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If you answered "YouTube", you're right - and you may already be convinced of the platform's advertising power.
Whether you are or not, you've come to the right place to find out everything you need to know about advertising on YouTube, aiming for maximum performance.
It's impossible to surf the web without coming across YouTube in one way or another. And with good reason: it's the second most-used social platform in the world, with 2.5 billion monthly active users, just behind Facebook. That said, YouTube is by far the world's leading social network in terms of time spent each month, with 23 hours and 9 minutes (compared with 19 hours and 43 minutes for Facebook, and 17 hours and 20 minutes for WhatsApp).
Given these figures, one thing is clear: YouTube is the ideal platform for reaching a broad cross-section of the population, with diverse socio-professional categories and interests. But above all, it's the perfect channel to reach a captive audience that spends a lot of time on the platform.
What's more, it's important to note that the video format itself is ideal for advertising. In particular, it enables you to:
All the more reason for you, as an advertiser, to get started on this advertising platform if you haven't already - or to fine-tune your strategy with the tips you'll discover here.
You can target your advertising campaign on YouTube using a variety of criteria.
Among them, you can use :
But the key to further improving your targeting is to take advantage of the various sources of data from the Google ecosystem. The idea? Target customers and prospects who have an appetite for your products and services, and understand their behaviors/uses so you can deliver your message to the right place.
For instance, you can use:
To make sure you get the best possible exposure, use a brandsafety tool such as YouTube BrandSafety by Gamned! This type of tool enables you to visualize the potential reach of your campaigns in advance, and to select the channels and videos most closely aligned with your products and services. You can then target certain channels, themes or topics, or even certain keywords, to further refine your targeting and avoid associating your brand with accounts that are too far removed from your identity.
On YouTube, you can launch different kinds of advertising campaigns, in a wide variety of formats. There are ten of them, and they enable you to achieve different business goals.
“One of the keys to success in YouTube advertising, often overlooked by advertisers, is to leverage the data available in the Google ecosystem. This vast amount of data enables precise, affinity-based targeting, helping advertisers to reach their core target. But don't overlook the choice of format either, which should be based on your primary advertising goal.” François Madelin, Head of Customer Success at Gamned!.
Do you have a branding or online reputation goal in mind for your YouTube ads? Turn to one of the following advertising formats:
For these formats, you pay by CPM (Cost Per Thousand).
Want to engage your target audience with your own YouTube videos? You'll need to turn to one of the following three formats for optimum ROI.
Would you like to attract prospects and customers to a dedicated Landing Page, and above all, generate actions on your website? One YouTube advertising format is ideal for this: the Video action campaigns format. It contains a call-to)action dedicated to conversion, such as "Book now", "Get a free quote" or "Find out more".
Armed with these few best practices in terms of targeting and formats, you're ready to launch a well-crafted YouTube advertising campaign.
Creating campaigns and ads on YouTube is all very well. Measuring their effectiveness, to ensure the ROI they bring you, and to be able to optimize them on an ongoing basis, is even better!
So how do you measure the performance of your YouTube ads? First of all, be sure to track the following global key performance metrics:
Then track more specific KPIs, depending on your advertising goals:
Note that YouTube also lets you create segments to analyze your performance according to specific views (format, network, user device...), to further optimize your performance.
Finally, if you want to measure the impact of your YouTube campaign on how your brand is perceived, use the Brand Lift Survey feature. These are surveys you send out to your audience, to find out whether the ads they've seen are relevant to them, or whether they've memorized your advertising messages.
At Gamned! we regularly support advertisers in their YouTube advertising campaigns.
Late 2022, a famous household appliance brand launched a two-month campaign in collaboration with Gamned! Its goal: to build branding through attractive, engaging video ads.
The brand decided to carry out behavioral targeting, to reach an audience over 35, CSP+, interested in household equipment and decoration. It chose the Trueview format, a 25-second bumper.
And the results were not long in coming. At the end of the campaign, a 70% View-Through Rate (VTR) was recorded. All this for -40% of the CPCV (Cost Per Completed View) estimated before the campaign was launched!
Want to get started in YouTube advertising, or optimize your current platform? Contact a Gamned! expert today, and let's talk about your project.
Tell us who you are, we will tell you which digital activations to adopt!
