Videos can be expensive and complex to create. But they’ve also proven to be the most effective visual on most social media platforms. The stats don’t lie:
- Facebook video ads gain more impressions and clicks at a lower cost than carousel or static image ads.
- On Instagram, videos receive 2x more engagement than static images.
- The average TikTok user watches about 24 hours of video content every month.
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At the same time, we also know that not every video is created equal. Far from it. You’re just as likely to fail with a bad video ad on these platforms as you are to succeed when your visuals and messaging hit just right.
And here’s the thing: as explored in our recent guide on creating a winning testing framework for video ads, you don’t have a lot of time to capture and hold your audience’s attention.
In fact, according to a meta-analysis we recently performed across 20 video ad campaigns, only 25% of users watch more than 5 seconds in any video across all of our advertisers. The average watch time for these same campaigns and users was between five and six seconds.
Make no mistake: getting the opening of your video ads right on Meta or TikTok is absolutely vital. Get it right, and you have a good chance of hooking your audience. Get it wrong, and little of what happens after the opening–even the best content–won’t matter much.
Naturally, testing your ads leads to better results. In our analysis, the fastest-growing advertisers created 11x more creative assets and saw an 11x variance in return on ad spend between their top and bottom-forming creative compared to their lower-performing peers.
But testing every ad you have entirely 11 times can be hard. So, we’ve built a framework designed to help you think more methodically about your approach, working smarter instead of harder to create new ads at scale and identify winning components for future iterations.
It all begins with the first few seconds of your ad. That’s what makes these 9 testing variables so valuable when looking to optimize your ad’s opening.
Variable #1: Opening Visual
As its name suggests, your opening visual is the very first image or video frame your audience sees. If they don’t like what they see, they’ll move on without questioning it. But if they do, you’ve got them hooked for the more in-depth messaging to follow soon after.
In the below examples from Camp, a boxed mac and cheese brand, we tested four different potential opening visuals:
- a parent and child speaking to camera
- a parent and child in an action shot
- a child eating the product
- a close-up of the product in a bowl
Knowing which of these variables won allowed us to speak to our audience’s core needs and preferences from the first time they laid eyes on the ad.
