Facebook today announced it is expanding its Premium Video Ads to international markets including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. The 15-second video ads will be available to a “limited group of advertisers” and will expand on a rolling basis, with users seeing them “over the next few months.”
The ads will start playing without sound as they appear on screen and stop if you scroll past. If you tap the video, it will expand into a full-screen view with sound.
Facebook first started testing Premium Video Ads back in December, and then rolled them out to the US in March. The company describes them as being designed “for advertisers who want to reach a large audience with high-quality sight, sound and motion.”
Facebook sells and measures the new format similar to how media firms do with TV: based on Targeted Gross Rating Points to reach a specific audience over a short period of time. In fact, delivery is measured by an independent third party, Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR), meaning advertisers don’t have to worry about Facebook changing prices: they only pay based on what Nielsen OCR measures.
Yet the company has realized advertisers need to better understand how users respond to their videos on Facebook. As such, today it is launching new video metrics in Page Insights and Ads Reporting for all videos uploaded to the social network, an improvement that will be rolling out “over the coming weeks”:
Previously, Page owners could only see how many people started watching their video. The new metrics will also show information like video views, unique video views, the average duration of the video view, and audience retention.
See also – Facebook opens up its social TV data for the first time in partnership with UK analytics firm SecondSync and Facebook takes on Twitter with new tools to give TV broadcasters access to its user data
Top Image Credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.