Simple Term or Valuable Knowledge?

This week in class I was challenged to define and understand one of the many SEO terms we that are going to learn about next week. Me, being a busy student and having no extra time tried to take the easy way out and choose the word “Play Rate”. To me the concept seemed relatively simple. The play rate was the rate at which your video or ad is played. But upon doing some actual research I found that this term has a lot more value than my simple definition.

Play Rate can be defined as “how often your ad’s video was played compared to how often the ad was shown.” That basically means that the play rate is a ratio that calculates the number of plays verses its total impressions. These numbers can and will have a huge effect on the overall marketing campaign on platforms like YouTube. If your ad has a low play rate then we as advertisers know we need to enhance the ad or the experience the ad is giving in order to engage our customers more. This can be done a number of different ways. You could have a stronger call to action or even something as simple as having a more graphically appealing opening image.  

With this knowledge we cannot only better understand our consumer but we can focus our marketing techniques for the future. The play rate gives us clear data that we can use to support our AB testing methods or to solely show the success of our work. Search Engine Watch believes that video has the perfect balance between creativity and data - with information like this we need to ensure that we are taking advantage of tools like play rate in order to give ourselves the best chance of success.

I think its safe to say that this basic term holds a lot of value in the strategies and technique I will be using in the future. This just once again goes to show “do not judge a book by its cover” or a term for its value in this situation.