As home to the content people need and the creators they love, YouTube is where personal meets popular — with fan favorite channels like Naomi Campbell (500,000+ subscribers) and Zach King (10 million+ subscribers). In the U.S., YouTube is the #1 video content provider viewers would miss the most if it was no longer available.1
To help brands engage peak audiences, build association and stay relevant when it matters most, today we’re announcing a bigger, better sponsorship program under YouTube Select in the U.S.
Expanding our YouTube Select sponsorship offering
In addition to longstanding sponsorships available exclusively in the upfront like NFL Game Day All Access, new this year, we’re offering a rolling set of seasonal sponsorships available on a quarterly basis.
Our seasonal sponsorship offering focuses specifically on what’s prominent in culture during that time of year, like Mother’s Day, Summer Wellness or Women in Music during Women’s History Month. And most importantly, the breadth of the seasonal slate means advertisers have a much wider variety of opportunities to celebrate diverse communities and topics, and reach their audiences where they are watching.
See below for a glimpse into some of the most exciting sponsorships coming up, available either upfront or through our new seasonal offering.
The Upfront Slate
Reaching over 30 million views in the 2020 season, NFL Game Day All Access will be returning to YouTube for a third season this fall.2 Streaming exclusively on the NFL YouTube channel, it gives fans an intimate look at the full game day experience, with wired sound from players and coaches. Advertisers will have the opportunity to sponsor the show for multiple episodes during the regular season and postseason.
2020 was the biggest year yet for gaming on YouTube, with 100 billion watch time hours and 40 million+ active gaming channels. Building on this momentum, we’re adding a brand new upfront opportunity with Summer Game Fest — the industry’s first fully digital and global gaming event. We’re also excited to bring back the upfront sponsorship for The Game Awards — one of the biggest nights in the gaming industry that celebrates the biggest achievements of the year, including high share of voice, in-show integration and more.
Additionally, brands will have the opportunity to put on their studio executive hats with YouTube Greenlight. YouTube Greenlight brings a group of emerging YouTube creators together to pitch an original series ideas based on specific advertisers goals. The sponsorship includes a custom creator pitch session, a fully funded creator original series with integrations and paid promotion across YouTube.
The Seasonal Slate
Today, YouTube announced a continued focus on sustainability with new original programming coming later this year. A subset of these shows will be available for sponsorship as part of our Q4 sustainability seasonal package, alongside other opportunities with YouTube creators and content focused on sustainable impact. The sponsorship will be available for companies with strong commitments to building a better planet for everyone.
Additionally, the seasonal state offers new ways to connect with your audience during holidays like Mother’s Day. For Mother’s Day specifically, we’ve seen surges in interest for things like that special gift, the perfect song for mom and more. To help brands align with this moment on YouTube, we’re offering a variety of packages including ownership of top moms’ channel WhatsUpMoms and the ability to build your own high share of voice packages across top mom creator and celebrity channels.
We’re celebrating Black Music Appreciation Month with three different Black Music Month packages in June. Each sponsorship includes high share of voice across relevant playlists like R&B Wave or Essential 00’s Hip Hop, added value components and ownership of top channels like Joe Budden TV.
How advertisers are tapping into moments that matter most on YouTube
Mediacom partnered with their client and YouTube to honor women’s history through the lens of music. The partnership included development of custom creative assets to celebrate women’s history, plus 100% share of voice of contextual environments like Women’s History Month music playlists and the GRAMMY’s channel, which featured a Women in the Mix special.
Angelina Kim, Senior Partner & Group Director, Mediacom, said “This was an important opportunity to help our client connect with their audience, and drive engagement with the brand in the moments that matter most — all creatives drove significant increases in awareness and message association.”
The sponsorships shared today are just a sampling of what’s available. Reach out to your Google sales team to learn more about YouTube Select sponsorships available in the upfront, and throughout the year.
1. Google/Talkshoppe, US, whyVideo study, n=2003 A18-64 Genpop video users, June 2020. 2. YouTube Data, Sep 2020 – Mar 2021
YouTube is inarguably the biggest platform for video creators to potentially reach millions of people around the globe. The problem many creators face is how to get those views.
If you’re a marketer or content developer looking to boost your YouTube views for free, the process can take time and effort. But if done correctly, you’ll be rewarded with more views, a better user experience, and opportunities to grow your content and audience.
Like most major social media platforms, YouTube operates on an algorithm that suggests videos that a particular user will most likely be interested in to keep them on YouTube for longer. This data is collected from the user’s viewership history and engagement on videos they have watched in the past.
Thankfully, YouTube’s algorithm considers a wide range of variables when determining which videos are the best and should appear at the top of its search results. This algorithm is vital in determining if your video makes it onto the suggested and trending page.
Whether you’re just starting a YouTube channel for the first time or you’re seeking new ways to gain viewers, it’s important to stay on top of the latest methods.
So, here’s 10 of the best practices for getting more YouTube views (bonus: don’t miss the 3 mistakes you’ll definitely want to avoid).
10 Best Practices For Getting More YouTube Views
1.) Allow Ads On Your Videos
If you’re trying to monetize your blog, allowing YouTube to run advertisements can be a great start. But if you don’t use the right kind of ad placements for your video, it can drive away viewers. If your video is longer, it’s reasonable to run an ad in the middle. Shorter videos should stick to ads placed at the beginning or end of the video. Even though studies show that visual attention is higher for advertisements on YouTube than on TV, you shouldn’t expect viewers to watch more advertising than content. So before you check yes to placing ads in every place you can, consider the perspective of the viewer.
2.) Keyword Optimization
For each of your videos, it’s imperative to embed unique keywords in specific areas. Creating strands of keywords for each video will improve the reach of your video. It will also place your video in front of the right crowd. If you haven’t been customizing your keywords for each video, you can open the data from previous videos by going to “Videos” in your YouTube Studio Dashboard.
TITLES: Write Youtube Titles that are descriptive and keyword rich. Picking a good title is critical. Your title should not give everything about your video away but should be intriguing enough that someone would want to click on it with the promise of what the title is delivered in the video. A engaging and descriptive title accomplishes two goals: it provides keywords for the algorithm to sort for relevancy, and it attracts viewers and informs them about the video’s content. You can do your keyword research through a keyword planner provided by Google. Go to keyword planner and select YouTube search on the far right to see how common a keyword is on YouTube. By reminding users and search engines of what your video is about, optimizing your video content for the right keywords can help you gain organic views.
DESCRIPTIONS: The video description informs the viewer what the video is about without giving too much away. You can think of it as a meta-description except for YouTube. A description that stands out and captures the viewers’ interest increases the click-through rate, thus generating more views. Entice users with keywords you know they are looking out for when they search for a particular video. An excellent format to follow is to have a strong introduction of approximately 2-3 sentences, an outline that is about 150 words, and links to relevant websites and your social handles.
TAGS: Video tags help create a niche for your video and your content so that the algorithm understands what viewers may be interested in when they watch your video and those like it. Tags, therefore, push videos with relevant tags to the forefront of a user’s suggestion page, increasing viewership. The best place to put these phrases is at the bottom of your description. But also remember to change the automatically generated keywords in the “Extras” section.
Pro Tip: It can also be useful to keep a notepad or Word document with common keywords for you to add to your videos. Keeping this list can help you generate these words faster and cut down your uploading time.
Include keywords in these places:
Thumbnails
Tags
Video Description
3.) YouTube Subscribe Watermark
The more subscribers you have, the more likely viewers are going to see your posts. But how do you draw viewers into subscribing? By creating a “subscribe” watermark for your videos. Creating your own “subscribe” watermark is simpler than it may look. In YouTube Studio, select Settings > Channel > Branding. From this screen, you can choose an image for your branding watermark and the amount of time you would like it displayed on your video. Make sure the image design catches the eye and matches your channel.
Pro Tip: Casually reminding viewers in your video to subscribe and click the Notification Bell can be a great way to also invite new viewers to subscribe. This method is especially effective if you make it fun or unique to your channel.
4.) Aim to Entertain or Teach
There are two reasons most people watch YouTube: to be entertained or to learn something. If your videos are doing one or both of these actions, then you’re in a good place. The more entertaining or informative your videos are, the more likely people will share them, talk about them, and gain trust in your content. Gaining consistent subscribers and viewers in the key to growing your YouTube channel.
5.) Create YouTube Playlists
If you’re a content creator that dabbles in several different kinds of videos, you may have noticed that some of your videos will get different responses. Some viewers may only want to watch certain types of videos you’ve made. But how do they find all your past videos for these categories? One way to help viewers find the content they are looking for is to create playlists for each category of videos you make. Creating playlists generates a “binge-watch” mentality with viewers. It also gains you more consistent views.
Playlists give top-performing channels an extra edge over other channels simply because of Auto-play. From a viewer’s perspective, it takes effort to pull your attention away from an entertaining video, so it is much easier for videos to keep playing.
The concept of loss aversion states that people feel more significant pain from losing something than gaining the equivalent. This can be visualized so that an individual is likely to work harder to keep $100 than earn $100. Auto-play uses this concept to keep viewers on YouTube. So instead of the ‘loss’ of clicking away from a video, a viewer would instead continue watching. Use this to your advantage by curating a playlist that the viewer is likely to watch for longer.
Pro Tip: Spend time organizing your playlists. It may seem logical to place them chronologically, but also consider the flow and topics of each video so they blend seamlessly together.
6.) Balance Following Trends and Creating Unique Content
Sometimes referred to as “newsjacking”, creating videos about current trends can generate more views for your channel easily. Once a trend is picked up on YouTube, you’ll find everyone releasing videos about the same subject or content, hoping to catch the tailwind of viewers. The problem with many of these videos is that they regurgitate the same content without offering anything new or unique. There’s nothing wrong with creating content that people are already interested in, but try to create something unique which has your spin on it. Be sure that what you create is true to your channel’s themes and other videos.
7.) Create Relationships For Guest YouTuber Appearances
Creating bonds between like-minded channels can be a great way to increase viewership. Even writing engaging comments on popular posts can draw people’s attention to your own channel. Try contacting similar channel creators and ask if they’d like to do a collaboration video. Having popular YouTuber guests on your posts can draw in new viewers, but it can also create a sense of community for both of your channels’ subscribers. Collaborations are a massive part of the YouTube community. When YouTubers collaborate, they increase viewership by attracting viewers from all the parties involved and introducing them to other content creators similar and in the same community.
8.) Be Present in Your Content Community
Engagement with your viewers and community is on the rise. This is because the viewer feels that they have established an authentic and organic relationship with their content creator. Doing so increases the chances that viewers care about your brand and are likely to subscribe and expand your knowledge and understanding of your particular audience.
9.) Link Your YouTube Videos on Your Social Media Pages
People that are in contact with you on other social media platforms will have an easier time getting to know your YouTube channel and the content you create with just one click. Pushing traffic from your social media profile to your YouTube channel also helps out with the algorithm as your video is seen as a source of clicks from other websites.
10.) Use cards and end screens
These tools help promote other videos from your channel and are a call-to-action. Doing so ties in with the concept of loss aversion used in auto-play. Cards are a tool that pops up at certain times during your video, relevant to what content you are going through at that moment. An end screen is a frame at the end of your video that wraps things up and suggests other videos created by you. This keeps viewers on your channel and increases the viewership of your other videos.
There you have it, ten steps that you can take to increase your viewership. Above all, focus on creating great content for your target audience. Then optimize your content with the above tips and watch your viewership grow.
Gone are the days where YouTube trending videos revolved around funny, strange cats and dogs on skateboards. More than 500 videos get produced every minute on the platform.
YouTube is now a thriving platform with various topics and subjects for everyone. It’s time to get your business on Youtube and start generating an additional stream of traffic to your website.
but what about the 3 mistakes to avoid?
3 biggest mistakes to avoid:
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When it comes to a marketing budget, every dollar is precious, especially for small businesses, and you need to squeeze as much mileage out of each marketing tactic as possible. That is why the concept of remarketing makes so much sense.
Although marketers would love to be able to just drive prospects to a website or retail location, where they make an immediate purchase, the real outcome is that this scenario seldom comes true. Some people do use their mobile devices to make immediate purchases (think food or gasoline), but most must be nurtured and communicated to several times to make the impression that tilts the buying scale in your favor.
Let’s say you spend a considerable amount of money on your online marketing strategy, and meet with a certain amount of success. Remarketing is a way to connect with those people who ALREADY took notice of your business, interacted in some way, or possibly even visited your website. This marketing tactic allows you to strategically position follow up advertisements in front of these audiences, reminding them of your brand.
You might have experienced remarketing when you searched for something online, and saw a promotion for that very same product come up in your Facebook feed or Google results.
If you need some convincing statistics about the power of remarketing, consider the following:
One ad is not enough: Only 2% of visitors make a purchase on their first visit to a website. Cart abandonment rates are incredibly high, especially on mobile devices. Remarketing offers the possibility of getting a second chance with that other 98%.
Conversion rates increase over time: WordStream reveals that the more prospects see an ad, the more likely they are to buy. Sometimes they might not really notice your ad, or your timing could be off. But, the more they see what you offer, the more likely you are to catch their attention.
People ENJOY reminders: Would you be surprised to find out that 25% of visitors actually enjoy seeing a remarketing reminder? If they liked something enough to research it once, the chances are they had interest, but were not yet fully motivated to buy.
Common Remarketing Mistakes and How to Correct Them
Although it might seem easy enough to just say that you want to remarket to people who have interacted in some way with your business online, setting up remarketing is not easy. It requires following several holy grails of technical manuals, and there are dozens of ways to make mistakes which compound quickly.
Here are some of the biggest missteps, and tips to make your remarketing more effective:
Set Up Your Remarketing: If you have ever heard that “there is never enough time to do something right the first time, but always enough time to do it over,” you have already learned an important lesson about remarketing – set it up right! Google takes you through a step-by-step remarketing set-up process. Set up an audience source, tag your website for remarketing, create a data source, and use Tag Manager to confirm that a global site tag has been placed on every page of your website.
Choose Your Audience Wisely: Setting up your audience lists will help you define which audiences see your ads across Gmail, YouTube, Google Search, and the Google Display Network through remarketing campaigns. Choose website visitors, your customer list, similar audience, app users, and callers, or a custom combination to specify who you want to see your ads. The audience you choose depends on the type of ad you will run. Don’t try to accomplish too much with one ad. It can be confusing to your audience, and will be next to impossible to track. On the other hand, though, you do need an audience that is large enough to generate trackable results, so don’t exclude every possible demographic just to save a few dollars.
Remarket to Those You Already Know: You only have a passing acquaintance with some people – they visited your website once, or clicked on a YouTube video. But, with others there is a more “intimate” relationship. They are on your e-newsletter list, gave you an email address to download an e-book or white paper, or maybe even made a purchase. Perhaps they got all the way to the shopping cart stage, without taking the final buying action. These are people that are not what you might consider “regular” customers yet. You want to have specific remarketing efforts for this audience to remind them of why they like your business, and motivate them to take another action. This is also where the concept of the “similar” audience is useful – if it works well for your current associations, then it will probably work for those who are in similar demographic groups, too.
Think About the Length of Your Remarketing Campaign. You could believe you want a particular remarketing campaign to last about 30 days, but some buying decisions need longer periods of time than that. You might want a sales promotion to run a week or two, and a restaurant can probably get by with a shorter timeframe, but a car dealership might have to go out to two months to meet their buyers’ thought process. You want to have enough visibility during the timeframe when a prospect is most likely to revisit their purchase options.
Don’t Go Overboard: There is a limit to how much any prospect, even a very interested one, wants to hear from you. Use frequency capping to limit the number of times your remarketing ads appear to the same person over a given time period.
Pay Attention to All Your Online Marketing: Although it might feel like your remarketing strategy should be able to practically run itself, you do want to check on it regularly to make sure it is generating the results you expect. Look for areas you can improve on, and also those that might need to be rethought completely. Keep an eye on those people who do convert, to determine how you want to reach out to them in upcoming remarketing efforts. And don’t focus so much on the remarketing that you forget to revisit your primary online marketing strategy, as that is what is driving the initial results you count on for remarketing.
Watch the Audience Overlap: You want to try to maintain control over the amount of information each of your specific audiences will receive from you. Too much and they might get annoyed; too little and they could lose interest. Think about what you are saying to each audience, how long your campaign will last, and figure out whether they are getting other overlapping remarketing messages from your business.
Measure and Measure Again: You want to get a good ROI with any marketing strategy, and that includes your remarketing efforts. Take advantage of Google Analytics to gain insights on pages visited, session length, and traffic sources, in order to improve results.
Finally – BE INTERESTING! You might have made it perfectly through the set-up and audience selection parts, but you still need to have an ad that is interesting. Use quality images and captivating content to grab your audience’s attention and make them give your business a second thought. You’ll want to do some testing of various versions of your ad, to make sure you hit on the exact combination that works.
This focused on the concept of remarketing with Google, but Facebook also has a very similar process (they call it re-targeting) for helping people rediscover what they really love about your business. The point is that you want your online marketing to work its very best for your small business. Building on strategies you already have in place through remarketing can help take those efforts to the next level.
Advertising Week is an event I look forward to every year—it brings global thought leaders together to find new ways we can use technology to solve business challenges. Over the past few months, I’ve had a chance to meet virtually with many of you to learn how COVID-19 is impacting your business and how partners like Google can help. I’ve been inspired by how you’re supporting your local communities and re-imagining ways to run your business.
You’ve also shared great ideas for how we can build better solutions that help you grow your business online. Today at Advertising Week, I’m excited to share innovations that will give you new insights about changing consumer behavior and help you meet customer demand in real time through automation.
Get insights tailored for your business
Consumer behavior is constantly changing, and the pandemic has only accelerated the pace of that change. For example, Kettlebell Kings saw a surge in interest for home fitness products when communities began sheltering in place. By meeting this demand from customers, the team processed more sales in one day than they typically would have over the course of months! For Zazzle, an online marketplace for customized products, exploring search trends allowed them to identify rising categories like puzzles and outdoor games as people looked for activities to do at home. By investing in these categories, Zazzle was able to deliver on customer needs and improve campaign performance.
These businesses are proving how important it is to stay ahead of shifts in consumer behavior in order to drive continued growth. That’s why we’re introducing the new Insights page in Google Ads to give you custom insights specific to your business. We’re rolling out the beta in the coming months and will add new information over time—including audience and forecasting insights.
The Insights page will feature a trends section that shows current and emerging search demand for the products or services most relevant to your business. For example, an outdoor retailer can quickly take notice of rising demand for tents as consumers gear up for more outdoor adventures. And a vacation rental company might see a growing trend for cabins. Explore these trends to uncover opportunities for categories you already promote in your campaigns—as well as for new, related areas you could tap into.
You can deep dive into a trend to understand which queries consumers are searching for or the geographic locations where demand is growing the most. These trends are aggregated and anonymized across many queries and can’t be tied to any individual user. Also use the integration with recommendations to easily activate keyword, budget and bidding optimizations in a few steps. You can apply these learnings to unlock new business opportunities, like new product areas to pivot into or future promotions to highlight.
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Keep up with consumer demand and take action in real time
Insights help you keep a finger on the pulse of changing consumer demand, and automation makes it possible to act on it in real time. To bring the full value of automation to more businesses, we’re introducing Performance Max campaigns, a new way to buy Google ads across all our inventory.
Google Ads currently offers fully-automated campaigns for app marketers, retailers, and businesses with physical locations to drive results across Google’s surfaces. Performance Max campaigns will build on learnings from those campaigns to deliver a comprehensive solution that works for all advertisers across a wider range of marketing objectives. They’ll deliver four main benefits:
1. Customer reach: Performance Max campaigns will complement your keyword-based Search campaigns, and be the most complete solution to help you drive conversions and revenue by unifying Google’s ad inventory.
2. Performance towards your business goals: Over time, you’ll be able to choose from multiple marketing objectives like online sales, new customer acquisition, and offline sales. For the first time, you’ll also be able to drive new leads across Google from one campaign. Machine learning will automatically optimize for your most valuable customers across channels.
A new goals-first setup makes it easier to fully define your conversion goals. For example, if your objective is to generate leads, you can make sure you’re capturing both form submissions and phone calls as goals.
3. New reporting and insights: Get a deeper understanding of how machine learning is working for your business, such as which audiences and creative asset combinations are performing the best. Performance Max campaigns will also be included in the new Insights page to help you understand what’s driving changes in your performance.
4. New campaign inputs: While automation helps you drive better results, your expertise and knowledge of your business can improve how machine learning performs. Speed up the campaign learning process by specifying which audiences are most likely to convert. Combine these inputs with value rules to indicate which conversions are worth the most to your business based on characteristics like audience, location and device.
We’re still in the early stages of testing Performance Max campaigns and will invite more advertisers to join the beta next year. You should continue to use existing campaign types to meet your business goals during this important holiday season.
Reach more viewers and inspire action
As people spend more time at home, video streaming is a key area where a “new normal” is emerging. On YouTube in particular, over 2 billion people globally are gravitating towards timely content to stay entertained, keep up with current events, and learn new skills. In the coming weeks, Video action campaigns will expand to all advertisers to help you drive more conversions from video and inspire action across YouTube and Google video partners.
People are also watching YouTube in more ways than before—for example in the U.S., over 100 million people watch YouTube and YouTube TV on their TV screen each month. Given this boom in TV viewership, we’ll continue exploring ways your ads can appear with Video action campaigns and test direct-response video ads on new surfaces like connected TVs over the next year.
Even as the world around us continues to change, our commitment to you remains the same: we’re here to help businesses of all sizes grow online and get ready for what comes next. To learn more about our latest product innovations, watch the full Advertising Week keynote.
The digital video boom is here. As people spend more time at home and the need for relevant, fresh content is at an all-time high, the shiftfrom linear to digital video is accelerating.
On YouTube in particular, over 2 billion people globally are gravitating toward timely content, from live entertainment like Post Malone’s livestreamed living room concerts to transformative current events like rallying cries for racial justice from creators. They are also favoring the TV screen—with watch time growing across regions. In the US for example, watch time on YouTube and YouTube TV on TV screens jumped 80 percent year over year.
Leading brands are making the most of YouTube’s massive reach and deeply relevant content to build brand awareness, and ultimately, drive results at scale. Today, we’re sharing new ways to help advertisers achieve these goals, including expanded reach planning solutions and advanced contextual targeting—a new and better way to show up in the right contexts for your customers.
Expanded tools to drive efficient reach and fuel your awareness strategy on YouTube
More viewership and the right mix of tools to reach a growing audience means that YouTube can offer incremental reach for the same budget. In the US, our relationship with Nielsen helps advertisers find the right mix. On average, advertisers saw that shifting just 20% of spend from TV to YouTube generated a 25% increase to the total campaign reach within their target audience, lowering the cost per reach point by almost 20%, across 21 Share Shift studies we’ve commissioned from Nielsen.1 To help global marketers, we are expanding our evaluation of Nielsen’s Total Ad Ratings to the UK and Italy.
When marketers include YouTube to drive efficient reach, they are seeing it pay off in real business results. Katie Haniffy, Head of Media, PepsiCo Beverages, turned to YouTube to drive scale and extend reach of Pepsi’s “Gift it Forward” Holiday campaign. The creative, starring Cardi B, celebrated the gifting mindset during the holiday season. “We knew YouTube had to play a critical role in ‘Gift it Forward’ as it continues to deliver strong performance across the beverage portfolio. The ‘Gift it Forward’ campaign did not disappoint—YouTube drove new brand buyers during the holiday season to the unique audience we wanted to reach.”
To help you easily plan campaign strategies that take advantage of this incremental reach beyond TV, soon we are also expanding TV data in Reach Planner to more countries, including France, Spain and Vietnam.
Additionally, if you’re looking to plan YouTube with other online video partners, we’re enabling reach planning capabilities across your entire campaign in Display & Video 360 including YouTube, auction and programmatic deals.
Use Video reach campaigns for a simpler way to buy efficient reach across ad formats.
Since launch, we’ve seen when advertisers combine skippable in-stream ads and bumpers into one campaign optimized for unique reach, they see higher lifts in Brand Awareness than advertisers who bought either format on its own.4 Marion Carpentier, Omni Business Leader at French men’s wear brand, Jules, says “By combining multiple formats into one campaign on YouTube, we were not only able to reach incremental audiences at a more optimal frequency compared to other video partners, but were able to drive a relative brand lift of 4.9 percent.”
A new way to show up in the right contexts for your brand
YouTube’s ability to drive mass reach means we can also deliver scale in specific contexts that matter for consumers and your brand. To make it easier to discover the content that’s best for you, today we are announcing YouTube dynamic lineups—powered by advanced contextual targeting.
Advanced contextual targeting is the next generation of content targeting on YouTube. It uses Google’s machine learning to better understand each channel on YouTube, including analysis of video imagery, sound, speech and text.
This allows us to create lineups5 that are scalable across content based on specific topics, cultural moments or popularity. For example, in addition to home or lifestyle lineups in most markets, you can find more nuanced choices like “home and garden” and “home improvement.” This means better access to customers with unique interests and needs—all with the brand suitability controls that are most important for your business.
It also means you’re able to drive greater impact for your brand. A recent study conducted by Google and Ipsos in the US found that video advertising based on consumer interest and intent has significantly more impact than demo—with a 32 percent higher lift in ad recall and 100 percent higher lift in purchase intent.
Complement your audience strategy with dynamic lineups to maximize reach.
Early adopters like OMD are seeing strong results using YouTube dynamic lineups to complement their existing audience strategies. Chrissie Hanson, Global Chief Strategy Officer at OMD says, “Using lineups powered by advanced contextual targeting delivers a more relevant and empathetic understanding of audiences. This in turn serves to drive more relevant reach and efficiencies for our customers, as part of a broader program that leverages audiences and other tactics across YouTube.”
YouTube dynamic lineups are launching on a rolling basis starting today and will be fully available by the end of September in ten markets. They are available across both Google Ads and Display & Video 360, with more countries coming soon.
From sales to ROI—deliver the results that matter
Most importantly, efficient reach and relevant ad experiences must drive not only awareness, but also business results. Across global Marketing Mix Modeling studies we’ve commissioned from Nielsen, we’ve seen YouTube deliver the bottom line results you care about.
Check out our new awareness collection—from success stories to trends
We’re sharing a new collection of resources on our Advertising Solutions Center to help you build awareness for this new world. You’ll hear first-hand perspectives from companies like PepsiCo, Domino’s and Jules, delve into trends driving YouTube viewership and learn about our newest product innovations built to better meet your awareness objectives. We’ll continue to roll out more content on the Advertising Solutions Center in the coming weeks.
We hope these latest updates will help you build your brand for today, and create resiliency for tomorrow.
Reach out to your Google sales rep to learn more about the solutions above, including best practices on campaign set-up, how to apply for the Video reach campaigns beta and how to access YouTube dynamic lineups in your market.
From sparking an idea to helping people make that final decision, online video plays an important role in helping consumers make purchases. In fact, 70 percent of people say they bought a brand as a result of seeing it on YouTube. For advertisers, measuring video campaigns and conversions accurately has never been more important—or more complex—given all the different paths the consumer journey can take.
That’s why we’ve been researching engaged-view conversions (EVC), a more robust non-click conversion metric. EVCs measure the conversions that take place after someone views 10 seconds or more of your skippable ad, but doesn’t click, and then converts within a set amount of days. EVCs are a more robust way to measure conversions than view-through conversions (VTCs), an industry standard that measures the conversions that take place after a person views an impression of your ad, but doesn’t click.
We’ve heard from advertisers that it can be challenging to assess the impact of video ad campaigns on conversions when you can’t compare across ad formats. That is why today we’re announcing that by the end of the year we will make engaged-view conversions a standard way of measuring conversions for TrueView skippable in-stream ads, Local campaigns and App campaigns. Our vision for the coming year is to give you more transparent reporting across both click and engaged-view conversions, aggregated and anonymously, and new configurability options for conversion measurement to make data-driven media decisions for your business.
Engaged-view conversions are informed by incrementality studies
Our teams have run large-scale incrementality studies over the years that confirmed the causal impact of video ad campaigns were undervalued when considering clicks alone. Based on these studies, we found that most incremental conversions come from engaged users who are given the option to skip, but choose to watch your ad. In fact, over 60 percent1 of all skips on YouTube direct response in-stream video ads happen before 10 seconds. Therefore, the decision to watch 10 seconds of a skippable ad is a user choice that signals an ‘engaged-view’. When these engaged-views result in conversions within a set amount of days, engaged-view conversions are included in the conversion report.
The incrementality studies we ran also determined the default attribution window for engaged-view conversions. The default attribution window is tailored based on consumer behavior for each campaign goal and is set to three days for TrueView for action, two days for App campaigns for Install and one day for App campaigns for engagement. But you know your business best, and will be able to set the right attribution window based on your customers’ behavior and campaign goals in the coming year.
We look forward to seeing how engaged-view conversions can help you understand the value of your ads and grow your business as user behavior evolves and new viewing habits, devices and experiences become available.
Nearly 3.5 billion people worldwide use social media. That is almost half of the people on the planet.
No business can afford to do without a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other popular social media sites.
If you are an entrepreneur or an executive at a large and established company, you should leverage the power of social media to promote your brand and your product.
What is Social Media Marketing Automation?
Engaging people on social media is time-consuming. According to a recent survey, marketing teams spend 16 hours a week on tasks involving social media.
You can save your team and company time and money by installing special tools that will do the work of monitoring and managing social media.
Social media marketing automation consists of a set of tools that are designed to decrease your workload and enhance your social media marketing campaign.
The three most popular automation devices are:
Scheduling tools
Content curation tools
Social listening tools
Social Media Scheduling Tools
Members of your executive team have more important things to do than update your company’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.
A scheduling tool relieves them of this burden by posting valuable content on your social media accounts automatically.
The posts will be sent out at optimal times so that you get maximum engagement with your audience.
Here are some of the more popular scheduling devices available on the market:
Buffer allows you to schedule posts and tailor the content to each social media account. Buffer also has a calendar feature that allows you to review what you have already posted. This gives you the ability to organize, manage, and rearrange your posts as you like.
Hootsuite is known for its elegant and accessible design, which makes it easy to automate your posts. It offers a bulk scheduling option. It also gives you the ability to schedule content you see while surfing the web.
There are 3 main features that stand out in this tool. First, there is a content recommendation device. If you want to send a post with a news article link, you can conduct a search by topic and it will give you a long list of trending articles to share.
Second, Sendible has a built-in CRM. The latter presents background information on anyone you interact with. This will enable you to send customized content to whomever you are in conversation with.
Third and finally, Sendible can monitor Twitter for certain keywords and phrases and send an automatic reply.
Content Curation Tools
Content curation tools allow you to easily find content that you can share with your social media followers through your posts.
According to one recent study, companies that share curated content receive 33% more clicks than those without it.
Here are a few of the top tools available on the market:
This tool analyses the topics that interest you and your target audience and shows you related content. The tool comes with an AI research assistant named Leo who helps declutter the information so that you are able to share the best pieces with your followers.
Socialinsider.io is one of the most comprehensive social media analytics and reporting tools. It is perfect for digital agencies and companies that employ digital technology extensively. You can track your company’s level of engagement on different social media pages and compare them. You can also compare these numbers with your competitors and industry benchmarks.
The site makes it easy to build a large report and to download it as a PDF and PPT file.
This tool will automatically search thousands of web sources to find content related to your keywords. You will then be able to approve or reject the suggestions that are to be shared on your social media sites.
Curata also allows you to edit the text and alter the images in the content that you share. You can also add notes and comments to each piece.
Social Listening Tools
These devices help you monitor all online chatter about your company and brand. They help you identify influencers who may be praising and promoting your products.
They can also inform you of any negative reviews of your products or company online.
Social listening tools provide great insight into how consumers are interacting with your company and its products in real-time.
Social listening sites will help you discern trends that drive your highest performing posts. They also help companies build better relationships with followers and identify profitable gaps in the market.
You need not track down every single comment and critique that is made about your company. You can have this done for you with social listening software.
Here are some of the sites that offer social listening solutions:
This tool sifts through billions of sources each day and informs you when and on what site your company’s name has appeared in conversation. You can also set up alerts that inform you when the names of your competitors are mentioned, which can help you analyze social discussions they are involved in.
Mention can be especially helpful to large companies with well-known brands.
This social media management tool was designed with businesses in mind. The team at Social Sprout has identified 5 key pieces of information that are gained from social listening: brand health, industry insight, competitive analysis, campaign analysis, event monitoring. The software allows you to tailor your social listening experience to fit one or more of these categories.
Sprout Social also has tools that allow you to go beyond the mere mention of your company to figure out the sentiment behind it. Your company can be talked about in a positive or negative context. Sprout Social helps you determine which.
In summary, there are plenty of ways to automate your social media marketing operations. Using one or more of the sites discussed above can help your company punch above its weight.
Using social media marketing automation tools can give you deep insights into your target market and help you build better relationships with customers.
Advertisers tell us that understanding the business impact of their marketing is more important than ever. But they also report that it’s becoming more difficult as the industry—in response to growing concerns about privacy—changes its practices around how data is collected and used. Ads Data Hub enables customized analysis of your Google ad campaigns while protecting user privacy and upholding Google’s high standards of data security.
Today, we’re providing an update on improvements to Ads Data Hub that help you analyze data more quickly and easily, better understand the way that people interact with your ads, and use insights from your data to reach the right customers. With these updates, you can tailor your measurement to your unique business needs, understand how your marketing is performing, and drive the greatest business impact.
Improvements to help you analyze your data faster and easier
Over the past year, we’ve been investing in the infrastructure that underlies Ads Data Hub to make it available to a larger number of customers and simplify the process of writing queries. Over 200 brands, agencies and measurement partners are actively using Ads Data Hub today. And usage continues to increase, with successful queries up over 145 percent in 2019 compared to 2018. But we’ve heard from customers that we need to make it faster and easier to run analysis.
In the coming weeks, we’ll add self-service account linking for Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, so you can more easily access your Google ad campaign data across multiple products in a secure, privacy-centric environment. This includes allowing you to create multi-tier account structures, which adds flexibility to how brands and agencies can configure ads data within Ads Data Hub to address unique account hierarchies and user access requirements.
We’re making it easier to run analysis with a Sandbox environment, which recently rolled out to all customers. This environment includes a test dataset and can be used to experiment with data and query development, which can help make execution faster by giving you a better understanding of the types of queries you can write and insights you can get in Ads Data Hub.
We’ve also launched a new query library that gives you access to over 20 templates for the most common types of analysis run in Ads Data Hub. For example, the All events template can be used to get impressions, clicks, conversions and Active View stats for a specific account. Ads Data Hub users can also suggest new templates directly via the in-product feedback form.
NoneQuery templates help you write and run queries for the most common types of analysis
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A frequent request we’ve heard from customers is to be able to access and analyze ad data closer to real-time. To address this, we’ve brought latency down from 24-48 hours to 6 hours for display and YouTube ads data from Google Ads, as well as for data from YouTube ads bought via Display & Video 360. That means, if an impression was served at 8am, you can query data associated with that impression from 2pm on the same day.
New ways to understand the consumer journey
Manually stitching together event-level data from Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 to reconstruct the path to purchase is possible today in Ads Data Hub, but it can be time-consuming and difficult. That’s why we’ve introduced consumer journey paths, a set of pre-processed data that automatically join impression, click, and conversion events together if they’re part of a single journey. This will help advertisers get valuable insights about the consumer journey faster and with higher quality output than manual approaches, and is available to all Ads Data Hub customers that have Campaign Manager and Display & Video 360 data enabled in their account.
To cover more of the ways people interact with media and your brand, we’re expanding beyond computer, mobile and tablet device measurement to include TV screens. This includes coverage for connected TV and gaming consoles. These devices are becoming a bigger part of many media plans, so understanding their role in delivering value for your business is also becoming more important.
Today, Ads Data Hub includes key advertising metrics such as viewability, impressions, clicks, and conversions from display and video ads in Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360. And in the coming months we’re enabling more measurement use cases by adding advanced Active View metrics for YouTube—including viewability and audibility metrics—that allow you to uncover deep insights into creative performance and user attention.
Reach the right customers with customized audience list creation
Beyond measurement, one of biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from customers is that they’d like to take action on the insights they uncover in Ads Data Hub, while protecting user privacy. We’ve begun a test to allow a limited group of customers to build audience lists based on clicks or conversions from Google Ads, Campaign Manager, and Display & Video 360, and use these audience lists to inform who sees display ads in Google Ads and Display & Video 360. For example, you could create an audience list in Ads Data Hub of users that have already purchased your product, then use that as an exclusion list to ensure you don’t continue to show them your ads served via Google Ads and Display & Video 360.
User privacy protections are deeply embedded across all of these features, and—as always—there’s an aggregation requirement for output of any data from Ads Data Hub. Over time, we’ll continue to evolve the capabilities of Ads Data Hub by providing access to additional ads datasets and developing deeper integrations across our ad platforms.
Think back … can you remember the first time you heard about YouTube? Or even better–can you recall the first video you watched? It’s a fun parlor game we YouTubers sometimes play–and an occasion to reflect on how far the platform has come since its earliest days.
And for those of us who have been on the ads team for more than a few years, it’s particularly remarkable to think about how our ad products have changed as well. Back when we introduced TrueView 9 years ago, people entered the site typically from a link and typically on desktop, watched a short form video and then left to do other things. In fact, desktop represented 90 percent of all YouTube usage in 2010. The appetite for in-stream ad experiences was extremely low in these contexts, which prompted us to introduce a skippable video format that put the choice to view an ad in the hands of the user. Advertisers only paid if viewers watched the complete ad or 30 seconds if longer, so it was a win-win.
In the years since then, YouTube has grown to accommodate not only diverse content types and audiences, but also a new diversity of viewing patterns. In 2016, mobile viewing eclipsed desktop, and in 2019 TVs are our fastest growing screen. Today, viewers may just as readily binge six or seven short videos on their mobile phone, before they switch on YouTube on their TV and watch several hours of longer form video.
In short, YouTube viewing has evolved to serve seemingly divergent consumer mindsets – active browsing sessions where they discover new content and more longer, more leaned-back sessions. This has required a reconsideration of how we serve ads in each of these varied contexts.
Our mission as an ads team is to build the right ad experience for each of these contexts – from active discovery through to more leaned-back sessions:
The changing ways people watch YouTube also means that a view has different value in different contexts. This is why we continue to develop additional metrics beyond views and view-through rate–like Brand Lift, or direct actions and conversions – to quantify ad impact, while also developing new ad formats that are matched to viewing patterns and advertiser goals. While we work on these new ad experiences, our priority is to align pricing with anticipated advertiser value.
This led us to introduce Smart Pricing over a year ago, which aligns media costs with anticipated value of a given context. For example, if we know a user is watching content in a longer, TV-style session – we will price those ad impressions according to what our effectiveness models indicate is the typical value of that type of viewing mode. Smart Pricing delivers better results for advertisers – at launch we saw:
More efficient awareness—5 percent gain in brand awareness per dollar
Higher ROI for advertisers – 7 percent gain in ad recall per dollar
Beyond Smart Pricing, we are also working on ways to align YouTube media directly to your marketing objectives, and delivering value as you measure it. For instance, with video reach campaigns, you can optimize for your reach and awareness goals more easily using multiple video creatives and formats within a single campaign. Google’s machine learning will automatically serve the most efficient combination of those formats to help you reach your audience at scale.
The variety of viewing contexts is an asset, as YouTube increasingly meets the needs of viewers looking for short form, long form, TV screen experiences, a go-anywhere music player, social video, highly produced traditional video and more. And the continued evolution of our ad experiences means brands will see a benefit from each viewing mode. We take pride in continuously evolving our platform based on changing user behavior and will continue to experiment with delivering advertiser value across a variety of user contexts. And we invite you, our trusted customers, to partner with us as we build an effective video ad system for the age of choice.
Consumers are moving faster, jumping from channel to channel, and researching more often in unexpected ways. This explosion of touchpoints means more opportunities—and more complexities—for marketers. But just because today’s customer journey is more complicated, doesn’t mean orchestrating your advertising campaign has to be. At Advertising Week New York, we’re sharing new ways to help marketers use video to more efficiently and effectively connect with consumers across their purchase journey.
A simpler way to drive reach
We’re constantly working on better ways to help you achieve your marketing goals—whether you want to build awareness for a brand, shift perceptions, or drive a specific action. But while it’s great to have options, mixing and matching these solutions takes time and can add complexity. Today we’re announcing Video reach campaigns—a simpler, more efficient way for marketers to achieve their brand awareness goals with YouTube.
Rather than managing separate campaigns for 6-second bumper ads, skippable in-stream ads, and non-skippable in-stream ads, now you can upload multiple video creatives into a single campaign. From there, Google’s machine learning will automatically serve the most efficient combination of these formats to help you reach your audience at scale.
Early adopters like Ford are already seeing strong results using Video reach campaigns. In alpha tests, the automaker lowered their campaign cost over 20 percent compared to their previous YouTube benchmarks. “Ford is using data and machine learning technology, like Video reach campaigns, to drive a learning culture across all of our media. The positive results of the Video reach campaign not only provided cost efficiencies while maintaining effectiveness but also the confidence to implement this tactic across additional campaigns” says Lisa Schoder, head of U.S. media.
A complete solution across the journey
For brands looking to build a full-funnel video strategy, we recommend complementing Video reach campaigns with TrueView for action to drive whatever online action is important to your business. Soon TrueView for action ads will seamlessly extend to the YouTube Home feed, a tremendous opportunity for any advertiser looking to drive more, high value conversions. The Home feed has long been a great place for users to discover their next favorite creator, and now it can be a great place for them to take action with your brand.
Reach audiences where they are watching
In addition to Video reach campaigns, we’re also bringing the YouTube Masthead to our fastest growing surface—the TV screen, where daily watch time tops 250 million hours per day. This means advertisers have a unique opportunity to reach people who are increasingly cutting the cord, right where they are watching their favorite content.
Through the globally-available beta, marketers can purchase the YouTube Masthead on TV screens on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis, and customize the audiences they want to see it. Like CPM-based Mastheads on the desktop and mobile home feed, it will be available as a reserved placement to ensure brands can drive the visibility they need on the dates that matter most. It can be purchased as part of a cross-screen or single-screen Masthead buy.
And, we know the rich audio and visual experience of YouTube on TV screens means the potential to drive upper-funnel impact is greater than ever. According to a recent experiment we conducted with Media Science, YouTube ads on TV screens drive a 10 percent greater lift in recall than ads on linear TV.
By focusing on marketing objectives rather than media tactics, we believe we can be a more strategic partner to help you sustainably grow your business. We hope these new solutions help you make it easier for you to get ahead of the pack and drive real results across the entire customer journey.
