Know Their Intention, Get Their Attention: New Ways to Connect and Measure on YouTube

We look at our phones while we watch TV. We watch TV on our phones while we walk to work. We work on our laptops while we cast video to a set-top box. We spend the majority of our days connected, often via multiple devices—so much so that reach has become a commodity in advertising. And while reach is plentiful, attention is scarce.

Unless we’re talking about online video. Our latest research with Ipsos suggests people are 3x more likely to pay attention to online video ads vs. television ads.¹ And within online video, people pay nearly 2x more attention to video ads on YouTube than they do on other social media.² That’s because on YouTube, ads are more likely to be seen and people are more likely to arrive with intent to watch video—2X more likely than other online platforms.³ Today we’re sharing four new tools to help you capture the attention of your audience on YouTube:

1) Helping brands reach the right audiences

Intention is what has made search advertising so effective—the ability to quickly connect people looking for something they want or need, with a business that offers just that. Since January we’ve seen that what’s worked great for search works great for video as well. We found that campaigns that use intent-based audiences on mobile have 20% higher ad recall lift and 50% higher brand awareness lift relative to campaigns that only use demographic audiences.⁴

In order to help you deliver more relevant, useful ads on YouTube, we're expanding the ways you can use Google's broad ecosystem using Custom Affinity Audiences to reach people based on the kind of searches they do, or the kind of places and apps they like. That means an outdoor outfitter could use Custom Affinity audiences to potentially reach people who have searched for skis, spent time at ski resorts, or have downloaded a ski resort’s trail guide app.

2) Enabling custom creative at scale

Custom audiences are most valuable when paired with creative that is relevant to them. But personalization at scale can be difficult—new video creative is pricey and takes time to make.

We're launching Director Mix to simplify the process of creating different versions of the same creative tailored for each audience—you give us the building blocks of your video ad, like different voiceovers, background and copy, and our system will create thousands of versions to match your various audience segments.

Campbell’s Soup used Director Mix to create videos with clever copy based on the content people were about to watch. For instance if you clicked to watch clips from Orange is the New Black, you’d see a bumper asking “does your cooking make prison food seem good? We've got a soup for that.” And it worked: Campbell’s earned a 55% lift in sales and a 24% lift in ad recall with this campaign.

3) Telling a story that breaks free of a single unit

Similarly, we’re introducing Video Ad Sequencing to help you architect an ad experience that unfolds over time. This new feature in AdWords Labs lets you string together ad creative. You can pivot, you can react—and you can take consumers down a different path depending on which ads are working for them.

For instance, you could start with a fifteen-second TrueView ad to build awareness, continue with another, longer spot that communicates product attributes, then follow with a six-second bumper ad to keep top-of-mind and drive to purchase.

To drum up excitement for their new Assassin’s Creed game, Ubisoft cut four sequential six-second bumper ads, each with a critical element of their longer trailer. The brand used Affinity Audiences and Video Ad Sequencing to serve the ads to core E3 audiences. The campaign reached almost 15 million unique viewers and resulted in best-in-class lifts in awareness (+25%), search lift for ‘Assassin’s Creed’ (+224%) and search lift for the Assassin’s Creed trailer (+375%).

4) Measuring the impact – New ways to measure sales lift

And finally, you need a way to measure that you earned attention—and one way to do that is to look at its effect on offline sales.

We’re rolling out a new, global approach to measuring sales lift with Nielsen MPA (Matched Panel Analysis). This geo-based solution offers a fast, media-agnostic way to determine which online ads drive offline sales. With this implementation of Nielsen MPA, CPG clients can measure video alongside other Google media.

From looking at the Nielsen MPA studies we’ve run to-date, we found that YouTube drove sales lift for the advertised product in 14 of 19 studies globally.⁵

We’ve also expanded our Oracle Datalogix ROI offering in the US to include six-second bumper ads so that brands can more comprehensively measure their YouTube campaigns. And we’ll continue working to deliver more solutions to complement our Nielsen MPA, Oracle DLX ROI, MMM and store visit offerings today, so you’ll have the measurement that works best for your business.

At YouTube, our aim is to show ads that are relevant and useful, so that instead of interrupting people’s viewing experiences, you’re enhancing them. This means matching what advertisers have to offer with what people are interested in—leading to a better YouTube experience backed up by comprehensive user controls. We hope you try out these new features as they become available, and hope to see you at Advertising Week.

Posted by Diya Jolly, Director Product Management, YouTube & Video Monetization

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1. Source: Google/Ipsos, Video Mobile Diary, US, 2017, n of 4,381 (saw ads occasions). Online video includes video platforms such as YouTube & Hulu, social platforms such as Facebook & Snapchat and TV Full Episode Players like NBC.com.
2. Source: Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience, Video Ad Cross-Platform Biometrics Research commissioned by Google. Conducted in the US using 8 advertisements, 4 platforms and 400 participants, 18-35 year olds, Nielsen CNS Lab, Boston, US 2016
3. Source: Google/Ipsos, Video Mobile Diary, US, 2017 (n of 18,219 total video occasions)
4. Source: Google Brand Lift Targeting Analysis October 2016 - March 2017, Global, Smartphone, numbers shown represent relative difference between additive lifts of intent targeted and demo targeted campaigns, i.e. the former had Brand Awareness lift 1.5x the latter.
5. Source: Commissioned Nielsen Matched Panel Analysis – 19 studies on YouTube from 2016-2017 across 6 countries; Lift based on at least one of multiple tested strategies with significance >80%