Using YouTube Creative to Drive User Engagement and Action

In case you haven’t been able to pull yourself away from your smartphone to notice: we’re in the middle of an attention drought. Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. In fact, they even did a study in Canada that indicated that our attention spans are now shorter than that of a goldfish.

Our brains are harder to engage with content that is seen online. This presents a challenging problem for marketers across all industries. Be honest, how many times do you actually look at an ad online?

As marketers, if we want to capture the attention of our target audiences, we have to craft content that is engaging. While that may seem easier said than done, you actually have a lot of useful tools at your disposal. One, in particular, is YouTube TrueView Ads. They solve the attention problem because they’re attention-grabbing, creative, and short.

Plus, you are able to optimize campaigns based on completed views ensuring that your customer actually saw your video ad and wasn’t just served up an impression which is really just the potential to see a display ad, but doesn’t ensure that the customer engaged with it.

What are YouTube TrueView Ads?

YouTube TrueView for Action Ads are in-stream video ads that make it as easy as possible for users to engage with your call to action. As ads, they are highly engaging and are designed so that the user does not have to navigate away from their content to engage with them. The call-to-actions are bright and bold and the ad itself is hard to look away from. They disrupt our attention and grab it—making us more likely to engage. In this sense, they’re able to turn attention into action.

Technically speaking, the ads consist of four components:

• Video content
• Calls-to-Action
• Headline Text Overlay
• End Screen

Because they are so simple and straightforward, there’s little chance for your audience to be confused by them. In short, the YouTube TrueView for Action ads are optimized for lead generation—whether it’s filling out a form or signing up for something.

How Do They Work?

YouTube TrueView for Action Ads have a number of advantages. In fact, when used correctly they can impact potential customers at all levels of the marketing funnel. The trick is knowing when and where to target your customers—and the results can be pretty interesting.

Using this kind of ad in your marketing strategy comes with a variety of different benefits, including:

• Makes it easier for your leads to fill out forms automatically with pre-filled form fields
• Gives you access to YouTube’s advanced targeting options
• Allows you to reach relevant, in-market audiences
• Convert your audiences faster across Google and YouTube
• Educates your audience and increases brand awareness with relevant content
• The ability to reach and convert mobile YouTube users

You can determine the success of your YouTube TrueView for Action Ads by measuring the metrics it produces. Depending on your business, here are three of the most prominent metrics you can use: website conversions, store visits, and purchase intent lift.

Using YouTube TrueView to Your Brand’s Advantage

For example, here are three tips for using them based on a number of case studies from Think With Google. Each tip has the potential to yield valuable results.

• Pair audio and visual elements unique to your brand
• Use Google’s Intent signals to target users by their interests, even if it means displaying your ads in unusual places
• Plan for your ads to show at the same time as TV events and other cultural phenomena online

You have the opportunity to be extremely creative with your YouTube TrueView ads. That’s why it’s imperative to make your ads as engaging as possible.

Although these types of ads can yield amazing results, they may not work for every aspect of your marketing strategy.

Some of the Disadvantages to For Action Ads

If you’re looking to create content that feels personalized to your audiences, YouTube TrueView ads aren’t going to achieve that. In addition, here are some of the biggest disadvantages to YouTube TrueView for Action.

• Unlike other Google Ad tools, your company must be whitelisted in order to run these kinds of ads.
• You have to create each campaign one at a time—you can’t copy and paste elements into different campaigns.
• In order to access the data and lead submissions, you’ll need a webhook tool that connects your CRM to Google’s API.

So, are YouTube TrueView Ads right for your business? It depends on your strategic objectives.

When to Use YouTube TrueView for Action Ads

If you’re focused on generating new leads in 2020, you may want to explore adding YouTube TrueView for Action to your strategy.

However, you should never rely on just one type of advertising to power your strategy. It’s important to balance and optimize your advertising campaigns across a number of different marketing channels.

Have a question about how to best optimize your advertising strategy in 2020? We’re here to help. Reach out to our team today.