Cheap Thrills, Empty Views: The Hidden Trap of Low-Cost Reach
We find that there’s a misconception that more eyes equals more impact, regardless of engagement quality. The “quantity over quality” mindset can be hard to shake.
We believe it’s important to shift the focus from “how many people could potentially see our ad” to “how many people actually watched and engaged with our content.”
From past experience, we knew that Reach objective campaigns have a lower CPM and will deliver strong surface metrics. When running a video campaign on Meta, we wanted to prove that setting a buying objective for video views gets your ad seen more than using a reach objective.
📊 Case Study: Optimising Video Campaigns on Meta
🔍 The Question: When running a video campaign on Meta, which buying objective gets your ad seen more: Reach or Video Views?
🧪 The Experiment: We compared two campaigns with different buying objectives:
- Reach – Low CPM focus
- Video Views (Engagement) – Completed Video Views
The Results
Whilst the reach campaign had lower CPMs, the content’s viewability and completion rate were significantly lower than those of the engagement campaigns.
This is where it’s important to ladder back to your audience and key objectives.
What behaviour are you trying to evoke? And what is your desired result?
In many cases, especially for video content, having fewer but more engaged viewers can lead to better brand recall, message retention, and, ultimately, more desirable outcomes.
As always, I would love to chat further. Thanks, Elise
