Google Makes a Major Change in DoubleClick Program, Offering More Transparency to Advertisers

It’s common knowledge that businesses are more likely to see higher web traffic and more page links if they bolster their online marketing and advertising campaigns with multimedia content, and videos in particular tend to produce great results — but that’s only if internet users actually click on the videos and watch them.

The inability to see the real numbers behind video advertising on Google’s DoubleClick advertising feature was enough to drive away many potential clients, and this became enough of a problem for Google that the search engine giant decided to make a big change to draw in more DoubleClick advertisers.

As of January 6th, Google has begun giving detailed reports to advertisers on DoubleClick regarding their own videos; everything down to the average time that a particular video is watched, to the number of people who mute the video, will all be made available to advertisers.

The goal, top Google executive Neal Mohan states, is to prove that digital video advertising isn’t just as effective as TV advertising — the goal is to show that the return on investment is measurable in a way that TV ads have never achieved, which will allow businesses to fine-tune their entire advertising campaigns and make them more cost-effective.

The industry standard of a successful digital video play, says Mohan, is to have the video play for at least two seconds (ideally with the sound on) and cover at least 50% of the screen.

While this may seem like a low industry standard, the fact is that it doesn’t take much time for internet users to make judgments about a website, article, or video; considering that it takes mere milliseconds for people to decide if they trust a business based on its website design, two whole seconds is long enough to draw and captivate someone’s attention.

Advertising and marketing analysts are already predicting that online video ad expenses will increase by about 30% during 2015, possibly reaching $7.8 billion collectively, and getting one step closer to overpowering TV advertising.

Google’s decision to make its video advertising statistics more transparent to clients is merely to show businesses that digital videos are, without a doubt, the future of advertising.

“Video is the preferred means by which brand advertisers connect with their consumers,” Google’s Mohan explains. “It’s a way to make them sort of laugh, make them think, have them make that emotional connection.”