At enCOMPASS Agency, one of our most important consultatory services is working with clients to determine where they should be spending their advertising dollars. We want to make sure our clients are presenting their message in a place where their target audience will have a high level of engagement. And of course, we want to help them generate a significant return on their investment.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but often, we’ll counsel our clients to invest some of their resources in YouTube ads.

Why YouTube?

There are a number of advantages that YouTube can deliver. Consider five of the most significant benefits:

1) YouTube offers incredible reach.

Studies confirm that roughly a third of all time spent online is spent watching videos; and while not all of that video consumption happens on YouTube, the platform does offer some staggering statistics:

• More than 2 billion logged-in users per month
• About three quarters of U.S. adults use YouTube
• Among U.S. adults, YouTube use eclipses virtually all other platforms, running neck-and-neck with Facebook

Purely in terms of access to a large audience, YouTube is unparalleled.

2) YouTube allows for robust targeting.

Reach alone only matters so much; marketers don’t need to reach a big audience so much as they need to reach the right audience. This is another area in which YouTube shines, providing sophisticated targeting options that make it easy to identify and serve ads to a specified group.

You can probably imagine what some of the targeting options are; like many online ad platforms, YouTube lets you target in terms of age, geographic locale, and other demographics. But there are a number of even stronger options. For example, you can target your ads based on what the user is actually watching on YouTube. If you own an HVAC company, you can serve ads to users who have been watching content about DIY air conditioning repair. If you own an aftermarket auto customization shop, you can serve videos to users who’ve been viewing footage about “tricked out” cars. You get the idea. YouTube provides remarkable options for ensuring your ads are displayed to the people who are most likely to be interested (and most likely to become paying customers).

3) YouTube offers different kinds of ads.

Advertisers will find a number of ways to customize their YouTube strategy, ensuring it aligns with their goals and their budget. Specifically, YouTube provides different kinds of ads:

• TrueView ads. You’ll only pay for these if the user watches in full or interacts with the content in some way, such as clicking through on the call to action.
• Preroll (and midroll) ads. These are the ads that users can’t skip, and they may be up to 20 seconds in duration.
• Bumper ads. These six-second ads play right before the user’s chosen content; their brevity provides creative challenges but also a great opportunity to raise brand awareness. (Indeed, running bumpers in conjunction with longer ads has been proven to raise brand awareness as well as ad recall by an average of 38%.)

4) YouTube is an OTT platform that actually serves ads

Living room watching is the platform’s fastest-growing screen segment. It’s called “Over the Top” or “OTT” for short, initially named in reference to devices that go “over” a cable box to give the user access to TV content. Much video consumption happens via over-the-top media services; for example, streaming platforms watched from a “smart” TV or via a device like AppleTV, Roku or game consoles.

While OTT represents a significant part of the media landscape, it’s critical to note that the biggest OTT platforms (Netflix and Disney+) don’t serve ads. As such, it’s critical for advertisers to include YouTube as part of their broader video strategy.

Most companies that buy OTT don’t include YouTube in their OTT mix, even though YouTube says 250 million hours of watch time per day are happening on TV screens. And this continues to rise as YouTube views on connected TV screens have increased 39%. In fact, with adults 18-34, YouTube is the second only to Netflix in the OTT category.

5) YouTube brand lift studies.

Ultimately, the efficacy of an ad campaign is about more than how the audience responds to the ads; it’s also measured by how the campaign affects brand metrics. Brand lift is a term that denotes the effect YouTube ads have on perceptions and behaviors during the consumer journey.

YouTube provides reporting that helps advertisers gauge these effects. Within days of starting a new ad campaign, YouTube “gives you insights into how your ads are impacting the metrics that matter, including lifts in brand awareness, ad recall, consideration, favorability, purchase intent, and brand interest, as measured by organic search activity. You can easily optimize your campaigns mid-flight, based on these near real-time results, broken out by demographics, frequency, and more.”

The enCOMPASS Approach to Digital Video

Our approach to YouTube falls within our broader strategy for digital video.

We help our clients leverage digital video in a number of ways. We’re here to produce excellent, creative video content on your brand’s behalf. We’ll also develop the combination of video tactics, audience targeting, and results tracking you need for a robust campaign. Whether you’re looking to make the most of older video content or to execute a brand-new content strategy, enCOMPASS can help.

We’re always eager to talk more about the merits of digital video advertising, including YouTube ad strategy. And we’re ready to help you determine whether YouTube is the right fit for your brand. To set up a time to chat, just reach out to enCOMPASS at your next opportunity.