Make The Best Of YouTube Yours With YouTube Select

Helping you connect with your audience is our top priority. This is especially important as digital takes precedence in how we interact, communicate and stay connected.

To make this even easier for your brand, today we’re announcing a new global content solution called YouTube Select—a reimagination and unification of solutions like Google Preferred and prime packs. It offers more flexibility to reach the audiences you can’t find elsewhere in the content and places they choose to watch—with the confidence that your buy is brand-safe.  

More content for greater relevance at scale

Viewers say YouTube offers the most extensive video library.1 To help you find the right content for your brand, YouTube Select surfaces a diverse mix of content packages called lineups—each tailored to globally and locally relevant needs like beauty & fashion, entertainment, technology, sports and everything in between.

This year, we’re introducing a new offering called emerging lineups in the U.S. Emerging lineups provide an easy way to efficiently extend the reach of your campaigns among up and coming or niche channels, with the added benefit of brand suitability controls. 

Beyond our lineups offerings, YouTube Select can now help advertisers reach new audiences across top YouTube apps and verticals like YouTube Kids, Sports, Music and Originals with sponsorships and programs. Across markets, advertisers should work with their local teams to customize the right YouTube Select plan for their needs.

More capabilities for the TV screen, and how you buy

Around the world, people are turning more and more to YouTube on the biggest screen in their home. This shift in viewing behavior means lineups contain more TV screen inventory than ever before.

For example in the U.S., over 100 million people watch YouTube and YouTube TV on their TV screen each month.2  And according to Comscore, YouTube has a higher household reach and share of watch time than the next 3 ad-supported streaming services combined.3  

That’s why we’re introducing a dedicated streaming TV lineup as part of YouTube Select in the U.S. to help brands reach their audiences where they are watching. Streaming TV combines the best of YouTube TV and lineups content, both on TV screens. That means being able to easily reach your audience with a single, scalable offering on the big screen across the best content, including popular creators, YouTube Originals, live sports, feature length movies, timely news and more.

We also recently announced Brand Lift measurement on TV screens, which will be available globally for the YouTube app and coming soon for YouTube TV, to better help brands measure their results.

In addition to more capabilities on the TV screen, we are also bringing more choice to how you buy. Many countries, including most across Europe and Asia-Pacific, are making certain YouTube Select lineups available via Google Ads, Display & Video 360 and reservation. Connect with your Google sales team to learn more about the buying methods available in your region.

More certainty in your campaigns

With YouTube Select, you can be confident that your ad buys are brand-safe. You’ll have access to advanced brand suitability controls, as well as the option to only serve ads on videos that have been machine classified and human-verified across all lineups (lineup/market dependent).

Harriet Perry, General Manager at OMG Digital says “For Omnicom Media Group UK, the ability to build relevant and customized content plans to support the unique needs of each of our clients is critical. The YouTube Select product will allow us to achieve this, and will also provide us added controls like human verification and brand measurement. Additionally, we are excited about YouTube Select’s audience and scale on OTT/connected TV devices, which will be a core part of our overall connected TV strategy.”

With more content, capabilities and certainty, YouTube Select offers an easier way for you to authentically connect with your audience at scale. Most importantly, YouTube Select helps drive real results for your business. In 2019, global lineups delivered an average awareness lift of 13 percent and an average purchase intent lift of 9 percent.4 And in an MMM meta-analysis we commissioned with Nielsen in the U.S., YouTube Select lineups had greater ROI than TV in 73 percent of MMMs that measured YouTube Select lineups, Other Digital, and TV in 2016-2018.5

Make the best of YouTube yours with YouTube Select. 

Explore YouTube Select programming on our website. Connect with your Google sales team to learn more about YouTube Select offerings and rollout timing in your region.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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

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