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Facebook updates video ads

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 12 Feb 2016
Facebook research shows most users react negatively when loud video adverts automatically play in their news feeds.
Facebook research shows most users react negatively when loud video adverts automatically play in their news feeds.

Facebook introduced new features this week to help advertisers better capture audience attention, including a new tool for auto-captioning muted videos.

The new tool generates captions for video ads and delivers them to the advertiser within the ad creation tool to review, edit and save to the video ad. Previously, advertisers were only able to add captions to Facebook video ads by embedding captions or uploading their own caption files.

Facebook found that when feed-based mobile video ads play loudly when users are not expecting it, 80% react negatively, both toward the platform and the advertiser. Therefore, by including captions, advertisers can increase video view time by an average of 12%, it says.

In Facebook's earning results earlier this year, it was revealed users are watching over 100 million hours of video on the platform each day. Also, according to independent Fors Marsh tests, people can recall mobile News Feed content after seeing it for only a quarter of a second.

In addition to auto-captioning, the social network is providing new metrics on video ads for advertisers. Advertisers will be able to see the percentage of people who have viewed their videos with sound in Page and Ads Insights.

The automated caption tool will roll out globally to Ads Manager and Power Editor in the coming weeks, and will initially only be available for US English captions.

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