If You Want to Sell Ads, Learn to Measure Viewer Engagement

Online video is on a tremendous upswing - and so is online video advertising.

Look for online video advertising to make up one-third of all online display advertising by 2014. This information was shared by Daisy Whitney in her latest New Media Minute video, which you can see below.

If you're serving entertaining or informative videos on your site and you've built up an audience, you might be wondering how you can pull in some ad dollars for yourself. Before they'll spend their money, advertisers need proof that your site is a good buy. You're going to need to measure engagement.

Engagement could mean several things to an advertiser:

• The amount of time viewers spend viewing ads


• The amount of interaction a viewer has with an ad


• Whether or not viewers intend to purchase a product or service advertised.

You can measure engagement by studying where people watch ads on your site and where they go immediately after. This will show how many are interested in interacting with the advertised product.

Look also for the time viewers spend watching your content. Are viewers returning for more videos and sitting through more ads?

You'll want to provide potential advertisers with video ad completion rates, as well.

While much of the attention has been on premium video content online, that content is scarce - there just aren't enough video streams for every interested advertiser. That's why large content owners will do better trying to increase video views, getting visitors to sample more content in each visit. That's one more way that content owners can boost engagement and pull in some ad dollars.

For more, view the entire video below. Video used courtesy of Beet.TV.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net