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Google has released a set of new tools to help advertisers deliver highly personalized ads on YouTube.
The tools use information like an individual’s search history, the places they visit, or the apps they may have downloaded to deliver YouTube ads that are much more likely to generate sales than non-targeted ones, the company said Sept. 25.
One of the new tools is called Director Mix. It can help organizations deliver thousands of different versions of the same ad, each one tailored for a specific audience, said Diya Jolly, director of product management, on Google’s Inside AdWords.
Advertisers simply provide Google with the building blocks of a video ad, such as voice-overs, copy and background. Director Mix then takes the different elements and mixes them in different ways to automatically create thousands of versions of a particular ad.
Campbell Soup for instance is using the tool to deliver ads to people based on the YouTube content that they are about to watch, said Jolly. “For instance if you clicked to watch clips from Orange is the New Black, you’d see a bumper asking, does your cooking make prison food seem good? We’ve got a soup for that’, ” Jolly said.
Such personalization helped Campbell realize a significant lift in sales and in ad recall with the campaign, she claimed.
Starting this week, Google is also making it easier for advertisers to specify the target audiences they want to reach using a feature called Custom Affinity Audiences.
Businesses that want to advertise on YouTube can use the feature to target people based on data from their browsing histories or the kind of apps and places they might like. For example, a maker of outdoor apparel could use the audience segmentation capability to deliver ads targeted to people who might have searched for skis or downloaded a ski resort’s brochure.
Custom Affinity Audiences, according to Google, gives businesses a way to reach people who might be interested in products and services similar to their own even when those people might be searching for or watching videos of other products on YouTube.
A third feature that Google announced this week for YouTube advertisers is called Video Ad Sequencing. The feature lets organizations string together and use a series of sequential ads to communicate a marketing message.
An advertiser could take advantage of the feature to deliver a 15-second ad to create awareness of a new product. They could then follow that first ad with another one that describes the product in detail and a third ad that keeps the product fresh in an individual’s mind and pushes them to a purchase decision, Jolly said.
Ubisoft, the maker of the popular Assasin’s Creed video game for instance used a sequence of four, six-second ads on YouTube to generate substantial interest in the next version of its game and the trailer for the game, she noted.
Google also announced a new approach to help businesses measure the effectiveness of their campaigns on YouTube. Businesses advertising on YouTube can now use a Nielsen technology called Matched Panel Analysis to identify the ads that are working best at driving offline sales, Jolly said.