Your User is Not A Nail And Your YouTube Ads Should Not be An Hammer

Create better YouTube Ads!
Your user is not a nail, and your YouTube Ads should not be a hammer.
When running YouTube Ad campaigns, like in every other marketing campaign, measuring the correct KPI is essential! Checking at the wrong KPI can negatively affect your business.

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My Experience with repeated ads

I experience this problem as a user almost every time I watch a YouTube video. As I start the video, YouTube shows a 25-second video by a sponsor. I’m not sure why, but the sponsor is always one of a restricted group of only three brands. In order to watch the requested video, I have to go through the entire 25-second ad and then some more, up to a total of 45 seconds of advertising.

Bad for the users, bad for the advertisers

While I understand YouTube’s need to monetize my use of its resources entirely, I don’t appreciate repeatedly watching the same irrelevant ad. Let’s see why this is bad for everybody:

• If you are a user (like me), as I explained, the repetition of the same ad over and over is annoying and, after a while, can become even more irritating.
• If you are an advertiser, you are wasting your money. Targeting the same user multiple times will not make any positive difference; quite the opposite.

What should advertisers do instead?

Instead of serving the same long ad to the same users, advertisers should create a long and short version of each ad. They should show the extended version up to three times, working on the Frequency Cap parameter of the YouTube campaign to control the Ad Frequency. After that, the campaign should switch to the short version as a simple recall. This is what most well-run campaigns are doing.

Picking the right KPIs

Ad Frequency is an important KPI that many marketers underestimate. If you don’t set a Frequency Cap and show the same ad to the same user too many times, you might induce irritation, and the perception of your brand can quickly shift toward the negative.