YouTube Ad Sequencing

Factor One YouTube Ad Sequencing

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What Is YouTube Video Ad Sequencing?

“YouTube ad sequencing” is a feature on YouTube that allows you to serve video ads to your audience in a specific order with the aim to build brand interest, reinforce a message, or segment potential leads from uninterested viewers. Showing ads in a particular order helps to target audiences that are more likely to convert to customers, engage with your customers in a way that is more clear to your company’s message, and reduces marketing costs.

How Does YouTube Ad Sequencing Work?

Take us for example. One way we use ad sequencing is to reinforce brand recognition and recall. This particular method is called the Direct Shot. This sequence uses four to six videos to present the same idea from different angles and is great for reinforcing our internet marketing services’ features and benefits.

In this sequence example, we show our 60-second video ad as the first video in the ad sequence. If a viewer skips our ad prior to the 30-second mark we remove them from the ad sequence, since they may not have been interested in our content. If, however, a person showed interest in our first video ad, we then serve 4 unique, unskippable bumper video ads. Each bumper ad is only 6 seconds in length and each ad continues to reinforce our brand name, features, and benefits; followed finally by the original 60 second ad that they saw the first time.

This video ad sequence can take place over several days, but we can limit how often a person may enter a sequence during a YouTube marketing campaign in order to avoid ad fatigue.

So what are the types of results we’re going for? Here are what Google’s results were when they analyzed The Direct Shot type of sequencing campaign vs a typical 30-second spot.

Direct Shot Metrics

Playlist - Our Ad Sequence

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Want to advertise on YouTube? Factor One Marketing can help!

Want to advertise on YouTube? Factor One Marketing can help!

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Factor One Marketing Bumper 1

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Factor One Marketing Bumper 2

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Factor One Marketing Bumper 4

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Finding Authenticity In Discomfort

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Creative Effectiveness In A Pandemic

YouTube Advertising - Creative Effectiveness In A Pandemic

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YouTube #WithMe Videos

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Creating For Time Of Day

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Data Can Drive Creativity

Programmers or designers of software working with online data and papers

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We work with marketing teams that have some very talented creatives. We’ve also found that when creatives have access to and understand who their real audiences are, it takes marketing to fascinating new levels.

On a recent campaign, for example, we found that a disproportionate amount of website visitors to an outdoor clothing site also were searching for flights to Costa Rica. In combining these two data points they were able to create product reviews videos that also talked about using them in context with travelling to Costa Rica.

This showed an increase in ad response, view rates, brand recall and sales by targeting this specific audience on YouTube.

Let us work with your creative team to drive better marketing results on YouTube, Google Search, Remarketing and Display advertising for your company.

When working with talented creatives, the willingness to experiment and using data analysis for instant feedback, it’s not only effective, it’s fun.

Do Long Ads Work?

Three tourists receive a boarding pass in airport

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We often get asked, how long should my YouTube ad be? Truthfully, YouTube is such a diverse platform that some ads that are 4 or 5 minutes in length can be very effective, especially when you’re hitting the right audience.

What works best on YouTube is experimenting with not only the audiences that will see your ads, but also the content that they will most connect with.

The above Air Canada ad was about 1:30 in length and was one of the most watched ads by Canadians in 2019 (both organically and through ads). Likely this ad content would connect with audiences that fall into a multitude of categories, such as:

In Market – Air Travel > Travel By Class

Affinity – Travel Buffs

Interests – TV Comedies

We work well with creative marketing teams to provide insights to not only connect with the right audiences but also helping use data to drive creative experimentation to better reach new customers.

Want more information on this and other YouTube strategies?

YouTube Bumper Ad Campaign

Factor One YouTube Bumper Ads

YouTube - Bumper Ad Campaign

There has been a lot of exciting developments and innovations for advertising on the YouTube platform, one of which is bumper ads. Bumpers are six-second ads that are unskippable. They’re designed for and do particularly well on mobile devices, where the majority of YouTube content is viewed. Because they are short and unskippable they aren’t as intrusive as say a 15 or 30-second unskippable ad.

The challenge with a six-second ad is that it’s not a lot of time to have a call to action or explain a product or service, however, it is long enough to promote a feature or brand. Currently, it’s a bit like the wild west in that we’re all learning to be creative and memorable within six seconds!

The Challenge

So the challenge for us at Factor One was to try and boost awareness of our brand name and what we do within our own Calgary market as a digital marketing agency and a Google Partner that specializes in advertising on the Google platform. Display Ads are an economical and effective brand awareness tool, however, we wanted to see how much more effective YouTube bumper ads could be.

There are plenty of generic keyword search terms we do target with our search ads and they do well for us, however, searches for our brand name in our local market were not very high.

The Campaign

We created 10 bumper ads that we would run on YouTube for 3 months. In experimenting with the format we knew from other campaigns we ran for clients that music plays a big part in getting the attention of the person seeing the ad. We also knew humor works well on YouTube. Finally, we needed to highlight an issue or problem our audience might be experiencing so we came up with several humorous ways of highlighting them and ended each video by showing our brand name and service for the last 2 seconds.

For our targeting, we selected a very targeted audience profile of those who were in the market for our services. In addition, we monitored what time of the day our ads showed to maximize our bidding strategy for when our audience might be the most receptive to our message and then did time of day bid adjustments based on the data we got back.

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Measuring Results

As YouTube bumper ads don’t give a huge opportunity for a call to action but tend to have higher brand recall we were going to measure several indicators. We had micro and macro conversions (you can read my article about micro vs macro conversions here.)

For a micro-conversion, we were measuring how much we could grow our segmented remarketing lists that we would then use for display and remarketing for search ads. Since we wanted to drive brand awareness through people searching for our brand name, we also wanted to measure how often we had ad impressions for our brand name.

For a macro-conversion, we were going to measure people who contacted us either through a phone call or quote request from all channels but more importantly through searches through our brand name.

We would compare the results of brand searches on Google for the three months we ran the campaign to the previous three months.

The Goods

+1,950%

Branded Keyword Impressions

+36%

Website Conversions

+16%

Remarketing List Growth

+26%

Website Conversion Rate

When comparing searches for our branded keywords we saw a whopping 1,950% increase in searches. Our branded keywords campaign was not altered for this case study so that represents quite a large jump in searches within our local market. Ads are only triggered if someone searches for our brand name.

In addition, we saw a 36% increase in overall conversions, a 26% increase in conversion rate on our website (better quality of traffic), and a 16% increase in our remarketing list audience.

If you want to know if this type of a strategy would work for your company please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, we’d be happy to see if we can do even better managing a campaign for you!