Imagine upgrading from a dial-up to fiber optic internet.
It opens up an exponential surge of capability and reach. This is exactly what YouTube’s advertising growth has looked like over the last 12-18 months.
The results have been fascinating to analyze.
No shift was more impactful than the addition of Shorts and In-Feed ads, cementing YouTube’s 3-pronged approach. This shift creates an opportunity to serve ads to three different user experiences.
Advertisers and those in the paid media field should be excited about the opportunity to generate revenue. More importantly, however, they ought to see the value in driving top funnel interest with efficiency. This has always been YouTube’s #1 advantage.
Unfortunately, many brands aren’t making the jump to use these new channels of distribution, leading to missed opportunities.
This shift has had a massive impact on the YouTube growth many top brands have enjoyed. In this article I outline Youtube’s approach, and how you can experience similar brand growth by employing the same tactics.
YouTube’s 3-Pronged Approach – And Why It Works
- In-Feed
This placement serves as one of the top spenders for the majority of brands we advertise on YouTube, because of the massive walled garden in-platform reach garnered for the price paid.
While user behavior is different than with shorts and in-stream (skippable/non-skippable), this is where the value lies. What makes this placement unique and similar to other in-feed platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, is the video placement. It means you are able to initiate the video you need to click on a thumbnail within a feed, rather than having to watching 5 seconds or more of content with a skippable ad, forced 15 seconds between a viewing experience.
This advancement for YouTube allows those first to market to reap the benefits.
2. Shorts
As the obvious response to TikTok and Reels, this placement serves as another unique opportunity for YouTube.
This ad type provides the first full-screen SOV (share of voice) experience. It gives the advertiser a shift from the competing space of landscape desktop and mobile ad experiences. While skippable and non-skippable ads can run via Shorts, the interesting shift for advertisers is how the creative is built.
It’s moving those first 5 seconds of immediate capture of attention to appease the user behavior within a faster scrolling environment.
3. In-Stream (Landscape)
The legacy placement continues to hold a valuable place for all advertisers.
One of the most unique attributes of in-stream is the unlimited ad length combined with the CPV model. This allows brands to only pay for users after a view, as opposed to an impression.
This combination of ad placement and bidding model furthers the advertiser’s advantage. A longer view rate and watch time results in the ability to:
• Introduce a new product
• Explain a more complex offer
• Paint a more in-depth picture for the consumer
Combining Strategies with YouTube’s 3-Pronged Approach
The unique advantage of the ad placement shift for an advertiser within YouTube comes in combining all three placements.
All placements have a unique way of driving interest and purchase behavior. The hardest but most impactful route is a combination of all three placements. That involves leveraging AI and Machine Learning Algorithms to reach the right user at the right time.
While there is value in combining these placements, a new advertiser should consider that every brand is different.
With so many variables in play, the best-performing set-up will look completely different for each brand.
Here’s an example:
There are many strategies to succeed via YouTube, but the quickest (and most effective) way to get there is through creative testing across these three ad placements.
Working with some of the biggest Youtube influencers, consulting for channels with millions of subscribers, and managing 20+ brands running Google Ads video campaigns for 10+ years, we have seen positive trends that these brand create by testing the waters and gathering data for each of these ad placements.
Data-Driven Decisions
What used to be a focus on one creative, 2-3 minute video that engages the user with deep storytelling, has now been replaced with “get to the point” content.
The first 5-10 seconds are now much more crucial. However, more variations and iterations that link the creative with the ad placement with the right age, gender and audience, can help maximize performance. With the advancement of placements, audiences, and data variables we have access to, there is more room for testing and analysis – all leading to data driven actions and results.
The one point I always hammer home with consulting clients is that while you can drive impressions, views, sometimes clicks, conversions, subscriptions, earned views, etc., the real advantage is the one that you can’t directly calculate – the creative insight gained. This allows you to not only understand your audience deeper, but also:
• See what your audience enjoys
• See what your audience doesn’t enjoy
• Understand why they cut out during certain periods of the video
With longer watch time and a robust organic sister platforms, insight within YouTube puts advertising here an absolute must for beginner and experienced advertisers.
Evidence It Works
According to E-Marketer, time spent with digital platforms vs the percentage of digital ad spend has been trending in an interesting way.
3 of the 6 are self-service, programmatic and open to the public while the other three are pretty guarded if an advertiser wanted to run media. YouTube currently holds the largest positive differentiation between time spent and thus another piece of data pointing toward the potential value attainment through the efficiency of the media.
When you combine an ad placement strategy with the most important variable (The Creative) you create the ability to drive true brand growth.
The YouTube Ad Platform is unlike any other platform because it combines placement, ad targeting, tracking, attribution, and social engagement. At Hero Conference, I plan to hopefully encourage more brands to take the leap and begin on YouTube ads or optimize their current campaigns to take advantage of the newest advancements.
Cory Henke will be speaking at Hero Conf San Diego in November. In his talk, Cory will explore the evolution of YouTube’s video formats, from its traditional skippable landscape orientation to the introduction of vertical shorts and TV-compatible content.
