By Alan Coleman on 27 Jan 2016
When Facebook proclaimed itself as the world’s most viewed video platform, the digital world certainly took notice.
Overcoming Google's YouTube to claim this title was undoubtedly an impressive feat by the social media giant. However, for many, the claim was more than a little controversial.
Why?
Well, it all came down to the definition of a ‘video view’, and I'll explain this in the video below.
Nevertheless, we were confident we could overcome the definitions issue and test the effectiveness of the two platforms from a digital marketer’s point of view. We weighed up video views, video completions, cost per video view and cost per completed video view to uncover whether Facebook truly is a viable option for video advertisers.
Take a look, the results may surprise you.
Video Transcript
Hello there. This video blog is about the battle of the Internet giants, and in this blog we're going to focus on the battle between Google and Facebook for video.
Facebook: The World’s Most Viewed Video Platform?
So one of Facebook's stated objectives is to be the world's most viewed video platform, and according to their own stats, this has already happened. They've beaten YouTube, and they are now the world's most viewed video platform. However, there is a lot of controversy surrounding this claim. And the key reason for this controversy is what constitutes a ‘view’. So on YouTube, a view is typically arrived at after 30 seconds. However, Facebook is counting a view after three seconds. So you could say there's 10 Facebook views for every 1 YouTube view.
The Test: Facebook Video Ads Vs YouTube Video Ads
So as the digital marketing scientists, we are really keen to do a study, a test on the efficiency of the two ad platforms. So we felt that the best way of identifying are people engaging with the ads is by measuring completed video views. So not 3 seconds, not 30 seconds. What proportion of people actually watched the video right to the end?
So it's a very reasonable hypothesis that your YouTube completion rate is going to be higher because the view rate doesn't happen for 10 times longer, so the person is a lot more engaged by the time they're counted as a view. So what we did is we took this one video, and we put it out over the two platforms. We targeted a very similar audience on both platforms. This was a 20-second video.
The Results
And what we found was, as you'd expect, the view rate on Facebook was significantly higher because that view happened a lot faster. There was a huge difference in the cost per view. On YouTube, we were getting 4 cent views, which is really, really good value. But on Facebook, we were getting them for as little as half a cent. Facebook has a relevancy score like AdWords and YouTube have a quality score. So because the engagement rates on this video are quite high, we found we got really, really, ridiculously cheap views.
The cost per view of a full video, very significant, was less than 2 cents on Facebook, but it was 24 cents on YouTube. So that was driven by two factors. Number one, the cost per view was just so much cheaper on Facebook, it was at a very significant advantage from the get go. But the other factor driving that was the completion rate, and we were really surprised to see that Facebook actually had a higher video view completion rate than YouTube did.
Try it Yourself
So videos are highly subjective. The difference between one video and another is quite vast, so I wouldn't take this as gospel for your business. But what I highly recommend you do is, when you are promoting videos is you do use both platforms. And these are the metrics to look at. Don't focus so much on views because you're looking at very different metrics. But look at cost per view, look at video completion, and you'll get some really interesting findings there, I'm sure.
