4 Ways to Reduce Waste in Your YouTube Advertising

Advertising on YouTube is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience and promote your toy products. However, not all YouTube advertising is created equal. While marketers have long prioritized impressions and view rates, the best performance metrics for learning how video ads deliver real business outcomes are more complex than first thought.

Echoes of John Wanamaker’s famous quote still rings true today with the majority of toy marketers on YouTube: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” 

This begs the more important question: how much money are you making or wasting on YouTube? 

At Precise TV, we help you answer that question. We’re all about making advertising more effective and reducing your waste as a marketer. And with top marketers spending nearly $8 billion on YouTube advertising in Q4 2022 alone, there’s bound to be waste we can reduce. In fact, we typically help toy companies reduce media wastage by 40- 60%.

Let’s talk about four key ways to tackle this issue.

1.  Understanding current wastage

We use our exclusive panel data from our proprietary report dubbed PARK (Precise Advertiser Report, Kids)  to understand how much wastage you have in your current media buys. We use our COPPA Compliant contextual engine to understand where audiences are actually consuming content. 

2. Targeting the right audience happens at the video-level 

Most toy marketers might think about channel-level targeting when they start a campaign. While there are millions of YouTube channels out there creating amazing content, not every video is relevant to your product. 

Let’s take the Kaji Family Channel  as a prime example. One of our customers is a Slime Toy Company, using YouTube to reach 4-6 year old girls. On the surface, the Kaji Family Channel seemed like a great fit – there’s awesome kid-safe content, tons of videos and views, and in most cases, you would buy this at a channel-level. But digging deeper, Precise TV’s solution identified only 12 videos that were related directly to slime. Our contextual intelligence engine further predicted that only 19% of the videos were likely to resonate with girls 4-6. This is a considerably small percentage of the overall channels’ content, which means if that advertiser were to just target the Kaji Family at a channel-level, they likely would waste a lot of money running against content that won’t convert their desired audience.  

Using the PreciseTV methodology allowed us to eliminate a ton of waste from the campaign and focus on those videos that would perform better.

3. Use POS data to better inform your ad strategy

Point-of-sale (POS) data opens up a world of advanced analytics to help inform pre- and post-campaign success. Precise TV has access to proprietary retail data from sites such as Amazon that help toy marketers understand if they’re running their ads in the appropriate regions and targeting appropriate buyers, and ultimately yields far more accurate post-campaign attribution modeling.  

Let’s say you’re a toy company and you’re running a new campaign to advertise your latest product. POS data can help determine which locations your products are in the greatest and fewest supply. This may sound simple, but if your customers in South Carolina can’t get the product in a store, you’re just wasting your money if you run ads targeting their location. 

POS data also helps inform campaign attribution. By working with PreciseTV, toy marketers are able to determine the ROAS for their ads on YouTube, focusing on the creative and audience targeting that drives the greatest impact on real-world sales, and stopping campaigns that aren’t driving returns and just wasting money. 

4. Focus on  the metrics that matter

View rate is not a performance metric. For toy companies, view rate can even be misleading in terms of determining success. Unskippable ads are one example where view rate reports ‘false success’ (see our Virtual Playtime article for more). 

The best way for a toy marketer to reduce their waste and avoid the ‘view rate trap’ is by working with a specialized partner who enables you to leverage contextual insights, video-level intelligence, POS data, and predictive analytics. By effectively targeting  your audience with better data up front, you can better predict success knowing your ads are reaching the right audience in as least wasteful a manner as possible. 

Precise TV is the world’s first and leading kidSAFE+ COPPA certified YouTube advertising platform. If you’re interested in learning about your current media wastage, we would be happy to help, so  please contact us.