In June 2023, Alconost made an advertising video about the Ecwid by Lightspeed platform, an e-commerce solution. The Ecwid e-commerce platform makes it easy to launch online shops and manage sales. The Ecwid marketing experts used that video in a campaign on Google Ads. 

Alconost's video runs for 19 seconds and features 2D animated graphics. Watch it now:

Two months after Alconost's video was included in the ad campaign, Ecwid's marketing team shared the video's performance data with comparisons to other video assets which Ecwid by Lightspeed had made in the past, with no involvement from Alconost, and had used for the same audiences during the same time period.

"In July and August, Alconost's video was one of our top three videos for conversions in this campaign," says Lisa, Ecwid's digital marketing expert.

Remember: a video's subject and its production quality aren't enough to guarantee success. Several factors impact a video campaign's performance and its conversion cost. Those include which promotional channels you choose, how right the audience is and how ready they are to buy, the freshness of your other creative assets, how active your competitors are, the quality of the visual materials you provide as the client, and other circumstances. All those factors are outside the video production studio's control. Ordering a video from Alconost does not guarantee growth in conversions or a decrease in the cost per conversion.

You can be sure that a video from Alconost will meet your technical requirements, your  signature style, and your quality expectations — plus, you'll like it. 

Context

The Ecwid team creates various video content on its own for both organic placement and paid promotions. But recently, when the time came to freshen up its Google Ads campaign, the Ecwid marketing team decided to outsource an animated video. 

"We record our own podcasts and make training videos using our actual interface. That kind of content may look simple, but it helps our users navigate the platform, which is the most important thing. But for advertising videos, it's a different story. Production quality requirements are much higher for those. They need to attract a new audience and enhance Ecwid's brand recognition and image. We've made video ads ourselves before, but we know how much time a proper production can take. So we decided to conduct an experiment: we'd outsource the promo video task and see how we liked the results," says Lisa, the Ecwid by Lightspeed digital marketing specialist.

Video formats created

Ecwid decided to have Alconost make a video with animated graphics in several formats: 1x1, 9x16, and 16x9. 

Google Ads has recently added an AI tool that automatically creates varied formats, but practice has shown that it's not always easy to convert a "horizontal" video into a "vertical" one without introducing some significant flaws. If text in the frame or a person's face gets cut off, for example, Google Ads will discard that video at its quality control stage. 

"We don't like guessing which versions will end up working with their machine and which won't. If we rely only on the AI tool that Google Ads suggests, we might end up without a vertical clip, for example, because the machine cuts off part of the text in some on-screen graphics. But since we know exactly which formats do best in our campaigns, we think it's smart to commission exactly the versions we need. It's not hard for the team working on the video to compose shots so that every element shows up correctly," says Lisa.

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The other videos Ecwid used in its campaign

Ecwid's Google Ads campaign also made use of one 15-second video and one 59-second video that Alconost did not help to create, among others. 

Video 1: 15-second clip made by Ecwid by Lightspeed

This 15-second video consists of animated key phrases from the text voiced by the narrator and several fragments of live video assembled from stock footage.

Video 2: 59-second video with inserted UGC made by Ecwid by Lightspeed

This 59-second video is an edited montage of user-generated footage. These are unique videos made by Ecwid's clients, e-commerce sellers who use the Ecwid by Lightspeed platform. They share their thoughts about the platform in the advertising video. The live footage is interspersed with animated inserts illustrating the features of the product as the merchants mention them.

"We've been using the video with UGC clips in our campaigns for over six months now, and we like its performance," says Lisa. "They're amateur videos, but they function as social proof that real members of the e-commerce industry use our service and are happy with it." 

Video 3: Animated advertising video made by Alconost

The main thing differentiating Alconost's video from the others in Ecwid's campaign is the execution technique. The video from Alconost is made of 2D animated graphics. The plot follows a "problem-solution" structure, and the story is told by an animated character who e-commerce entrepreneurs will relate to. The artwork for the animation was provided by the client, so it matches Ecwid's in-house style. 

"As a marketing person, I had my own reasons for wanting to try this technique. If we use animated illustrations, will viewers understand what Ecwid actually is? We tell a short story using an animated character in an imaginary but relevant situation. Will people understand what our product is if we describe it using that kind of visual medium? We wanted to use Alconost's production capabilities to test those ideas," explains Lisa.

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Video performance by the numbers

Image: screenshot from Google Ads kindly provided by the marketing department at Ecwid by Lightspeed. The videos are listed here in the order they are mentioned above. The most important data from this screenshot is also included in the table below. 

If you compare the nearly 20-second video from Alconost with the nearly minute-long video with UGC clips, 21% more people watched Alconost's video to the halfway point, and 17% more people watched it to the end. 

But there's nothing surprising about that. As a rule, the shorter the video, the higher the completion rate. That can also be seen when we compare the 15-second Ecwid video with the nearly 20-second Alconost video. The longer video loses out to one that finishes more quickly.

However, according to the client's data, the 20-second video turned out to have a lower cost per conversion than the 15-second video.

"In assessing video performance for our campaign for the July-August period, I see that Alconost's animated piece is within the benchmarks. We've already added the video to our collection of creative assets that are constantly in rotation, and we'll keep using it to bring in new clients over the next few months," Lisa says.

It's also interesting to look at the audience engagement the video made by Alconost demonstrated in the In-stream Skippable mode (screenshot below kindly provided by the Ecwid marketing team): 

After the five-second mark, audiences were able to skip the ad, but the graph shows that almost a third of viewers watched Alconost's video to the end. 

"Based on my experience evaluating video ad effectiveness, what's interesting here is not so much at what point engagement begins to drop, but at what point it actually ends. It's a real success that out of the 42% of viewers who began actually watching the video, more than 25% watched it to the last second. The graph shows that audiences reliably find it acceptable that our ad distracts them from watching other content for 19 seconds. I think that completion rate is evidence that the storytelling in the video has been done right," notes Lisa. 

Conclusions

A video producer cannot guarantee clients specific results in any one metric of advertising success. After all, content is only one component of a campaign. It can affect the result, but not lock in your success.

Here at Alconost, we're delighted that the video we made was handled by the professional marketing team at Ecwid by Lightspeed, whose approach to working with audiences, and to setting up and running their campaign, played a huge role in obtaining the results we've described.

Congratulations to Ecwid on their success! We're grateful to have been part of it. 

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