Guest post by Chris Cunningham, co-founder & CEO appssavvy
The emergence of social media has dramatically changed consumer behavior. People now spend more time online performing social activities than they do on email, content portals and instant messaging combined. Despite this profound behavioral shift, online ad inventory and delivery has gone largely unchanged, while opportunities to engage key audiences at key moments remain untapped.
New research from appssavvy, “Social Activity Index – Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Advertising,” reveals the power of delivering brand messages against social activity and underscores its evolution as one of the most effective forms of digital marketing to drive brand engagement.
SOCIAL ACTIVITY ADVERTISING DEFINED
Social activity advertising includes online advertising channels that serve ad impressions against events rather than content. This enables brands to deliver contextually relevant ads based on what people are doing rather than what they’re viewing. This new segment of display advertising delivers brand messages within activities or events in social games, apps or websites, which include sending a virtual gift, playing a branded level within a game, completing a poll or quiz, entering a photo contest, to name a few. Upon completion of a brand-enabled activity, a social ad is delivered. These ads combine brand messaging through video and interactive media with social calls to action such as sharing, following, or Like-ing.
KEY FINDINGS
Key Finding 1: Social activity advertising rivals the effectiveness of paid search, outperforms standard display ads by 11 times, and more than doubles the performance of rich media.
Drivers of Performance
Social activity ads perform at high levels for two reasons. First, social activity advertising places brands and ads within highly interactive, social content that typically enjoys a loyal and engaged audience, allowing marketers to leverage naturally occuring activity to drive significant engagement with their brands.
Second, social activity ads offer a wider variety of calls to action vs. other online ad formats, including clicks to URLs, video views, sharing to Facebook, tweeting, etc
Key Finding 2: Within social activity advertising, social games deliver the highest performance, outperforming all other ad formats (including paid search).
Drivers of Performance
The strong performance of gaming advertising is driven by its exceptionally high activity rate and uniquely engaged audience – games enjoy audiences that play for hours per week while completing several activities per minute. Additionally, ads incorporated into gift giving, virtual good use and the completion of in-game missions or quests enable brands to integrate and become associated with daily events that enrich the everyday life of the gaming audience.
BEST PRACTICES
The most successful social activity ad units immerse themselves within the flow of activities that occur naturally within a website, game or app. Branded calls to action should mirror functionality and styling throughout the website, game or app, and can serve to enrich, rather than disrupt, the user experience.
Additionally, social activity ads are most effective when the activities inherently involve a high level of interaction. Apps and websites that drive the creation of shareable content or encourage self-expression through activites like interactive contest entries provide advertisers the best opportunity to foster brand engagement.
CONCLUSION
Social activity advertising gives brands access to previously untapped ad inventory and provides a new way to engage with consumers at a time when they are actively involved with relevant activities. These lean-forward events allow context and intent to be captured before ads are delivered, and have paved the way for a new segment of display advertising that significantly outperforms other display media, including rich media and video, and indexes alongside search. As the Internet continues to evolve and time spent online continues its shift towards social media and games, social activity advertising will become an increasingly powerful way to reach and impact online audiences.
