Best practices to engage users with pre-roll advertising on mobile

If you’ve ever spent time on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitch, you’ve most likely encountered pre-roll ads. A pre-roll ad is a short promotional video that plays before the user’s desired video. With so many advertisements vying for our attention, consumers are less likely to meaningfully engage with the majority, unless it’s a brand or product they’ve had previous interest in. Even then, ad fatigue is a growing problem.

To counter the growing prevalence of ad blockers, advertisers have started to incorporate skippable ads rather than forced completion pre-roll ads. With the introduction of the skip button, pre-roll video advertising often has the difficult task of converting viewers with very limited screen time.

In this pre-roll ads guide, we take a look at the types of pre-roll advertising along with the format’s benefits, and how to make your video ads more engaging.

A pre-roll ad is a paid, promotional video that plays before a featured video on desktop, mobile, and Connected TV (CTV). In contrast, mid-roll and post-roll ads serve the same purpose but play part-way through, and at the end of featured videos, respectively.

The three types of pre-roll advertisements

1. Non-skippable ads

Non-skippable ads are normally between 15 and 20 seconds long—YouTube even has a 30 second unskippable on its CTV app. The longer a viewer is engaged with an ad, especially if it’s relevant, the more likely they are to convert. Bids for non-skippable ads are based on target CPM (cost per mille) bidding. If your creative can stimulate your audience for the duration of the ad, non-skippables will boost brand awareness as well as conversions.

2. Skippable ads

Skippable ads give users the option to skip after five seconds. They operate with a pay-per-view model, meaning that advertisers pay once the user has watched a part of the ad, or the ad in its entirety. Keeping viewers engaged when they have the option to skip an ad can be hard. In fact, 84% of people skip YouTube ads on their smartphone whenever they can—but, compared to non-skippables, message retention was only 10% lower. Capture an audience’s attention, and skippable ads can be optimized to drive product awareness, online sales, and leads, all with less disruption than non-skippable.

3. Bumper ads

Bumper ads are brief, non-skippable videos that are normally six seconds in length and use target CPM bidding. Because of this, bumper ads let you reach more customers and help boost brand awareness. They’re also an effective format to run on mobile devices as they’re designed to be short and memorable. When testing over 300 bumper ad campaigns, Think with Google found that 9 out of 10 bumper ads drove a significant lift in ad recall.

A key benefit of pre-roll ads is the flexibility they provide—they can target users based on their viewing habits, age, demographic, interests, and the featured video’s topic. Pre-roll ads are often cited as being more favorable compared to mid- and post-rolls. Mid-roll ads can disrupt the flow of a video, and there’s no guarantee a viewer will get to the end of a clip to see a post-roll ad. Pre-roll ads play before a user has dived into their content experience, so are generally seen as less of an inconvenience.

Your potential audience size for pre-roll ads is also larger than mid- and post-roll ads. This is due to viewer drop off even before a mid-roll ad can be played. In addition to this, by watching free content on platforms such as YouTube, the viewer is opting to watch your pre-roll almost as an implicit form of payment, therefore having more patience to not only view the ad but also wait until its completion.

Not only are pre-roll ads less intrusive, users regard pre-roll ads as more informative and engaging than other formats. A Nielson study with Facebook found that from the moment a pre-roll ad is viewed, there is an increase in ad recall, purchase consideration, and even brand awareness. This rises exponentially the longer the viewer watches the ad.

A 2024 IAB report revealed that digital video ad spend in the US climbed 15% YoY, while Wave.video found 90% of people are still hitting the “skip” button. An older report also found that 65% of people hit the skip button the moment it becomes available—mostly out of habit.

So, how can advertisers capture viewers’ attention and provide them with content that they won’t want to miss?

The first 5-6 seconds of your pre-roll advertisement are unskippable, therefore you need to:

1. Clearly state your intention
2. Showcase your brand
3. Give the viewer a compelling reason to keep watching

A guide to pre-roll prosperity

The first five seconds are crucial, so here are our top tips and best practices to help improve retention and engagement, and to ensure that your pre-roll ads are skipped as infrequently as possible.

1. Be up front

It’s crucial to convey your message and include your call to action (CTA) early on, so that interested viewers can be redirected to your app as quickly as possible. You don’t need the full duration of the pre-roll ad for it to be effective, you just need to leave a good impression. Users today are especially skeptical of ads that they believe are inauthentic—surprising viewers with something that stands out can be just the thing that gets them over the six-second mark. The clock is ticking, make those six seconds count!

2. Keep it relevant: Behavioral targeting

With pre-roll ads you can easily target people who are either interested in your specific vertical or have spending habits that would make your product more appealing. The main reason viewers can be persuaded to watch skippable ads is ad relevance—the consumer is ready to purchase the product.

While SKAdNetwork (SKAN) has limited access to the IDFA, and Google’s Privacy Sandbox on Android is set to reduce reliance on the Google Advertising ID (GAID), it’s still possible to measure, target, and retarget with pre-roll ads. With technologies like AI and machine learning firmly in the mainstream’s consciousness, the expectation from viewers to see highly targeted ads is high. According to Google Ads, following video campaign best practices—including segmenting audiences for more refined exposure—can lead to 40% higher conversions.

Ensuring relevance when tailoring a video ad will continue to be paramount, just remember not to overload viewers with the same ad as it can reflect poorly on your brand. The golden frequency capping rule is to cap it at three views.

3. Make exciting creatives

The goal of any creative should be to keep your viewers engaged whilst promoting brand awareness. Even if the viewer skips the video, focusing heavily on your creative’s introduction will help them recall your ad. Don’t rely solely on visuals, instead tell a direct story that will capture attention and retain it. Think about attention-grabbing scripts that’ll be heard even if viewers are second-screening, and consider subtitles, which have become increasingly popular with younger audiences. Most people aren’t searching for advertisements, they want to be entertained or informed. Not only are you competing with thousands of other pre-roll ads, you’re also contending with the content the user actually wants to watch. The key here is to not make them feel as though they’re waiting, but more that your pre-roll is equally relevant to their interests as the featured video they actively chose to watch.

4. Incorporate emotions

Throughout 2020, a VidMob study found that pre-roll ads that showed surprised emotions within the first three seconds had a 360% jump in performance. In the same study, ads featuring outdoor settings saw a 60% increase in purchase rates as it showed a clear contrast from the reality of lockdown. A study on emotional appeal in advertising concluded that:

“The bond between a product’s emotional impact on the consumer and brand equity is the key to unlocking global brand success [...] However, excess use of emotional appeals brings risk to the health of the brand.”

By appealing to your viewers’ emotions you’re more likely to make a connection and leave a lasting impression of your brand. A creative that brings a smile to a viewer's face or makes them think will stick with them more than just a showcase of your product.

Neurons Inc references three key reasons emotions are an important success factor in advertising and decision making:

1. They shape perceptions and determine how we make decisions.
2. They motivate audiences to act faster than when thinking rationally.
3. They are mainly subconscious, but continue to influence choices.

Research has also shown that campaigns with “purely emotional” content perform about twice as well in generating profits (31% vs. 16%) than those with directly “rational” content.

5. Experiment with different lengths, offers, and more

While deciding which viewers to target with your pre-roll ads, consider testing different video lengths depending on the duration of the video playing afterwards. The attention span of a user viewing 30-second clips vs. that of a user watching a 30-minute video can highlight their preference for content length. It’s also good practice to run your pre-roll advertisements in tandem with special offers, like free trial campaigns. Similarly, think of the platform. If these ads are running on YouTube or Twitch, you need to consider the type of content reflected on these platforms/apps and design your pre-roll advertising creatives accordingly.

Viewers encounter pre-roll ads while searching for other online content. In this state, exposure to pre-roll ads can easily be seen as an annoyance. Consumers are exposed to information, content and advertisements across multiple platforms, all throughout the day. Sources returned from a Google search will tell you that we’re exposed to between 3,000-10,000 ads per day. Even at the lower end of that range, it’s clear that it won’t take long for an ad to find you once you’re online.

Thanks, in part, to short, snappy content found across YouTube Shorts, Tik Tok, and Instagram Reels, the “quality” of consumer attention has seen a 33% decrease in a generation. The attention span for the average millennial in the early 2000s clocked in at 12 seconds; for Gen Z today, it’s only 8 seconds. Keeping this in mind, marketers should work with video campaign formats to reflect the shift. Pre-roll ads are a valuable tool for marketing to a very specific audience or cohort, and showcasing your brand to new consumers. Even with the option to skip, any exposure to your ad can drive value. The particular placement of pre-roll ads is particularly useful due to brand engagement and memorability.

Understanding where and when viewers skip your video can also give you valuable insights into optimizing your content. To find out how Adjust’s Measure suite can provide you with the data and insights you need to measure and refine campaigns and take your app marketing to the next level, request a demo today.