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.
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!
