Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Say It In Six: Why Marketers And Creatives Are Embracing The Newest Video Ad Length

26 April 2017 by

Have you heard the good news about YouTube’s six-second bumper ads? These little wonders have swept the globe for three simple reasons: they provide wide reach, they drive brand results and they’re a great canvas for creativity.

And we’re ready to mark the one year anniversary of bumpers by giving them their star turn – for the 2017-2018 upfront season, we’re making bumpers available for Google Preferred buys. This format is a perfect match to the sought-after content included in Google Preferred and will help advertisers drive reach and build awareness during increasingly mobile viewing moments.

Let’s take a closer look at this little format that could, built to capture attention wherever and whenever it’s available.

Bumpers drive efficient reach

Sold on a simple CPM, bumpers aren’t just an easy way to get your brand in front of a lot of people – they also effectively drive upper funnel results. We looked across 122 bumpers campaigns in the US last year and found that 70% drove a significant lift in brand awareness, with an average lift of 9%.1 On ad recall, they perform even better – over 9 in 10 drove ad recall globally, with an average lift of over 30%.2 Given their high success rate and ease of use, bumpers can be a great building block for your YouTube campaigns.

Bumpers work for brands

Thanks to their efficiency and efficacy, many brands are weaving bumpers into their campaigns. For instance, Busch used bumpers to continue the story from their first-ever Super Bowl ad. Busch worked with their creative agency Deutsch to collect extra footage from their Super Bowl shoot and create bumpers with different themes. This approach resulted in a double-digit lift in both purchase consideration and brand awareness among viewers. Knowing how well its bumpers performed across various brand lift metrics, Busch was also able to optimize its campaign in real-time, tailoring its creatives to audience segments most likely to consider buying the beer after seeing a particular ad. As Anheuser-Busch’s Senior Director, Digital Victoria Vaynberg points out, “Capturing consumers’ attention is always a challenge, so short and contextually-relevant content is key to getting over this hurdle. By using YouTube bumpers, we were able to tap into a great product that is built to address this challenge and successfully break through with consumers.”

Under Armour also turned to bumpers for a recent product launch. They took a strategic hybrid approach for advertising on YouTube, leading with a TrueView ad, which helped to engage the audience through an emotional narrative, followed by bumpers that highlighted the innovation of the new product.

“Under Armour is committed to making all athletes better through performance and innovation, while inspiring the next generation of athletes with powerful storytelling,” said Jim Mollica, Vice President of Consumer Engagement at Under Armour. “Our forward-thinking strategy guided our athletes through a unique engagement funnel, which was evidenced by double the lift in product interest among people who saw our YouTube bumper ad and our TrueView ad combined, compared to those who only saw our TrueView ad.”

We’ve also seen strong results in third party studies when using a comparable approach to Under Armour’s – using bumpers to remarket to TrueView views produced a significantly higher lift in ad recall vs TrueView alone, with an average higher lift of 42% for the skipped views and 104% for the paid views.3 We’re excited to see other brands follow a similar playbook, orchestrating their storytelling across ad lengths to maximize results.”

Bumpers offer a great canvas for creativity

It’s no surprise that some of bumpers’ earliest fans have come from the creative community. Part of the reason bumpers are such a fertile format for storytelling is that creativity thrives in constraint. At SXSW, we challenged artists, filmmakers and agency creatives to re-imagine classic works of literature in six seconds – effectively re-telling these stories in miniature. The results were by turns evocative, funny, poignant and beautiful, and they showed that six seconds is a natural and adaptable ad length. For more insights into how to build bumpers that work, check out our new article “Success in Six” on Think with Google.

For more information on bumpers, including how to set up a campaign, check out the Help Center, and don’t forget to #bumpitup.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Track Your Goals With Campaign Groups And Performance Targets

6 September 2016 by

AdWords provides powerful tools to help advertisers grow their business. For example, if you’re about to launch a new holiday campaign, you can use TrueView ads on YouTube along with banner ads on the Google Display Network to drive brand awareness and more holiday sales. To make it easier for you to track and forecast the performance of these campaigns against your advertising goals, we’re introducing campaign groups and performance targets.

Create a campaign group

You can now package AdWords campaigns (including Video, Display, Search, and Shopping campaigns) into a single campaign group. For our holiday example, set up your YouTube and Display campaigns, select “campaign groups” from the left menu, and group those two campaigns together to create a campaign group called “Holiday Launch”.

Set a performance target

Performance targets make it easier to monitor and reach your performance goals for each campaign group. Tell us how many clicks or conversions you want to receive, how much you want to spend, and what average CPC or CPA you wish to maintain. We’ll then automatically show you a single view of how your campaign group is performing against those goals, and what we think you’ll likely achieve by the end of the campaign period.

 Here’s an early success story for campaign groups and performance targets:

“Previously I needed to export all my campaigns into a spreadsheet, group them together, and create a pivot table simply to see how they are performing. With campaign groups & performance targets, we can much more easily see how our groups are performing relative to our goals, all from within the AdWords interface.“

– Oleg Monakhov, Senior Lead Generation Manager at Wrike

Note that creating performance targets does not change how we serve your ads or optimize your campaigns. Instead, use it to evaluate whether or not your campaigns are working together toward your broader goals.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Surface Your Videos When Viewers Are Looking For What To Watch With TrueView Discovery Ads

21 July 2016 by

Think about the last YouTube video you watched. How did you find that video? Did a friend send it to you? Did you click a link from a blog or social media? Or did you do what millions of YouTube users do every day and head to YouTube to find something to watch?

To win over users who are choosing which video to watch, we built TrueView discovery ads (formerly known as TrueView in-display) – a format tailored specifically to helping users discover your brand content. And today we’re not just changing the name – we’re supercharging TrueView discovery ads with more relevant ads on search results pages and full inventory coverage across the YouTube app. This means that for the first time ever, TrueView discovery ads will appear on mobile search results. And thanks to our changes to search ad relevance, our experiments show an aggregate 11% increase in CTR.

TrueView discovery ads are such a powerful format because they deliver high engagement – when viewers click on your video, that’s a strong signal that they’re interested in your brand. It’s why on average, users view one additional video from your brand within 24 hours of watching your TrueView discovery ad.1 This format is built for winning over your audience, and guiding them to your content when they’re searching for something great to watch.

Since TrueView discovery ads capture your audience when they’re leaning forward, we see on average TrueView discovery ads drive over 5x more clicks on advertiser-provided calls to action than TrueView in-stream. They’re also great for promoting your longer form content.

Advertisers like Benefit Cosmetics are using TrueView discovery ads to amplify their branded content. In a recent campaign, they used the format to reach viewers as they searched and browsed the latest brow trends. “We wanted to insert ourselves in a way that felt natural and really drove our brand and DNA, but also be incredibly useful to the customer when they’re looking for us,” said Nicole Frusci, Benefit’s vice president of brand and digital marketing. By serving up relevant content on YouTube search results and on related video watch pages, Benefit was able to boost subscriptions to their channel by 20% and drive an additional 663,000 earned views on top of their 1.2M paid views.

But why read all about what makes TrueView discovery ads so great when you can watch a video instead? Take it away, Josh:

These changes will roll out in the next few weeks – keep an eye out in Adwords or DoubleClick Bid Manager – so you can start engaging your most qualified audience at key moments of discovery across YouTube.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog