Ad Optimization on YouTube ‒ Your five minute brief

What marketers and media agencies really need to know about optimizing YouTube ad performance ‒ Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Last year video advertising spend in the US alone rose by 29% to $9.84 billion dollars. 72% of marketers were planning to allocate budget to YouTube in 2017, compared to a projected 46% on Facebook.

In this five minute brief, Precise.TV gives some quick pointers for advertisers who wish to make the most of their spend with YouTube ad optimization.

What are the biggest challenges with YouTube ad optimization?

There’s a whole set of challenges that advertisers need to deal with in order to really make the most out of YouTube:

1. Lack of control over video placement quality. The open nature of YouTube makes it a real forum for human creativity, featuring everything from big budget music videos to rough and ready mobile uploads. The challenge for polished consumer brands is ensuring their ads appear alongside content of the right caliber and quality.
   
   
2. Lack of transparency. Once your campaign is live, you have no way of controlling exactly where you ads are appearing. You just have to hope your targeting works as well as you expect.
   
   
3. Lack of control. Say you discover your ad is being served alongside some highly inappropriate content, for example an explicit or offensive video. Naturally you want to take it down as soon as possible. Using YouTube alone, you have no way to exclude just that content ‒ instead you have to stop the whole campaign.

What makes the biggest difference to YouTube ad optimization?

The most crucial factor for a successful YouTube campaign is the placement of ads against contextually relevant video inventory. Users today expect content served to them in the digital space to be relevant and appropriate.

Advertisers have to be sure their content is appearing against relevant videos, in front of consumers who are interested and engaged. Otherwise, there is a risk of being perceived as intrusive brand marketing. Consumers already have a low tolerance for this, and it’s getting lower.

If you want anyone to continue viewing your ad beyond those mandatory first five seconds, you’d better make sure it’s being shown in the right context. Our insider guide will give you step by step advice to ensure your campaigns outperform every time.

How can Precise.TV help with YouTube ad optimization?

Precise.TV’s proprietary technology helps brands and agencies improve the performance of their video advertising, through contextual relevance and granular optimization based on machine-learning.

We draw on our industry expertise to address the problems of targeting, by fine tuning, and filtering out non-relevant content, through detailed analysis, elimination, and ongoing optimization on a significant scale. Using a three-step approach, the platform curates and delivers your adverts against contextually relevant, brand-safe videos.

We go through our three-step approach in our insider’s guide. It certainly works. We achieve an average VTR uplift of 50% across all campaigns. For a recent campaign on a home appliance brand we achieved product interest lift of 161%.

Get the full story with Precise.TV’s insider’s guide to achieving top-performing ad campaigns on YouTube