How to connect YouTube insights to your wider strategy
YouTube is the largest video publisher in the world across all in-stream, native and video formats. It’s the most rewarding channel when it comes to unique user reach. And it’s the very definition of digital-first.
Marketers face many of the same challenges on YouTube as they do on linear TV. Getting the most out of YouTube takes more than basic insights, as well as guidance on how to utilize those insights for smart planning, mid-campaign optimizations and the precise measurement we expect in the programmatic age.
The YouTube challenge
Marketers face four major challenges when advertising on YouTube.
- Walled garden insights
The only way to buy inventory programmatically on the site is through Google’s self-serve advertising platforms (Google Ads or DV360). YouTube is, in essence, a walled garden, and like other walled garden advertising -- Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and so on – there are limits on the data that brands receive, making it hard to dig into the detail about where exactly their ads are running. - Targeting media spend
Unless you have solid insights into the kind of people you want to reach and the channels and videos where they’re most likely to be engaging, it will be challenging to reach the right people in the right places. - Brand safety
Without insights into what content your ads are being shown beside, it is difficult to mitigate brand safety concerns. - Real-time optimization
The way DV360 provides insights is largely via static post-campaign reports, which means that even if you had the insights to solve the challenges of wastage and brand safety, you wouldn’t be able to use them. This makes it difficult to course-correct on a campaign while it’s happening.
How to get more from YouTube
The good news is that there is a way to get a far greater level of insights from YouTube, to get more bang for your buck within the platform and to connect those insights to your wider strategy.
The solution comes in the form of the YouTube API, an incredible and vast source of data on all the content uploaded to the platform that, if analyzed correctly, can be used to get far deeper insights – and more quickly – than those provided by DV360.
By connecting to the YouTube API, you get granular data on the channels and videos where your ads are displaying, meaning you can look for trends and optimize towards the best performing keywords and video descriptions, or even make mid-campaign decisions based on metrics driven by video length, recency of upload or the popularity of videos.
To find out more about how it works in practice and what steps you need to take to make the most of your YouTube investments, have a read of our short ebook.
Tom Richards
Global Product Director
MiQ
