Ten-Minute Lessons as the Ad

The brand sold a course to an audience that already knew it. Most prospects at that stage of the funnel already knew the brand and the face on screen. They were warm traffic, or hot traffic that had gone cold.

It's hard to tell who's ready to buy in that much warm traffic. A 60-day site-visitor audience is bigger than many interest audiences and says very little about intent, so retargeting money gets spread across everyone who ever visited.

We made a series of specific, directly usable lessons from the course's subject. Each ran 10 to 12 minutes, really long for an ad, and we ran them on a conversion objective to a big audience. Then watch time did the qualifying. Anyone who watched 50% or more had given us more than five minutes, and that was the hot audience, shown follow-up ads at a frequency of seven to ten. People who watch 75% or 95% are raising their hand and asking to be sold. We kept the copy, the video and the landing page saying the same thing, because a mismatch between them shows up as a conversion-rate problem.

• Facebook video ads on a conversion objective
• Video-view audiences at 50%, 75% and 95%
• Retargeting at a frequency of seven to ten
• Copy, video and landing page matched

Follow-up ads went only to people who had already given us five minutes or more, at a frequency of seven to ten.

Retargeting money moved off everyone who had visited and onto the people who had shown intent with their time.

Using video to sell is level one. Level two is using your videos to segment the audience, so the people who watched most get seven to ten ads a week.