Why should you care about thumbstop?

Thumbstop measures the proportion of your audience who views the first three seconds of your video. It measures how powerful the first impression that your brand has on those who you are advertising to.

Thumbstop is the first impression that your brand is going to have with a prospective customer or a prospective investor

Nobody goes on social media expecting to buy something. Within a busy feed, you will only have a few seconds to stop someone and convince them to see more about you. As Nick Shackelford says, “It’s your first smile at that person you like where you are like - hey do they like my smile? Perhaps she’ll like my personality. Thumbstop is that smile and your landing page will be your personality.”

On top of that first smile, thumbstop can tell you a lot more about your brand:

• Who is your audience?
• What problem do your prospective clients worry about?
• What aesthetic resonates with them?
  

...later in this article, we’ll dive deeper into each of these topics and how thumbstop can be yielded for brand growth.

The three critical elements of a thumbstop

Twitter’s biggest innovation was restricting the character limit of a Tweet. Forcing users to deliver a point in 140 seconds made speech more succinct and powerful. The three-second constraint of the thumbstop is quite similar.

A good creative team like Konstant Kreative can tell a powerful, Kubrick-esque story in just three seconds. Following one of his own examples, let’s break down what Nick says are the three most important elements of this.

Element 1: The human connection

The human element is critical to allowing the audience to connect personally to a video ad. A well-done thumbstop will have a person who is clearly expressing an emotion that allows the audience to connect to what that person is feeling.

Take the example below for this mosquito repellent product. Scratching her neck to swipe away the mosquitos biting her neck, our lead shows a sense of frustration that the relevant audience will identify with.

Element 2: The bold problem statement

The bold problem statement builds upon the initial hook or the human connection by calling out the problem that resonates with the audience. 

Since audiences often view the first few seconds of video ads without audio, the bold problem statement is best conveyed through a powerful text statement (kudos to Facebook for dropping that 20% text rule).

Like the other elements explained here, the bold problem statement is critical to your thumbstop because it explains to the audience why they should care to watch more of your video.

Element 3: The shocking or satisfying hook

The last element of your thumbstop will be the shocking or satisfying hook. This is something visually appealing or unexpected, that provides a level of payoff which will leave the audience wanting to see more.

This is where you’ll really want to bend your creativity. Often, you’ll see three forms of this type of scene:

• The satisfying hook built into the product: How nice is it to see a knife slice smoothly through that big block of moon sand?
• The satisfying or shocking hook built into the result of the product: Imagine a slice of bread being wiped against a tire that has had a treatment put on it to repel dirt. When it’s revealed the bread is still clean, it illustrates the effect of the product in a really compelling way.
• The shocking hook built into the problem: Imagine that up close visual of a cat tearing through your mattress. Makes you want to buy reinforced linens, doesn’t it?
  

In this example, Nick and his team showed an upclose visual of a mosquito biting an unsuspecting victim. In just a second, the viewer is drawn in by a visual that is unpleasant and enticed to keep watching to get resolution.​

Tying these elements together to speak to your audience

If you look closely at the examples above, you’ll see that each element of the thumbstop goes deeper than just tapping into the superficial emotions of the viewer. They also tell the audience a lot about the product and who it is for.

Every element of the thumbstop should illustrate your value proposition. Who you care about and what problem you are trying to solve should be evident in just three seconds.

The human connection will tell your audience who you care about. Here, you are going to leverage actors who resemble your target audience, and who display emotions in the way that your target audience would when faced with their problem.

The bold problem statement will tell your audience about why they personally should care about the problem or your proposed solution. In a few words, your audience should clearly be able to connect this problem to a personal experience.

The shocking or satisfying hook will tell your audience what emotions they should feel when thinking about the problem. It should be something that the audience can relate to through past experience.

Once you settle on a thumbstop that works, you can leverage the above to create variations that better tap into the needs of distinct audiences that would use your product. As an example, take a look at the subtle differences between three variations of the same thumbstop content from Konstant Kreative with the chosen actors and messaging in the bold statement.

As seen in the three variations of the thumbstops above, each leverages slightly tweaked statements, situations, and actors to tap into unique audiences.

By leveraging divergent elements, these ads can become an invaluable way for brands and agencies to test the performance of various target markets and messaging strategies. 

Launching your thumbstop

Now that we have the essential elements of a thumbstop laid out, let’s look into the process that Nick and the team at Konstant Kreative take to launch their thumbstop tests.

1. Check your budget

Before starting work on testing thumbstop, it is critical that brands or agencies assess the budget that they have to actually test the performance of their thumbstop.

At the very least, you need a $100 budget in a three-day minimum window for each thumbstop.

This budget is important because an ad needs enough impressions, clicks, and days spent to paint an accurate portrait of how the thumbstop is performing.

2. Draft your first thumbstops

The next stage of your process will be to create your first few video ads, each one with their own unique thumbstop. 

Generally, when first testing a thumbstop you’ll want to compare at least three unique versions.

While in the previous section we talked about taking one premise for a thumbtop and tweaking elements such as the messaging or actors within, if you are creating a thumbstop for the first time you’ll want to create three very different versions to get a higher-level understanding of what is working and what isn’t.

The core of the variation should come in the central storyline of the thumbstop. For example, if you were to sell a tire rim cleaner, you might want to create three variations like:

• Thumbstop 1: Someone wipes a cloth against a dirty tire rim, showing how dirty they can get.
• Thumbstop 2: Someone wipes a cloth against a clean tire rim, showing how clean the tire cleaner made it.
• Thumbstop 3: Someone drives a car up to a date. Zoomins show how gross the tire rims are.
  

By comparing the results of these thumbstops against each other, you can see what message resonates best with your audience and iterate from there.

3. Iterate on the winners

Once you’ve picked the winner of your thumbstop, you can now begin the iteration process of narrowing down on what works with your thumbstop and what doesn’t.

Following the example above, let’s say that I discover that Thumbstop 2 works best. I now know that showing a cloth against a tire rim to highlight how clean the tire cleaner made it works best. Now, I’ll want to create variations on this ad to further hone in on this learning.

Some ways I’ll iterate include:

• Is the thumbstop composed of studio shot imagery or UCG-like imagery?
• What is the bold problem statement included in my thumbstop?
• What type of car am I using in my ad?
• What type of material (cloth, food item etc) am I using to wipe against the tire?
  

Each iteration should be tackled in a single test to isolate the variables and build progressive learnings on my brand and audience.

Measuring thumbstop and what your results tell you

So far you’ve learned about the importance of thumbstop, the elements that compose one, and how to launch your first campaigns. Now for the most important part - measuring the performance of your output.

Primary KPIs

First, let’s take a look at the primary KPIs that will signal the success of your campaign.

First off is the thumbstop ratio itself (calculated by 3-second video plays ÷ impressions × 100). This metric will show you the proportion of people who view the first 3-seconds of your video. It is important to note that a winning thumbstop ratio will vary brand-to-brand and industry-to-industry, so you are best off avoiding “optimal” numbers that gurus will share. Instead, the winning mentality is to establish your own baseline and grow based upon that.

The other keys to thumbstop success are your engagement metrics - namely comments and likes. Beyond being an indicator of the level of interest that your ad is attaining, these engagement metrics act as multipliers to the success of a video ad by offering critical social proof to the audience on whether the content is worth watching or not.

Now when you go live with a creative, you spend money on engagement or video views to get more love and attention with social proof engagement.

Like watering a garden, media buyers should spend extra money on videos with thumbstops that are performing well to boost the engagement metrics before comparing them with ads that have run for a longer period of time.

Secondary KPIs

Your secondary KPIs are equally important as they will show where you can improve each video ad and the funnel that lays beneath.

While this metric will vary from business-to-business, we like to focus on conversion-oriented events because they work tangentially with the thumbstop to give a good portrait of how the beginning of your funnel compares to the end of the funnel - allowing you to take the best of both to provide a more comprehensive experience. 

Analyzing thumbstop and improving your funnel

Let’s dive into our analytics stack and evaluate how thumbstops are performing. In order to do so effectively, you’ll want to follow a few general principles:

• Group results by creative: Comparing ads independently can often be comparing apples to oranges because a bad creative in a strong ad set might perform better than a strong creative in a weak ad set. By grouping the results of my analysis by creative, one can reduce margin of error by aggregating performance across all ad sets.
• Sort results by thumbstop performance, but only compare creatives with similar spend: You’ll want to create a leaderboard-style report that allows you look at your top creatives according to thumbstop. However, for accurate comparison it is important to only compare ads with similar spend in a given time range.
  

...fortunately, using an app like Motion, it’s easy to do all of this without having to build a pivot table. Let’s see how it can be done.

Finding the winning thumbstops

First, we’ll build a report to compare our most recent thumbstops. I’ll evaluate those in a similar spend range, and sort results from top-to-bottom KPI. As a secondary metric, I’m also looking at comments to see how social engagement is on each thumbstop.

With a quick glance, I can learn a few things from these results. First off, the first ad (brown bar) is definitely the strongest performer. Looking at my spend for each, it also has spent less than some of the others so it will make sense to allocate more spend here to continue driving results and boost engagement.

Passing on learnings to improve the funnel

Since thumbstop measures how strong your message resonates in just a quick soundbite, it is fertile ground for capturing brand learnings that you can pass down the funnel.

Post-thumbstop experience is so much more important now than it is before, as an agency we always ask ourselves how we can get our thumbstop learnings and use it to help conversions.

There are two main ways that brands can do this. 

The first will be to look at your top thumbstops and find commonalities in them that can be passed down the funnel. For example, by comparing my top two videos on Motion I can see that they both include the tagline “8 Types of Hydration”. By making this messaging more prominent on my product landing page, I can reinforce the value proposition to increase conversions.

The second way I can do this is by comparing the performance of two video ads that succeed in different areas. Take the example below. The first ad on the chart (green) has an outstanding thumbstop ratio of 17.05% while the last (navy blue) has a stellar click-to-purchase ratio of 10.08%. Taking the best of each ad should result in an iteration that performs stronger overall.

In this example, the last ad has a weaker thumbstop ratio, suggesting that the thumbnail and first three seconds can be updated to better capture attention on the news feed. This can often be improved by drawing learnings from ads that have stronger thumbstops to the left of the chart.

Conversely, the first ad has a high thumbstop but a weak click-to-purchase ratio. There are two ways that we can iterate on this. First would be by improving the ad by adjusting seconds four onwards with stronger CTAs and value propositions. The second would be improving the landing page that the ad is delivering to by leveraging the messaging in the thumbstop and creating a more aesthetically consistent experience between the ad and the landing page.