The effectiveness of online video content can be measured using metrics such as likes, shares and views. With YouTube Advertising, however, advertisers are able to dig deeper into customer behaviour and measure the effectiveness of their video ads by how engaged people were (TrueViews) and what type of people are viewing. These insights and metrics, when delivered in real-time, make optimising your online video campaign incredibly easy, and help you make informed decisions about your content and your targeting. If you are looking to increase sales and are contemplating using YouTube advertising, you’re in luck, we get asked about this all the time at Benchmarketing. Here are some answers below to help you decide.
Does YouTube Advertising work?
YouTube advertising has seen incredible growth in the last decade, and is a core marketing channel for many advertisers in 2015. Google predicts that the budget allocated to YouTube advertising will increase by 21% each year until 2019. If you are a marketer in a management position, it is likely you are increasingly being required to rationalize and measure your advertising spend – using YouTube Advertising will give you a large variety of engagement statistics for highly accurate campaign measurement, and will help you communicate your decisions to your team more effectively.
As a marketer of a brand in the digital era, it is likely you are used to walking the fine line between highly engaging content that users are going to love, and keeping in line with your brand guidelines. Coming up with content that users are going to love is one part of the equation. Granted, it is a large part, and is the first step in creating a successful YouTube advertising campaign. However, what you want to know as a marketer of a brand is not only that users who watched your content were engaged and enjoyed the overall viewing experience, but also that this content helped craft a perception of your brand in the user that is favourable to a sale or referral.
Traditionally, finding and tracking this sort of information has been difficult, as the only kind of feedback available was in views or clicks. With YouTube advertising, you are able to acquire a lot more detail about your campaign and the perception of your brand in the online space, and you can do this not when the campaign is over, but while the campaign is still running. This allows you to optimise as you go rather than from campaign to campaign.
What is the impact of YouTube Advertising?
When deep insights about your online campaign are available to you at the click of a button, it is likely that your perception of your own video content will change. Why? Because now instead of simply making assumptions about how engaging, interesting or entertaining your content is, the data of your audience will tell you. If your video content is lacking in some way, you’ll know pretty quickly with almost real-time statistical feedback. This way you can change, edit and optimise your creative or your audience quickly, with minimum waste.
How do I optimise my creative?
One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of your campaign message is by creating an A/B split test. At the start of a campaign, it is a good idea to create at least two creative options, exposed at a somewhat low spend, but high enough to understand which is performing best. You might do this by changing the tagline in each option of creative, changing the imagery, or changing the call to action. With YouTube advertising metrics, you will be able to determine which message or campaign element is working best in a matter of days, and increase the spend in this ad while decreasing the spend in the other.
With traditional TV campaigns, there is no way to know which ad is performing best and for whom, and there is not often any way to change your creative even if you know that its performance is lacking. This makes YouTube Advertising a very attractive video channel in the modern era, as the data you have access to means not only is your audience happier, as it is seeing content that resonates, but your executive team and bottom line are probably happier too.
How do I target the right audience?
The best way to find the right audience is to cast your net wide. By this, we mean that you might have some assumptions about the target market of your brand or product, and that’s great, these assumptions are able to be tested, but don’t limit your demographic targeting to who you think you might appeal to. It is often a better idea to set very wide parameters, such as the country and a large age range, and let the data speak for itself. With YouTube advertising, you will soon find out which ad creative and messaging is working best and for whom, and you might be surprised with the results.
Which metrics should I focus on?
Depending on your company’s overarching marketing goals, and the goals you have for your online spend specifically, you will need to prioritise different user stats to measure the success of your YouTube advertising campaign.
With YouTube advertising, you are able to optimise your media spend to your specific campaign goals, whether they are unique views, traffic to your site, brand interest and perception, or sales. You need to set a clear goal to measure success. If your goal is brand awareness in a specific demographic, then the best metric to optimise towards is Engaged Views. This metric takes into account the total views of the video, the amount of times the video was served, and the demographic viewing the video. If your goal is reach, then video ‘shares’ are a metric to watch, as these indicate that users have been so engaged with your content that they want their network to know about it. Although this might not lead to direct sales straight away, this will increase brand awareness, which, as we know, is the first step in the consumer purchase funnel.
To recap, YouTube Advertising is the perfect channel for the modern marketer, as it presents myriad ways to test the effectiveness of your media spend, your creative messaging and your brand awareness.
What’s next?
Now you understand the benefits of YouTube advertising, why not give the Ad Operations team at Benchmarketing a call? We can help you make the most of your online spend through high-impact online video. Call us on 1300 049 498, the team would love to hear from you.
