Before we get started, special thanks to our partners for this test: The Secret Life of Weddings Podcast.
For this test, we teamed up with Lisa and Rebecca, hosts of the The Secret Life of Weddings Podcast. They describe their show as: “Mostly we share the wildest wedding drama from our listeners and from the news. Remember what they say—truth is stranger than fiction. As we say at the end of every episode—anything can happen at weddings…and we will be here to tell you all about it.”
Do Animated Captions Work?
For this test, we wanted to see if the ever popular karaoke style animation increases the effectiveness of audiograms. I thought for sure that the animated captions would outperform the non-animated captions. I was ready for a blowout! But then, we ran the test…
We created four videos, two with animated captions, two without. They are as follows:
List of the Videos
- Video 1 – Centered – No Animation – this one uses the “Centered Heading” style WITHOUT karaoke animation.
- Video 2 – Centered – Animation – this one uses the “Centered Heading” style WITH karaoke animation.
- Video 3 – Bold – No Animation – this one uses the “Bold Description” style WITHOUT karaoke animation.
- Video 4 – Bold – Animation – this one uses the “Bold Description” style WITH karaoke animation.
Video 1: Centered – No Animation
Video 2: Centered – Animation
Video 3: Bold – No Animation
Video 4: Bold – Animation
We put these video units into Traffic Acquisition Split tests. The units all appeared as follows:
The Results
| Type | Results | Impressions | CTR | CPC |
| Centered No Animation | 88 | 2855 | 3.1% | $0.28 |
| Bold Animation | 72 | 3610 | 2.0% | $0.35 |
| Bold No Animation | 65 | 3774 | 1.7% | $0.38 |
| Centered Animation | 59 | 3788 | 1.6% | $0.42 |
Results: Surprisingly, the winning unit was the Centered Heading non animated unit. The second place unit was the Bold Description unit with animation. Followed by the Bold NON animated unit. Last place was the Centered Heading unit with animation. This was counter to what I expected to happen, but I think the main takeaway is that larger text with animation could be a bad mix! So, maybe keep it simple, or even skip the animation all together. If anyone out there has seen different results, I’d love to hear about it!
Finally, if you have a podcast and want to team up for a similar test, reach out!
What Are We Doing Here?
We’re on a mission to figure out what kinds of videos do best for promoting audio on social media, and will be using Headliner to test different variations of audiograms and see what comes out on top. As you may have seen in our previous posts, we were looking for the best way to do a proper A/B test on social media and found Facebook’s Split Testing Platform for Ads to be the easiest way to do this.
