While it is something often forgotten about and neglected for more important things, placements and are an important piece of making sure you’re allocating spend in the best possible way and steering clear of irrelevant or harmful surroundings.
With the rollout of larger responsive Display ads on Google, we now have the ability to add YouTube videos to our Display efforts. This seems to continue to push that Google is making to grow the channel and make video a more pervasive part of one’s online strategy beyond social media.
While we get insight into CPV, view rates, and all of the other video metrics, they don’t always tell the whole story. Taking that deeper dive can sometimes necessitate looking at placements in a more granular level.
Here are some of the major trends I’ve been seeing and ways to help refine your targeting for YouTube.
Foreign Language Channels:
With the new visibility into what YouTube channels one is showing on, I’ve been seeing a larger number of channels in a foreign language showing up. Much like on regular search, you’ll want to mirror the language of the video with what someone speaks to make sure you can get your message across.
Take a look at the metrics associated with each and how they compare to the average, maybe take a look at the channel itself, you may find that your resources are best spent elsewhere.
This is something that should be done during normal maintenance as you go through placement audits.
Vevo and other Music Channels:
Just because you’re seeing a good view rate doesn’t mean you’re getting your message across. Music channels are a prime example of this.
There is the potential for a big mismatch in terms of if someone is ready to convert and if they’re even paying attention. On some of my accounts, I’ll see hundreds of impressions without a single view being registered or the flipside of very high view rates as people likely just have their phone open playing music.
The first scenario sends Google a message that people don’t want to watch your video which may lead to poorer performance down the line. The second is likely money wasted as one isn’t attentively watching. While there is no hard and fast rule, it may be worth taking a deeper dive into Vevo YouTube channels and looking at their performance.
Connected TVs
A new device category rolled out during the end of 2018 includes performance on TV screens. Thus far, I don’t see a ton of traffic coming through this category but it’s something that will likely become a larger piece of the puzzle like tablet and mobile originally were.
Here we run into a similar challenge of how valuable one’s placement is. At least on my TV, it’s a bit of a pain to skip an ad if the remote is outside of arm’s reach. For 30 seconds, I’ll just sit on my phone and not pay attention!
Here you may fall into the trap of seeing really high view rates without actually seeing people do anything because of it. On your remarketing campaigns, there is likely some benefit to hearing the ad in the background, but prospecting may be money better spent elsewhere. How many commercials do you remember from the Super Bowl as of this posting?
Final Thoughts:
YouTube is likely one of the last frontiers of your account that you haven’t started exploring yet. As Google rolls out more audience targeting options, video ad sequencing, and TrueView YouTube Ads, they’re trying to entice you to make the leap for the first time or increase your dollars spent.
While these placement challenges are similar to what one would find on the Display Network, YouTube has its own unique quirks and things to look out for. The above are just three larger trends that I’m seeing and there are a lot more that will be unique to what you’re working on!