Digital Horizons
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Digital Horizons
Steal Your Competitors Traffic With YouTube Ads
How can your business harness the full potential of YouTube's advertising platform to outperform competitors and capture targeted audiences? This episode uncovers the secrets to mastering YouTube advertising, emphasizing its unparalleled reach—over 86% of Australians aged 18 and over—and sophisticated targeting capabilities. We dissect how to strategically use longer format ads to introduce your brand and follow up with cost-effective retargeting methods such as display and bumper ads. With insights on capturing your competitors' traffic by honing in on the URLs users visit, you’ll learn how to keep your brand front and center and maximize engagement.
We also dive deep into the Google ecosystem, revealing how to leverage data from platforms like Maps, Gmail, and Search to create precisely targeted YouTube ad campaigns. From interest and affinity audiences to custom and in-market segments, our discussion highlights the cost-effectiveness of YouTube compared to high-cost per click search campaigns. Discover the benefits of geographic and demographic targeting, first-party data utilization, and the value of YouTube’s skippable ads. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, find out how YouTube’s flexible ad formats and lower CPM rates can effectively drive prospects down the marketing funnel. Don’t miss our tips on crafting compelling ad content and strategies for optimizing your campaigns.
The Digital Horizons Podcast is hosted by:
James Walker - Managing Director Walker Hill Digital
Brian Hastings - Managing Director Nous
A great way to introduce someone to the brand. Serve them your larger, longer format ad two, three, four, even up to five times and then you can shift over to those lower cost retargeting ad options, such as display and bumper ads, to really build up the frequency and maintain that presence in market. Your audience will start to think you're way bigger than you are because you are seen so consistently and you're building up that brand message. Way bigger than you are because you are seen so consistently and you're building up that brand message. Well, welcome back, and we maintain consistency with the podcast while you're away.
Speaker 2:That's right. So this week we were able to put up one of our first brand news episodes, which we're really excited about for that style of podcast. But today we are going to be jumping into one of our standard longer form episodes, where we're going to be talking about YouTube, the opportunity that businesses have for advertising and, I guess, starting off with just the way and the power of the targeting that's available to advertisers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this one. I love YouTube. I love the power of video. As usual, you've got James Walker, owner of Walker Hill Digital, and myself Brian Hastings, owner and director of Nase Braining Agency. So let's crack on.
Speaker 2:So YouTube I watch more YouTube than I probably watch of anything, and it's probably, if you class like, even just in terms of I don't use it on my phone, but in terms of TV, if I am watching TV, it's normally going to be YouTube that I'm consuming content on, and I really need to stop paying for the premium thing because I want to start seeing what kind of ads are happening.
Speaker 2:I really should do that sometime soon. But the ability to target within the platform is so powerful and that's what we're going to be running over today and I guess the first sort of targeting option is one that it's sort of a way that you can start stealing your competitors' traffic because you can target by URLs that people are visiting. So if you've got a plumbing business, say, for example, and you don't want to be paying $25, $30 a click that you'd be used to paying on Google search, you just don't want to get in front of people who are just jumping on your competitors' websites because they are already going to pay for those clicks, then you can then get the cents on the dollar for people to view your YouTube content. So using this strategy is a really effective strategy for stealing your competitors' traffic, because you're just targeting anybody who's going to your list of competitors' websites. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:It's so powerful and it's often overlooked by a lot of clients considering where they should be in the marketing mix where they should be applying budget to. But this size and scale of how much YouTube is viewed and used in Australia is probably beyond what people expect. It's not the sort of ugly duckling or second to TV. It reaches over 86, almost 87% of all Australians aged over 18. And that's a huge potential audience. Obviously, the usage by age group and demographic varies, but when there's an audience size that big or a penetration into the population that high, in a platform that delivers video, it's a no brainer, especially based off the targeting capabilities that it affords you. You can really serve your ad your either brand or performance type ad to the right person at the right time and it's really cost effective. So cheap, yeah, let's, let's jump into it. And what sort of targeting do you utilize when building out a campaign in YouTube?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I mean, there's a number of different ones and I guess, like the one that I started off with with website URL targeting, so you can dump in a whole bunch of URLs which you want to be showing your ads to if people have been to these websites. So say, for example, as I said, you want to target your competitors traffic. That's an easy one Just find a whole list of all your competitors in the local area or wherever that you're advertising in, put their URLs in and then you're going to be shown to them. Other ways that we've used this as well. It might be like if you know that people are interested in specific websites or they're likely to go, say, if you're targeting, if you're a B2B business and there might be trade or association websites or different things that your B2B clients would be accessing, then you can target them to make sure you'll get in front of them. So the URLs are really powerful because you're able to target. It's not kind of like remarketing, but you're targeting other people's traffic as opposed to your own.
Speaker 2:I guess the next targeting and I guess when you're thinking about YouTube, you're not just targeting YouTube traffic YouTube is part of the whole Google ecosystem, so the data points and all the different signals that we're able to use for targeting here is pulling out of the Google Ads network and so similar to what we can do on display.
Speaker 2:So when we think about, all right, well, we've got interest targeting, we've got all the affinity audiences we can create custom audiences and all the different signals that are being received from Google, from Maps, from Gmail, from Search, from all the different platforms. These are all combining into different targeting options. So I think the next one that we want to use is really effective is using search so you can put in keywords that people are actually searching for that you want to be targeting. So, again, if you're in a very high cost per click industry, you don't want to be spending, you know, up to a hundred dollars per click on some of these terms. You can use them as a targeting option for your YouTube videos. So, and again, getting probably, you know, less than 10 cents a view on your advertising. So when you're comparing that and the reach and how far you can stretch your budget compared to a very high cost per click campaign, it's kind of like a no-brand and to be running alongside your search campaign or even just run instead of as a brand exercise.
Speaker 1:And we haven't even touched on the obvious targeting options like geographic really tightly constrained geographic targeting, as well as demographic targeting age brackets, household income and what else is there Gender, gender age, gender location education's in there A hundred percent.
Speaker 2:You've got your demographic targeting and then also you've got your in-market segments. So Google's going to know all right, well, people are searching for these types of terms, they're visiting these types of websites and, I guess, being that everyone's got Google Analytics, google knows how far down the buying journey that they are, and so it allows you to then sort of tailor your ads based on what the part of the buying cycle they're in, so you could be targeting these in-market audiences with specific ads for this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if you imagine how much brands are paying for TV advertising, if it had this, anything like this type of targeting capability, the cost would be even further through the roof. But this type of targeting is available on YouTube and I just don't think many people appreciate how amazing it is that you can target your video content to just the right person, based off either these demographic, geographic targeting capabilities or by the in-market or match list or search history. I think with all of these things combined it can get a little bit. You might be wanting to filter it a bit too much and then your audience and your potential audience starts to come down. But as long as you're not over-filtering your audience and you're not targeting in too tightly and you leave a meaningful size audience, you can build a good level of reach and frequency within the platform as well, I understand.
Speaker 2:And your CPMs are so low as well. So if you're thinking about the cost to reach 1,000 people, I think we're typically seeing between $10 to $20 to reach 1,000 people on YouTube, which is just crazy cheap for the amount of impact. That someone was sitting and watching a 30-second ad and if they're not watching a big portion of it, you're not even paying for that anyway. So you're getting that initial branding and you get in front of people and for no charge at all until they watch the part. Go past that threshold of the charge there.
Speaker 1:That's right. The skippable ads it's almost fine for me if they skip because there's no charge and if you had your branding upfront in the ad, then you get that for free. Effectively, you get that extension, that reach of the start of your ad play. It's also a good way of testing the effectiveness of your ad or the engagement of your ad. How long are people watching the ad before they drop off and hit skip as well? Yeah, but getting that metric, or what's your cost per completed view, is a really good combination of understanding the value of your creative and how many people you're reaching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's definitely something that is sometimes a little undervalued compared to a click through to the website. But having someone watch your ad in full, all the way through to completion, and knowing it's not always on the phone. Like you and I, I watch. Most of the YouTube activity I watch is on my big screen at home and I use the YouTube app on the Samsung TV, have my subscribed videos. I also do pay for YouTube premium, but not everyone does what you and I do.
Speaker 1:But yeah, you're right, I do sometimes turn off premium just to see what sort of, I'm going to have to turn it off.
Speaker 2:I want to see what's on there. To be honest, because we do so much YouTube advertising we talk about all the time, but I actually don't see any YouTube ads, which is probably a bit of a flaw in the system here.
Speaker 2:So I guess, back to targeting and I think you briefly touched on that before is the customer match list as well, Super powerful? So that is your own first-party data that you can be advertising. So you've got your Shopify list, if you've got sales data or whatever, you can then be uploading that into the Google Ads platform and be serving ads specific to these people and then also creating similar audiences as well. So then, just like the lookalike audiences on Facebook, uploading your own customer data or your newsletter list or whatever you have, uploading that into the platform and then making sure that. Oh, telling Google I would like to create, give me a list of more people that show similar behaviors as the people on my list. And again, that opens up who you can reach within the platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that match list is really powerful in even taking the displaying of the right type of video further down the funnel, when we've understood where someone's at in their research process. If you pair it with a marketing automation platform like Marketo or HubSpot, where you can create lists based off triggers or based off their on-site behavior, you can start to have categories of your customers defined by where they are at in the lead process and then feed that list back into your YouTube targeting to serve them the right type of video at the right time. Maybe they're a little bit closer to conversion and they need some customer case study videos. Maybe they're an existing customer and you're some customer case study videos. Maybe they're an existing customer and you're trying to reduce churn so they go into a different YouTube targeting channel, but you're not wasting budget on serving sales videos to existing customers and vice versa.
Speaker 2:Yeah, perfect, and I think one of like I guess, when you're thinking about getting really granular with your targeting, is a really powerful option YouTube has is the ability to target by channel and even just by a specific video.
Speaker 2:So you might be, I guess. For an example, we worked with a client who services luxury cars and so they've got a very specific niche they will only work in the high-end car sort of things, and so we decided, all right, well, we know that people who are likely to buy a high-end car are probably going to watch reviews about it. I mean, there's going to be a lot of people that can't afford the cars ever but they still just like car videos. But I think, trying to think about, all right, well, what's that customer journey of going through that purchase? How do we get in front of these people and so and stuff that do a lot of videos or reviews and stuff, comparison videos between some of these different car models, that allows us to put YouTube, put the advertising on these channels, so that way, when they're looking to get I think they do like the wraps and different stuff on these kind of cars they're going to be thinking about it if they've made a purchase.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and coming down to the cost, just to put it into context, to serve video ads on other more known or not more known than YouTube, but leading mastheads like Taste or Nine, for instance, or even realestatecom, you're going to be paying on a CPM model and sometimes around $30, $40, $50 per thousand times the ad is started to be served.
Speaker 1:When you compare that to YouTube, if you're paying on a cost per view model or even if it is impression based, it's significantly less because you're only paying for that performance. You can end up with CPMs if you were to compare it side by side with the likes of taste or realestatecom of 80 cents to a dollar $1.10 as opposed to the $40, $50 CPMs charged by these publisher platforms. And it doesn't make any sense to me that they can be in the same league without that level of targeting that YouTube has and be charging that much for your video to be started to play and obviously a lot of the times they don't enable skipping in those platforms. But I don't see as much value with the alignment to quality content that these mastheads are advertising that they offer. I think a better contextually targeted YouTube campaign will be cheaper and more engaging and more relevant if you've used the targeting attributes right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. And then I mean another value that you can do on this platform is knowing that someone's watched one of your videos. So you've got your targeting down. You know, you've tested a bunch of different audiences. You've got ones that are engaging and watching through your video, and then you can set your remarketing audiences based on watch time. So then you might be like all right cool.
Speaker 2:Now I know that people have watched 75% of this video. I feel that they're pretty interested in what we've got going on here. So you're almost moving people down along the funnel and then you're remarketing with different content, different ads, different placements. You've got your bumper ads and shorter form stuff continue having different touch points. That would want to continue that sort of full funnel strategy, from discovery on the using your sort of more interest-based, keyword-based targeting, through to your remarketing lists and people who have watched your video content to bring them through to ideally take an action as to what you're trying to achieve with your videos yeah, I'm glad you covered off bumpers and even that that supporting display in terms of remarketing, because you don't have to just remarket off a website visit.
Speaker 1:You can remarket off that view or that almost completed view and we know that someone's seen the key part of our message, so we don't have to pay for the full 30 second view every time. If we've built up a frequency with an individual of three, four, five times seeing the full ad, we can then reduce it down to showing them or serving them the bumper, which is a six second ad. It's called a bumper because it's the start and the end of YouTube content and it's a more cost-effective, even more cost-effective way of buying. As a campaign reminder, I would say it really is difficult to serve a meaningful ad with a six-second bumper if they haven't seen any more of your advertising.
Speaker 1:So I generally pair it with other ad activity but think of it as a bit more of an exciting. So I generally pair it with other ad activity but think of it as a bit more of an exciting animated banner ad. You serve those as retargeting as well, so it's a great way to introduce someone to the brand. Serve them your larger, longer format ad two, three, four, even up to five times and then you can shift over to those lower cost retargeting ad options such as display and bumper ads to really build up the frequency and maintain that presence in market. Your audience will start to think you're way bigger than you are because you are seen so consistently and you're building up that brand message. Plus, you're also able to keep it a bit fresh, swapping a new creative. But what I find YouTube does is it enables brands who typically couldn't afford this previously to have a layer of always on brand activity to support the performance campaign activity or that last click activity that we typically see a lot of budget shifting into.
Speaker 2:Yep, and I guess one barrier that a lot of businesses are going to find is, I feel I should be on YouTube, but compared to sort of creating content for TikTok and even your Facebook ads, there is, I think, a perceived barrier to creating content and I guess it is a bit of a real but it's not as easy. But there are definitely ways that you can do this in a cost-effective way. You don't need a whole production studio to be able to create content on there, and sure you do see, when I have seen ads on the platform, it is your big banks, it is a lot of your big brands that are advertising on these platforms with very high quality TV style ads. But then you also will see a lot more of like almost infomercial type ads from B2B brands and whatever, just educating people on their services. And I guess we're going to be doing a follow-up episode to this about how to structure and how to approach your ad creation for YouTube content. That's really going to get you some good results.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think that'll be a good session to jump into.
Speaker 1:And you're absolutely right, it's one of those platforms where anything from a hand or home shot video showing how the product works all the way up to the big multi-million dollar TV commercial is fine to use on YouTube, as long as it's structured well and it delivers the right brand message.
Speaker 1:So the barriers to entry are lower and you shouldn't only wait to have that really high-end TVC level commercial to use on YouTube. Obviously, they still work well, but where those TV commercials are a little out of place on the likes of TikTok or Instagram Reels, they still work on YouTube as well as an extension across from what you've seen on TV to what you see on YouTube too. So it's a really broad ranging platform that gives you a lot of flexibility as a marketer. I love it and it's going to be continually in our media plan recommendations going forward, pairing out or shifting out some budget, attracting more budget in wherever we can to try to push and test how YouTube impacts the overall performance of the campaigns that we're running. So hopefully we see more and more clients willing to bubble YouTube to the top of their list.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for your time listening today. I hope that we've been able to provide you enough of a bit of a background about the capabilities of the YouTube ads platform. It's going to be something that we're going to be talking a lot more about in the future because, as Brian said, and even for our plans here at Walkio is, youtube is a very strong focus for us going forward in terms of the campaign planning for our client base.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we'll do our part, maybe by turning off our ads blocker for a little bit That'd be a good plan and start reviewing some of the YouTube creative that's out there.
Speaker 2:So thanks for listening today. We'll be back the same time next week and we'll be throwing in another one of these short form new style episodes in between now and then. Thanks again, cheers, thank you.