Create better YouTube Ads!
Your user is not a nail, and your YouTube Ads should not be a hammer.
When running YouTube Ad campaigns, as with any other marketing campaign, measuring the right KPI is essential! Checking the wrong KPI can negatively affect your business.
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 only three brands in a restricted group. To watch the requested video, I have to go through the entire 25-second ad, then some more, for 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, I don’t appreciate having to repeatedly watch 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 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 a short version of each ad. They should show the extended version up to 3 times, using the YouTube campaign’s Frequency Cap parameter 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.
