YouTube, is without a doubt, the most popular video marketing platform on the planet today. However, last year’s content scandals caused many advertisers to back away from the company in a bid to protect brand reputation.
In a bid to win back disenchanted marketers and advertisers, YouTube recently released a new suite of creative tools that allow agencies to test ads in real-time before mass release and to target specific audiences with different versions of the same ad.
Introducing YouTube’s Video Experiments
YouTube’s new set of creative resources are designed to help you tell meaningful stories on the channel, to test variations of your ads and analyze the creative impact of your efforts.
One of the new tools, Video Experiments, will allow Google Advertisers to shift away from investing money in focus groups and simulated ad environments and to use YouTube’s real ad environment instead.
While there are many benefits of the Video Experiments tool, some of the primary gains have to do with price, time-efficiency, and performance.
Offering head-to-head testing for AdWords users, Video Experiments works with brand measurements and allows marketers to measure the ongoing impact of creative efforts on KPIs. All users pay for is media investment.
With this, you can run segmented experiments on YouTube and measure results in just a few days. It’s rapid, immediate, and ideal for providing a large amount of information in a short time.
It’s a great tool to convert non-working media spend and ensure that users are getting as much value as possible from the platform.
Changing the Tides of Testing
Before tools like Video Experiments and Creative Suites, marketers and other advertising professionals used tools like moderators, respondents, and focus groups to get the results they needed to hone their digital advertising.
While these traditional approaches were great for offering valuable qualitative information, social media has since become a more relevant way to understand the ins and outs of consumer behavior.
Because traditional focus groups are limited to relatively narrow sets of predefined questions, they don’t always provide the high-quality data and survey answers marketers need to make informed decisions.
Beyond that, using traditional focus groups and respondents can be expensive.
According to the Neilsen Norman Group, it can cost about $11,000-$13,000 to run a two-session evening focus group. That’s a massive investment, and it isn’t a step all marketers are willing to take!
The Benefit of Testing Ads in Real-Time
From Suck-It-And-See to Sixth Sense
In the world of digital marketing and advertising, there are dozens of tools and traditions that keep marketers being reactive rather than proactive. These run the gamut, but always cost teams some level of accuracy and effectiveness. Fortunately, that’s all about to change.
Today, testing ads in real-time has become the go-to approach.
The benefits of this approach are as follows:
• Low cost
• High-quality insights
• More creativity when it comes to ad campaigns
Additionally, because real-time testing offers immediate feedback for marketers, it’s easier for those using it to adjust their strategies accordingly and reap greater ROI in the process.
What’s more, real-time ad testing allows marketers to publish relevant, timely ads instantly, and to take advantage of things like YouTube and Google’s 2 million or more sites in the Display Network.
This is a massive marketing opportunity and will create major results for marketers.
The Future of Advertising Starts Now
Video Experiments is a powerful tool, and it’s here to help marketers excel.
By allowing teams to test versions of an ad against a single target audience, or new creative against several different audiences, real-time video ad testing via Video Experiments makes age-old things like audience segmentation and retention reports easier to combine and understand.
Combine these with new tools like YouTube’s focus on annotating key moments in a video, and tracking results that come from them, and it’s obvious that marketers are now existing in an environment where optimizing video context and audience has become critical.
Using YouTube’s marketer-specific Creative Suite, companies can access new features, powerful resources, and ongoing playbooks that enhance creative advertising, training, and more.
An adaptable new method of testing video ads, Video Experiments provides a platform for creativity and innovation for marketers, and simplifies the process of providing value and differentiating a company from its competitors.
