The secret to boost conversions with video feed ads

With the rise of short video platforms, the mainstream content consumption form of mobile Internet has shifted to the audio-visual language of short videos, and the era of video information flow advertising has arrived. How to improve conversion through design is a challenge facing video information flow advertising .

In order to improve the advertising conversion effect, we combined actual projects, conducted a lot of experiments and thinking, sorted out and summarized a set of conversion component presentation principles suitable for video information flow advertising, which we named "delay enhancement" . It covers various common information flow scenarios such as immersive vertical video stream, mixed text and image information stream, horizontal video list stream, etc.

1. What is latency enhancement?

Video information flow advertising has three elements: content, framework, and conversion component. The advertising content comes from the materials placed by the advertiser, and the basic framework needs to be aligned with the host to maintain consistency, so only the conversion component that carries conversion information and behavior is the designable part.

"Delayed enhancement" is a phased/progressive presentation method for "conversion components" that accompanies video content . It is derived from the ideal psychological dynamics of consumers when making decisions, combined with advertising behavior, and its effectiveness in improving conversions has been verified through experiments.

Latency Enhancement consists of two stages:

The first stage is the initial stage of ad display, which delays the display of advertising intentions and attracts potential users through content;

In the second stage, the advertising content is gradually presented, and the conversion components are progressively enhanced, supplemented by gain information, continuously reinforced, and guiding conversion behavior.

It guides the entire process of conversion components from "presentation" to "enhancement", helping to improve advertising conversion effects from three parts: timing (timing of enhancement)/guidance (dynamic interaction guidance)/preposition (information conversion preposition) .

2. How does timing-delay enhancement appear?

The presentation timing of the conversion component includes two parts: "when to display" and "when to enhance". The former helps increase the ad reception rate, while the latter improves the ad conversion rate.

1. Timing

Delaying the display of advertising intent can increase the probability of displaying advertising selling points

The rapid development of the Internet has caused the audience to passively engage in the explosive growth of information. Advertising has developed rapidly with the help of this medium. However, due to the excessive publicity of some commercial advertisements and their nature of reducing the convenience of users' information acquisition, it is inevitable that the audience will have psychological rebellion and resistance, and reject advertising information from the source.

Therefore, for advertisements, delaying the display of advertising intent and integrating it into the content at the beginning of the advertisement can alleviate the audience's resistance and increase the probability of displaying the advertising selling points .

2. Enhancement timing

Dynamically determine the timing of enhancement based on user behavior and video features, which can effectively improve conversions

For advertisements, it is better to enhance the advertising content, accumulate purchasing desire/trust through the content, and then prompt actions through phased enhancements. This can achieve better conversion effects than remaining unchanged.

We first tried programmatic enhancement timing. Without increasing technical costs, we adopted fixed-time phased enhancement for different advertisements based on historical experience .

However, different advertising materials have different contents and different user preferences. Fixed enhancement timing cannot meet all advertising needs well. Therefore, when our technical capabilities allowed, we adopted a dynamic timing strategy, dynamically determining the enhancement timing based on user behavior and video features. After the programmatic enhancement timing, we once again achieved conversion improvement .

3. How does lead-delay reinforcement guide conversion behavior?

How conversion components guide conversion can be divided into basic visual guidance and advanced interactive guidance. The former helps to grab visual attention, while the latter can implant some "little ideas" to help decision-making in the interactive experience.

1. Visual guidance

Properly adding visual attractions can effectively guide clicks

Delayed enhancement requires prompting actions through phased enhancement, and how to effectively attract attention requires consideration. Experiments have shown that adding scanning effects and intelligent color selection to conversion buttons can effectively attract attention, guide clicks, and have a good effect on improving conversions .

2. Interactive guidance

Allowing users to actively choose can increase ad exposure and assist conversion decisions

Internet product design is pursuing an increasingly extreme user interaction experience. For example, the film and television industry is moving towards interactive online dramas, which is essentially a shift from user acceptance to user active participation. Users themselves are gradually awakening to the awareness of obtaining high-quality experience. Commercial products also need to keep up with "experience" and "interaction", turning advertisements into interactive experiences or information with practical value, allowing users to move from passive browsing to active participation and gain the right to choose advertisements .

Taking interactive voting as an example, we induce group choices in the form of voting through the expression of opinions between users, which arouses curiosity and peer pressure .

If the user's choice is consistent with the group's choice, it will bring group endorsement and enhance trust; if the user's choice is not consistent with the group's choice, based on the herd mentality, the user is very likely to become curious about the group's choice and browse the content of both options, effectively increasing brand exposure.

4. How does pre-delay enhancement help achieve conversion?

The pre-processing of conversion components mainly includes information pre-processing and conversion pre-processing. The former assists conversion decisions, while the latter helps facilitate operations and complete conversions better and faster.

1. Information in advance

Adding gain information or pre-landing page information can assist conversion decisions

Purchase/conversion must have enough information to accumulate trust. Appropriately adding selling point information to the front card can better help users make decisions. For download ads, you can add ratings and star ratings. For second-hand ads, you can add price information, and even pre-place coupons, picture banners and other information, all of which can achieve a positive increase in conversions .

2. Pre-conversion

Shortening the conversion path can help achieve conversion more conveniently

When trust has been accumulated and phased enhancements have been achieved, the current conversion rate is compared with jumping to the landing page for conversion. This will shorten the link and reduce the probability of user loss. Rather than an experimental attempt, it is more like a basic capability configuration for delay enhancement.

First of all, we have carried out conversion pre-processing for forms/consultations/telephone calls/Android downloads, and button clicks with clear user intentions will directly provide feedback at the moment .

In addition to directly putting the operation in front, the path can also be shortened sensorily by optimizing the interaction form to meet the needs of different segmented scenarios.

Here we take Baidu's video MAX ads as an example. For merchants who focus on landing pages, we change the relationship between the MAX home screen (video page) and the H5 landing page into a double-layer structure. The landing page is carried by a floating panel, which pops up automatically with a delay, strongly guides the content below, and stimulates users' interest in swiping up to browse . This solves the problem of the landing page being hidden too deep and the conversion link being too long. At the same time, it increases the exposure of the landing page and improves conversion.

V. Conclusion

In the field of video information flow, delay enhancement can still be further explored as "infrastructure" to carry the interactive and personalized "spiritual needs" in more segmented scenarios in the future.

At the same time, the delay enhancement design method can also be horizontally reused in various scenarios such as pre-ad cards, landing pages, IM tools, etc. that need to capture the user's attention at the right time to pursue the increase of clicks or conversions. In the future, we can even try to use it in long videos or graphic scenes.

Author: Baidu MEUX

Source: Baidu MEUX