The perfect YouTube ad length

How long should your YouTube ad be?

Depending on your advertising goals you may have different opinions on the matter.

Here are the results of a split test recently done to find the optimal length for an ad when focusing on driving online conversions.

What do users think? 

A 2012 poll of US voters reported by Mashable suggested that the majority of users were willing to watch an ad up to 15 seconds long before they got to watch their chosen content on YouTube.

How long a user thinks they’re willing to watch an ad, and how long is actually optimal for ad length are probably quite different things.

Recently Unruly Media found that the average length of the top 10 most shared ads of all time is 4 minutes and 11 seconds, while at the end of last year Greg Jarboe provided a roundup of the top trending YouTube ads of 2013, which came in at an average length of 1 minute 44 seconds.

Which illustrates, if you can entertain people and tell them an engaging story, then they are willing to watch an ad for much longer than they think.

The majority of other studies show the success of a YouTube ad is judged on the number of Likes and Shares it received, and whether or not it went ‘viral’.

It’s great to be popular, but for a lot of clients the bottom line of whether an ad is successful is whether or not it generated sales with a good ROI.

Test

With this in mind, a test was conducted to see if ad length has an impact on conversion rate and ROI, and the results were pretty striking. Two ads were created that were almost identical for the first 15 seconds, but the first ad ended at the 15 second mark, while the second ad ran for a total of 30 seconds.

An A/B test of these ads against each other ran in a YouTube remarketing campaign for a month, before analyzing the results.

First, in terms of viewer engagement, users are slightly more likely to watch more of a video if the overall length of the video is shorter.

34% of viewers made it to the end of the 15 second video, while only 32% of viewers made it to the half-way point of the 30 second video.

Despite a fairly even distribution of impressions between the two ads, three times as many Earned Views (where a user goes on to watch another video on your YouTube channel after seeing your ad) from the 15 second edit than from the 30 second edit of the ad.

The conversion stats is where the difference in performance became much more apparent. Overall the 15 second edit saw 51% of impressions, but drove 83% of total conversions.



The 15 second edit achieved this with a CPA is almost four times lower than the 30 second edit, coming in at £45 compared to £169 for the 30 second edit:



It’s worth noting that YouTube conversions are reported against views, and not website clicks. Then, because the 15 second edit is more likely to be watched, simply because it ends sooner, you could say that it’s not surprising that a higher number of people exposed to the video go on to convert.

However, the conversion rate was more than three times higher from the 15 second edit compared to the 30 second, meaning that not only did a higher number of people convert overall, but per view they were much more likely to convert if they watched the 15 second edit.

Finally, one of the most striking stats was that the shorter ad actually had a higher clickthrough rate than the longer ad, with a 0.84% CTR for the 15 second edit, compared to 0.72% for the 30 second edit.

Users were more likely to want to interact with the shorter ad even though it was onscreen for half the time. Ultimately ad length is going to be heavily influenced by your video content and advertising goals. If you’re not testing different ad lengths on YouTube you should start, and start with 15 seconds.-eConsultancy

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