Creatopy has released a new paid social media case study, looking to find the best-performing vertical advertising platform.

The company's paid media team tested the same ad creative on four major platforms that allow running vertical video ads: TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Pinterest Idea Pins. They wanted to know which of these four platforms would help bring more traffic to their website when using a short-form video ad while also paying attention to the traffic quality.

For this experiment, Creatopy allocated $3,000. It ran for 15 days, from August 16 to August 30, 2022. The budget was equally split between the four platforms, each receiving a total of $750, which was set at $50/day.

The full data set can be found here: Short Form Video Advertising Battle—How YouTube Shorts Defeated the Competition.

Key takeaways: 

• The YouTube Shorts ad brought the most traffic to Creatopy’s website in terms of quantity (366 users), emerging as the clear winner of the case study. TikTok grabbed second place (165 users), Instagram Reels (44 users) came in third, while the Pinterest Idea ad only brought 5 users to their website.
• When talking about the quality of the traffic, Instagram Reels came in first with a 41.17% engagement rate, followed by YouTube Shorts (22.39%), the Pinterest Idea ad (20%), and the TikTok ad (15.66%).
• The Pinterest Idea ad scored the highest video completion rate (20.16%), more than double compared to the YouTube Shorts ad, which came in second place with a 7.42% completion rate. Instagram Reels and TikTok lagged behind with only a 1.97% and 0.82% completion rate, respectively. 

Bogdan Carlescu, VP of Marketing at Creatopy, said: ‘2022 is another year that saw a lot of updates in the digital advertising area. We love updates, so when we heard about YouTube and Pinterest launching Shorts, respectively, Idea Pins for ads, we decided to be among the first ones to do some experimentation. We tested these two new additions with two already popular and established platforms for promoting short-form video ads—TikTok ads and Instagram Reels ads. We wanted to see which advertising platform is best for short-form vertical video ads. I hope our findings can help you make a valuable decision for your business, leading to more growth.’