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Amol Ghemud Published: September 29, 2021
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The pandemic has affected us all, either at a professional or at a personal level – and has had effects on the mental well-being of individuals worldwide.
As the Covid 19 infection spread, it forced many businesses – across domains – to quickly change and modify their efforts to suit evolving user habits and requirements. Many businesses realized they had to move online during the pandemic to keep themselves afloat.
In a way, Covid 19 has shaken up the marketing & digital marketing realm entirely. Video marketing has changed and is going to experience a boom in the years to come. Studies show e-commerce has already exceeded the revenue levels expected to grow by 2025.
Millions of organizations are striving to scale up digital marketing to market and sell their products or services online and through Youtube Ads. A study has found that over 2 billion people log in monthly to consume video content for research or entertainment. The watch time of videos on YouTube & YouTube on TV screens has seen a radical growth since the pandemic.
Even after the lockdown in a few countries was lifted, the trend has not declined – it’s only rising, in fact. So it is not wrong to say that YouTube or video advertising is a powerful medium for brands to generate brand awareness & drive results.
Google has various planning tools which help in gathering audience insights and reach to meet the campaign goals of awareness through Video ads.
Planning tools
First is Insights Finder: to get started with Video campaigns, understand the audience & search for insights and create media plans and effective campaign strategies.
The second tool that helps with mapping your media budget is YouTube Reach Curves. It helps estimate the investment and the expected reach & frequency.
Reach planner is the other tool, which forecasts and helps in accurately planning reach-based campaigns on YouTube. It supports media planners with reach, budget, ad formats, distribution channels across YouTube and TV based on location and selected audience.
The specialty of this tool is that it is updated weekly to use the most up-to-date data available during these uncertain times and fluctuating markets.
There is one more exceptional feature in the Reach Planner tool, which is TV in Reach Planner. This feature helps to identify the precise mix of YouTube and TV with historical data to determine the reach, frequency, and impact of the video campaigns with accurate forecasts.
A case study of a BPC brand confirms they started a TV + YouTube campaign to reach a young audience to showcase their product line. They were able to achieve this and reach 90% of the selected younger audience in 42% of the budget compared to specific TV-only advertising.
Ad Formats in Video Marketing
There are many ad formats available for effective and dynamic audience reach.
Masthead, Bumpers, TrueView for Reach, Non-skippable Ads, Video Reach, TrueView Discovery Ads, TrueView Discovery for Search, Sponsorships ad campaign, etc. are a few of the examples of available Ad formats and types of campaigns that can be utilized based on requirements of the Brands.
Video Reach Campaigns comprise multiple ad formats in a single campaign and are auto-optimized for a precise marketing goal. It uses ML (machine learning) to automatically serve the best blend of video ad formats (combination of 6s Bumpers and TrueView for Reach ads) to meet reach goals and awareness.
TrueView Discovery Ads are the video ads that show up alongside other YouTube videos, YouTube feed, or YouTube search results to target users across Google properties when they’re open to exploring your products or services.
Similarly, TrueView Discovery for Search Ad format shows up above the organic search results on YouTube to your target audience based on their searches on YouTube.
Sponsorships are ad campaignsthat are targeted to custom content on YouTube. It works similar to the standard “Brought to you by” ads shown on television.
YouTube Select is a new packaging strategy that allows brands to connect with audiences that they can’t get anywhere else while watching their favorite video content.
Instant Reserve is a reservation campaign management solution that combines the ease of TV buying with the innovation of digital video. It automatically spends a set-up budget to deliver an estimated impression amount, while giving you Google’s targeting and measurement features.
Connected TV or CTV is one that is connected to the internet, either natively like a smart TV or through an external device like a gaming console, Chromecast, etc.
It allows you to make use of all the common video advertising features of YouTube for the TV screen along with Google’s high impact formats, audience, frequency management for smarter & effective media campaigns.
Google Video Partners (GVP) is a combination of high-quality publisher websites and mobile apps where brands can present the video ads to viewers. With GVP there is scope to spread the reach and impact of the video campaign surpassing YouTube.
Video Ads Measurement Tools
There are measurement tools available as well to assess the performance of video campaigns. These help with understanding and optimizing campaigns on the go.
Unique Reach is a reporting feature that helps with reports on the reach of a video campaign. It shows the number of people and number of times the ads were served across devices and formats.
Lift Measurement is a consolidated tool that combines Search Lift 2.0, Conversion Lift, and an improved Brand Lift to measure the effectiveness of the ad.
Video Experiments + Brand Lift Studies (BLS) – Video Experiments is a testing tool that helps assess the effectiveness of creatives, audiences, or other variables for video campaigns. For example, it can help to understand if videos with talents perform better than animations. Video Experiments work as a real-time canvas, similar to traditional A/B testing.
Google Marketing Mix Model (MMM) program is intended to help brands accurately measure the digital drivers of their ROI and to improve revenues. MMMs are third-party measurement solutions used to estimate the impact of media on brand sales and notify the allocation of ad spend across channels based on ROI.
Sales Lift Report helps determine how your campaign impacted sales. It measures offline sales, giving actionable insights to optimize your media for ROAS.
Watch: Video Marketing Made Smarter with Enhanced Google Ads Features
For Curious Minds
These planning tools are essential for navigating the modern digital landscape by providing data-driven forecasts for campaign performance before you spend. They empower you to build effective media strategies by first understanding your audience and then estimating outcomes, which is critical now that video is a primary content medium.
Google provides a suite of tools to ensure your campaigns are strategically sound:
Insights Finder: This is your starting point for understanding audience behavior and discovering actionable insights that form the foundation of your media plan.
YouTube Reach Curves: This tool helps you visualize the relationship between investment and outcomes, estimating the budget required to achieve specific reach and frequency goals.
Reach Planner: This dynamic tool forecasts the performance of reach-based campaigns on YouTube using data that is updated weekly. Its TV in Reach Planner feature is particularly powerful, helping you find the `optimal media mix` between YouTube and traditional TV to maximize unduplicated reach.
By using these instruments, you shift your campaign planning from guesswork to a calculated, data-informed process. The full article further explores how to integrate these tools into your workflow.
Video Reach Campaigns simplify the ad-buying process by using machine learning to automatically serve the most efficient combination of ad formats to achieve your reach objectives. This automated approach is highly effective because it removes manual guesswork and continuously adjusts delivery to maximize how many unique users see your ad for the lowest possible cost.
This campaign type intelligently combines different video ad formats within a single campaign to optimize for your primary marketing goal of awareness. Here is how its ML (machine learning) core delivers results:
Automated Format Blending: The campaign automatically serves the best mix of video ad formats, primarily combining short 6s Bumpers with skippable TrueView for Reach ads to capture attention effectively.
Efficiency Focus: The algorithm's main objective is to meet your reach goals at the lowest cost, making your budget work harder by analyzing real-time signals to determine the best ad to serve at any given moment.
Simplified Management: Instead of creating separate campaigns for each format, you can manage them under one umbrella that is optimized for a singular, clear goal: `maximum unique reach`.
For brands needing to make a big impact without a complex setup, this solution is a powerful tool. Discover how to apply this to your own strategy by reading the complete analysis.
The choice between these formats hinges on your campaign goal and the user's mindset at the moment of contact. TrueView Discovery Ads are ideal for capturing an audience that is actively seeking information, while non-skippable ads are better for guaranteeing a message is seen by a broader, less-engaged audience.
You should evaluate this decision based on `user intent and engagement context`.
Choose TrueView Discovery Ads when: Your goal is to engage users in a discovery mindset. These ads appear alongside other organic videos, in the YouTube feed, or in search results when users are researching topics related to your brand. The key is that the user initiates the interaction by clicking.
Choose Non-Skippable Ads when: Your primary objective is maximum brand awareness and message recall. These ads are intrusive by nature but guarantee your ad is viewed for a set duration, making them effective for large-scale campaigns where reaching a massive audience with a short, impactful message is the priority.
Aligning your ad format with the user's context is fundamental to campaign success. The full article provides more examples of how to match different ad formats to specific marketing objectives.
The BPC brand achieved impressive results by strategically integrating YouTube into their traditional TV media plan to specifically target a younger demographic that is harder to reach on linear TV alone. This case study highlights that a combined approach is no longer just an option but a necessity for `efficient, cross-channel reach`.
The results speak for themselves: the brand reached 90% of its selected younger audience while spending only 42% of the budget that a TV-only campaign would have required for similar results. This outcome demonstrates several key principles:
Incremental Reach: YouTube effectively filled the gaps left by TV, connecting with cord-cutters and light TV viewers within the target demographic.
Budget Optimization: By using a tool like TV in Reach Planner, the brand could precisely model how to allocate spending between TV and YouTube to avoid waste and maximize impact.
Audience-Centric Planning: The strategy was built around where the audience spends its time, not just where the brand has traditionally advertised.
This data proves that integrating YouTube and TV is a powerful way to enhance campaign performance. Explore further case studies and strategies in the complete post.
The sheer scale of YouTube's audience, now exceeding 2 billion monthly users, confirms its evolution from a niche video site to a central hub for daily life. The radical growth in watch time, especially on TV screens since the pandemic, proves it is a mainstream entertainment platform rivaling traditional television and a key destination for product discovery.
The platform's dual role is a critical strategic consideration. For example, TrueView Discovery for Search Ads directly targets users in the research phase, appearing above organic search results when a user is actively looking for information. At the same time, formats like Masthead ads and Non-skippable ads are designed for massive awareness, treating YouTube like a broadcast channel. This duality means your brand must develop a `bifurcated video strategy` that caters to both active searchers and passive viewers. Failing to address both aspects means missing a significant portion of the customer journey, a concept we explain in more detail throughout the article.
This accelerated growth in e-commerce means consumers are more primed to purchase online than ever before, and YouTube is a key part of their journey. Brands can capitalize on this by using ad formats that directly bridge the gap between discovery and purchase, effectively turning viewers into customers.
To tap into this trend, you must align your ad format choice with different stages of the `digital shopping journey`:
For Discovery: Use TrueView Discovery Ads to appear in YouTube search results when potential customers are researching products or solutions. This places your brand in their consideration set early on.
For Consideration: Employ skippable in-stream ads that tell a compelling product story and direct users to your website to learn more.
For Driving Action: Use TrueView for action campaigns (a related format) that feature prominent calls-to-action, encouraging viewers to click through and make a purchase directly from the video ad.
By mapping your YouTube strategy to the e-commerce funnel, you can capture demand that the pandemic has permanently shifted online. Uncover more ways to link video to sales in our full guide.
For a newly online business, using Reach Planner demystifies the process of launching a YouTube campaign by providing clear, data-backed forecasts. It allows you to model different scenarios to find a balance between your budget and your reach goals before committing a single dollar.
Here is a simple plan to get started:
Define Your Audience: Begin by selecting your target location, demographics, and interests within the Reach Planner tool. Be specific to ensure the forecast is relevant.
Set Your Budget and Dates: Input a realistic media budget and the desired flight dates for your campaign. The tool will use this to generate its projections.
Select Your Ad Format Mix: Choose the ad formats you want to use, such as a combination of Bumpers and TrueView for Reach ads, as recommended for a Video Reach Campaign.
Analyze the Forecast: The tool will generate a reach curve, showing the estimated number of unique users you can reach at different budget levels, along with projected frequency. Adjust your inputs to find the `most efficient plan` for your specific goals.
This process transforms an intimidating task into a manageable, strategic exercise. Dive deeper into the specifics of setting up your first campaign by reading the complete article.
Insights Finder serves as the crucial discovery phase for any successful video campaign, uncovering what your target audience is passionate about and actively watching on YouTube. It moves your strategy beyond demographic assumptions and into the realm of real, observed behavior, which is key to creating resonant content.
A team can operationalize these insights with a structured approach:
Explore Broad Topics: Start by inputting general topics related to your industry or product into Insights Finder.
Identify Core Audience Segments: The tool will reveal key audience profiles and the top-performing content and channels they engage with. Note these specific interests.
Extract Creative and Targeting Cues: Analyze the themes, tones, and formats of the popular content. This data should directly inform your `creative strategy` and your targeting selections for the ad campaign.
Build the Media Plan: Use the identified audience segments and content affinities to build your targeting groups in Google Ads, ensuring your ads appear in the most relevant contexts.
This method ensures your media plan is not just a guess but a direct response to what your audience already loves. The full post offers more on turning insights into impactful campaigns.
The persistent growth of YouTube consumption, especially on TV screens, signals a permanent shift in media habits that requires a fundamental reallocation of advertising budgets. Marketers must now view YouTube not as a supplement to TV but as a co-equal pillar of any comprehensive video strategy, demanding a more integrated and flexible approach to spending.
The key implication is the need for `dynamic budget allocation` based on performance data. Instead of fixed annual budgets for TV and digital, you should:
Adopt a Unified Video Budget: Pool your TV and digital video funds to allow for fluid allocation to the channels delivering the most efficient reach.
Use Cross-Platform Measurement: Employ tools like TV in Reach Planner to understand the unduplicated reach of combined campaigns and identify areas of diminishing returns on any single platform.
Test and Learn: Continuously experiment with different budget splits to find the optimal mix for your specific audience and goals, as demonstrated by the BPC brand that achieved 90% reach with just 42% of a TV-only budget.
This new reality demands agility and a data-first mindset. Explore the future of media planning further in the full article.
This trend toward automation fundamentally shifts the media planner's role from manual optimization to high-level strategy and analysis. As machine learning handles the tactical decisions of which ad format to serve, planners can focus on more impactful work like audience discovery, creative strategy, and cross-channel measurement.
The required skillset will evolve to be more strategic and analytical. Future media planners will need to excel in:
Audience Insight Generation: Using tools like Insights Finder to uncover the 'why' behind consumer behavior, which then informs the automated campaigns.
Strategic Goal Setting: Clearly defining business objectives and KPIs that guide the machine learning algorithms. The algorithm is only as good as the goal you give it.
Creative-Data Synthesis: Working closely with creative teams to ensure the ad assets are suited for the `automated, multi-format environment` that campaigns like Video Reach create.
Holistic Measurement: Analyzing the overall impact of campaigns beyond simple metrics, connecting video performance to larger business outcomes.
Success will depend less on tweaking bids and more on strategic direction. Learn more about adapting to this new era in the complete post.
This struggle is a common pain point, but it can be solved by using a blended approach within a single, optimized campaign. Combining formats like short, unskippable ads with longer, skippable ones allows an algorithm to choose the most cost-effective option for each individual impression, maximizing reach without wasting money.
The Video Reach Campaign is the ideal solution to this problem. It addresses the challenge by:
Leveraging Machine Learning: The campaign automatically serves the best mix of 6s Bumpers and TrueView for Reach ads. This ensures you are not forcing an expensive format on a user who could be reached more cheaply.
Optimizing for a Single Goal: By focusing solely on `maximizing unique reach`, the system prioritizes efficiency above all else. It finds the cheapest way to show your ad to one more person.
Simplifying Management: This approach removes the need for you to manually guess which format will perform best, letting the data drive decisions in real time.
This strategy provides a powerful answer to the perennial problem of balancing reach and cost. The full article provides a deeper look at how to structure these campaigns for success.
This misalignment is a primary cause of wasted ad spend and poor user experience. Using a specialized format like TrueView Discovery for Search directly solves this by ensuring your video ad is presented only when a user has explicitly signaled their interest by typing in a relevant search query on YouTube.
This format is a powerful solution because it perfectly matches the ad to the user's context.
Targets Active Intent: Unlike passive viewing, these ads target users who are actively in a `problem-solving or research mindset`. This makes them far more receptive to a relevant solution from your brand.
Provides High-Value Placement: The ad appears at the top of the YouTube search results page, a premium position that captures immediate attention from the most qualified viewers.
User-Initiated Engagement: Because users must click to watch the video, the subsequent engagement is of much higher quality than a forced ad view.
By using this format, you avoid interrupting a user's entertainment and instead become a helpful part of their discovery process. Learn how to better match ads to user context in our complete guide.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
