Supercharging Your Mobile Video Ads With The Help Of AI

Digital advertising campaigns are much more effective than offline media. But to generate genuine engagements and maximum ROI, you will need the help of artificial intelligence.

Digital marketers still struggle to ensure the entirety of their campaigns deliver ROI and that impressions aren’t wasted. How can artificial intelligence change that for mobile video ads?

Digital advertising has a great advantage over offline media such as TV, in that campaign results and tracking can be implemented on every single impression, not just on a fixed subset of the population. In theory, therefore, it should be easy to get the most out of an advertising campaign but, in practice, this is not always the case. What’s holding it back?

1. Non-Human Impressions

To ensure all impressions are being seen by humans, it’s important to partner with a third-party verification company. These partners can vet ad tech platforms to assess the quality of their traffic—only those classed as premium should be used to run branded content. Each campaign can then overlay tracking to ensure it is being shown to human viewers. By implementing tracking, brands can guarantee at least 98% of their impressions are being shown to real people who would be able to view their advertising.

2. Viewability On Mobile

The next step is to make sure the campaign is viewable. Viewability on desktop has been discussed in great depth, but the industry has been slower to react to mobile. This is partly because viewability issues on mobile can be caused by a number of factors, including Internet connection at the time an ad was served, but also because it has been difficult to track both mobile Web and in-app, as well as a lack of industry-wide standards. With new MRC (Media Rating Council) guidelines due for release shortly, viewability will become easier to monitor on mobile.

Until the new regulations are brought into place, brands can vastly improve viewability by using mobile formats which are full screen and user initiated, ensuring a viewer will have seen and engaged with the advertising. They should also use third-party tracking to receive actionable insights into which provider delivers the best viewability scores.

3. Hyper-Targeting Your Ads

Inefficient targeting is the other main reason impressions are wasted. Once safeguards for brand safety and viewability are implemented, advertisers can be sure that real people are viewing their advertising. The next step is to ensure that the users seeing the ad are going to deliver meaningful engagements, and this requires hyper-precise targeting.

Typically, targeting involves identifying users within a certain audience profile, their age, gender, and demographic, potentially extending to past behaviour, device, and location targeting. But even if an impression meeting all the criteria is identified, there is no guarantee the user will want to interact with the advertising at that particular time—perhaps their signal is poor, perhaps they are running for a bus, or are at work. The perfect time for engagements will vary from user to user and campaign to campaign.

Using AI To Deliver ROI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come to play a leading role in driving ROI. In fact, you could say it’s the only way to ensure that the vast majority of impressions will generate meaningful engagements. Why is that?

AI technology analyses information from billions of data points from the user, device, creative, publisher, and format. It then uses this data as a basis for predictive analysis, identifying the most opportune moment to target individual users with the creative they are the most likely to engage with at that point in time. If a user still doesn’t engage, machine learning means that for the next impression it will try something different.

By using AI, brands have seen a dramatic improvement in the performance of their campaigns. Common KPIs such as CTR (click-through rate) and VCR (view-through rate) can register up to 300% uplift. If a brand buys on CPM, using AI delivers fewer wasted impressions, better user engagement, and a more cost-effective campaign.

Ensuring ROI

If brands implement tracking and third-party verification tools across their campaigns, they will ensure that all of their advertising has the potential to contribute ROI. By making use of AI, they convert this potential into genuine engagements by delivering ads to users who really want to interact, ensuring the entirety of the campaign, and not just 50%, delivers ROI.