Impact of music on the effectiveness of Facebook ads

Abstract

Facebook is the most popular social media platform in Poland. As a result, it is often used in advertising campaigns by various types of organizations. The effectiveness of these campaigns depends on many factors, including advertising creation. Video ads are dynamic and may contain music. Music in advertising can be aimed at audience attention, persuasion, user interest and sales. Music influences the emotions of the audience, and these are an important factor in making a purchase decision. It can also increase the rememberability of an ad. Its beat is important, as well as content matching. On the other hand, social media audiences may not play music in ads, which often happens when quickly browsing applications such as Facebook, especially on mobile devices. The lack of background music in the video can therefore also make a difference. The aim of the article is to determine the impact of music on the effectiveness of Facebook ads. As a research method the test of four advertising campaigns was used. The video ads differed only in the background music (the remaining settings and the creation of the ads were identical): the first had no musical background, the second had rock music timed with the video beat, the third - the same rock music not timed with the video beat, and the fourth one had a calm music as background music, less suited to the content (the video required rather dynamic music). It has been hypothesized that music or the lack of it in the video ad, its type and timing (or not) with the beat of the ad’s video have an impact on the effectiveness of the Facebook ads. It affects, among others on the reach metric, impressions, post engagement, number of clicks on the ad, cost of clicks, click rate, video plays and video plays costs.