With this insight, you can make data-backed decisions to adapt your ad policies to improve engagement, retention, and ad effectiveness.
A Conviva customer wanted to understand just that: how advertising impacted their topline KPIs around viewer engagement. Specifically, they wanted to measure how increasing ad load for non-premium viewers watching on-demand content impacted consumption for that segment. It was critical to understand if retention and engagement metrics would drop when ad load increased.
The customer identified an opportunity to expand their mid-roll ad inventory and decided to test it. They increased the number of mid-roll ads delivered and created distinct segments with Conviva to measure the impact of that change. This change increased mid-roll ad impression by an impressive 34% and saw a 1.3% increase in minutes consumed in the first 15 days. This validated that the change in ad policy not only dramatically increased overall ad impressions, but actually had viewers tuning in a bit longer.
This ad impact analysis allowed the customer to uncover a previously untapped revenue generation opportunity. A 34% increase in mid-roll ad impressions can mean millions of dollars in newly generated ad revenue.
“Conviva is the only solution we can use to see the relationship between ad delivery and context of consumption. Until now we could not check the potential impact of new ad policies on user engagement.”
– Ad manager at leading multinational streaming publisher
Activating QoE Data to Improve Ad Engagement
And while ad frequency and ad impressions are critical to measuring ad impact, ads cannot be effective if the overall viewer experience across content and ads is suboptimal. If high rebuffering or high video start failure are impacting your viewer’s experience, they definitely won’t stick around to consume ad content – or the ad breaks within it.
When considering ad optimizations, don’t stop at ad engagement data. Improving every aspect of quality of experience can increase total viewer minutes, exponentially increasing ad delivery, ad impressions, and overall revenue generation. Customers are reporting up to $44M in increased ad revenue resulting from improvements ranging from faster video start times to reduced rebuffing to sub-2 minute issue resolution for their audiences.
High quality of experience across every touchpoint with customers is crucial to ensuring effective ad delivery. It is the foundation on which any successful ad campaign must be built on. And Conviva makes it easy for you to understand and act on the complex, unpredictable experiences your customers are actually having, so you can prioritize the right actions to improve viewer experience and increase advertising revenue.
