Your marketing team is burning cash.
You're running video ads across multiple platforms and optimizing for views because that's what everyone does. Your team celebrates hitting 1 million views while your CMO is breathing down your neck about website traffic and conversions that never materialized. Meanwhile, your junior marketer is scrambling to explain why all those expensive video ad views aren't translating to actual business results.
Here's the brutal truth: Most marketing teams are optimizing for the wrong metric entirely, and it's costing you thousands in wasted budget every month.
The Hack
Our team just analyzed a $31,000 video ad optimization experiment that proves most marketing departments are setting up their campaigns completely wrong.
The hack is dead simple: Stop optimizing your team's video campaigns for views and start optimizing them for clicks instead. This 30-minute campaign setting change delivered 60X more website visitors, reduced bounce rates by 21 percentage points, and increased session duration by 46% - all on the exact same budget with the identical creative assets.
Exactly How To Do It
Step 1: Gather your team for a 30-minute campaign audit (5 minutes)
Have your marketing manager pull performance data from your last 3 months of video campaigns
Ask your media buyer to prepare a list of all current video campaign objectives
Have your analytics person prepare bounce rate and session duration data for video ad traffic
Step 2: Identify all "views-optimized" campaigns (5 minutes)
In Google Ads: Look for campaigns with "Video views" or "Maximum CPV" bidding
In Facebook/Instagram: Look for campaigns with "ThruPlay" or "Video Views" objectives
In TikTok: Look for campaigns with "Video Views" as the objective
In LinkedIn: Look for campaigns with "Video Views" objective
Step 3: Create duplicate campaigns with clicks optimization (15 minutes)
Assign your media buyer to duplicate each campaign with identical targeting and creative
Change ONLY the optimization goal to clicks-focused objectives:
Google: "Website Traffic" or "Maximize Conversions"
Facebook/Instagram: "Traffic" or "Conversions" with landing page view optimization
TikTok: "Website Conversions" or "Traffic"
LinkedIn: "Website Visits" objective
Step 4: Set up proper measurement (5 minutes)
Have your analytics person create campaign-specific UTM parameters for both versions
Set up a dashboard comparing: total clicks, cost per click, bounce rate, session duration
Create a shared Slack channel for daily performance updates to the team
Step 5: Assign team roles for ongoing optimization
Your media buyer monitors daily performance and adjusts budgets based on CPC
Your content person reviews video engagement metrics to improve creative
Your marketing manager makes final budget allocation decisions after 2 weeks of data
Your analytics person provides weekly reports on downstream metrics (bounce rate, conversions)
What Your Team Will Get
60X more website visitors on the same budget
21% lower bounce rates
46% longer session durations
Eliminate wasted ad spend
Clear ROI for your CMO
Real Example
A 3-person marketing team at a B2B Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) company split their $31,000 video ad budget equally between views-optimized and clicks-optimized campaigns across US, UAE, and Singapore markets.
The views campaign generated 3.1 million views but only 11,000 clicks with a 65% bounce rate.
The clicks campaign delivered 1.6 million views but a staggering 660,000 clicks with a 44% bounce rate and 46% longer sessions.
Their marketing manager immediately reallocated 80% of their monthly video budget to clicks campaigns, resulting in a 42X increase in qualified website traffic without spending an additional dollar.
Variations of This Hack
For Brand Awareness Teams
If your primary goal is truly brand awareness and message retention, keep 20% of your budget in views-optimized campaigns, but be honest about what you're buying: viewers, not visitors.
For Multi-Channel Teams
Apply this same principle to other ad formats. Have your team audit image ads, carousel ads, and even text ads to ensure they're optimized for the metrics that actually matter to your business.
For E-commerce Teams
Take this a step further by creating a third test group optimized directly for purchases or add-to-carts rather than just clicks. Compare the quality of traffic between all three optimization strategies.
The Science Behind Why This Works
Here's what most marketing teams miss: The platform algorithms optimize for exactly what you tell them to optimize for. When you select "video views," the algorithm finds people who watch videos but don't necessarily click. When you select "clicks," it finds people with intent to visit websites.
The metric you optimize for shapes everything that happens downstream. Views create viewers. Clicks create visitors. Both have their place, but they produce fundamentally different outcomes.
For your first 5-10 seconds, focus on triggering clicks rather than passive viewing if website traffic matters to your business. Make your value proposition clear immediately, and your team will see dramatically better results without changing a single thing about your creative assets.
by GH
for the AdAI Ed. Team
