The top 10 benefits of AR that boost campaigns and customer engagement.
There are many benefits to launching an AR campaign as opposed to traditional printed campaigns, billboards or televised commercials that don’t have augmented reality features added to them.
Amongst these benefits are higher user engagement, longer dwell time, higher sales rates and enhanced consumer processing of information, leading to a higher conversion to purchase than for other media.
I’ll go through some important points to give you an idea of how this works so that you can make an informed decision when launching your first, or your next AR campaign.
When looking at the benefits of using AR in a campaign, an interesting factor is how the brain reacts when interacting with AR. As far as is known according to the few studies that have been done, these reactions stem from the blend between actual reality and the digital layer, making the digital content feel as if it is a part of the user’s world.
Studies show that consumers interacting with AR advertising react with higher levels of curiosity than compared with similar ads with no AR content. The hidden layer promises something more and unknown. (source: Yang et al).
When participants in a study run by Heather Andrew of Neuro-Insight (source: How Augmented Reality Affects the Brain) were scanned while using AR campaigns and equivalent non-AR campaigns, there was a clear difference between the two groups, with the AR group showing 70% higher visual attention toward the experience than the non-AR group. This is important, as engagement with a brand increases with the level of attention. Heather Andrew writes: “...AR drove higher levels of attention than pretty much any other medium we have studied.”.
Heather Andrew also writes that participants using AR were seen to have a surprise response, in other words that people experience something they aren’t expecting, which further increases engagement.
Another study entitled “The effect of augmented reality versus traditional advertising: a comparison between neurophysiological and self-reported measures“ (Pozharliev et al) shows that consumers engaging with AR report a higher level of arousal, which means that they are more alert and have elevated levels of interest and engagement compared to non-AR media. This is extremely important, as any campaign needs to get as much attention from the consumer as possible to make a difference in the long run. This also further strengthens the findings mentioned in the sections above.
Thanks to the fact that AR is added to the real world, it brings the unique possibility of giving consumers new and unexpected experiences in familiar surroundings. This plays to our longing for adventure and novelty and thus draws people in.
When people are drawn in, their curiosity is aroused and their visual attention is focused. This in turn leads to them engaging more fully with the content, which creates a stronger sense of connection to the experience. This reflects positively on the product or the brand.
When drawn in and feeling engaged with an experience, users tend to dwell longer, again increasing the attention that a brand or product is given. This has been found in several studies, where the average dwell time for an AR experience is 75 seconds, which is almost 4X that of a regular mobile digital ad (source: Arinsider).
This in turn increases the likelihood of the consumer purchasing the product or staying loyal to the brand.
According to “The effect of augmented reality versus traditional advertising: a comparison between neurophysiological and self-reported measures“, AR advertising enhances the processing fluency, defined as the ease with which consumers process product-related information. This increased fluency leads to consumers having more favorable responses toward the product/brand.
Once again, Heather Andrew looked at her results and found the effects on memory retention that AR can have, writing: “memory encoding was 70% higher in the AR tasks compared to the non-AR tasks. What this means is that AR can be a particularly powerful way to deliver information that is subsequently retained.”
In other words, consumers who interact with AR remember up to 70% more information than from interaction with other media.
In a report written by Nielsen, ARe you ready for what’s next? A look @ Augmented Reality Measurement & The Impact that was carried out for SnapAR (Nielsen), they found that AR ads lead to 6 times the sales effect compared to TV ads.
At the moment there are over 1 billion active mobile AR users on planet earth and the number is growing each year. Additionally, there are potentially 3 billion if everyone who had an AR capable mobile device were to use them for this purpose.
There are many different reasons to choose AR as the superior channel compared to traditional ad media such as TV, billboards or flyers. So if you want your audience to engage with your content, use time immersing themselves, remember what they have experienced and come away with strong feelings for your brand and a higher chance of going from ad to purchase, AR is the way to go.
