Campaign Insights Comes to YouTube

YouTube is increasingly becoming a key advertising platform for marketers of all kinds, from new display advertisers to some of the biggest brands in the world. A common need for all advertisers is to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns beyond click-through rates or the basic number of impressions. This is especially true for video advertising, which can have a powerful, lasting brand effect beyond click-throughs or conversions.

Last year, Google AdWords launched Campaign Insights, a powerful tool that can give advertisers reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness, or active user interest, in a particular product or service. Campaign Insights compares the impact of a campaign on a large groups of users who were exposed to a display ad campaign with the impact on a similar group who were not exposed to the campaign. Specifically, it then calculates the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits -- a good indicator of advertising effectiveness. Our models are even sophisticated enough to identify the incremental lift that was specifically caused by the display campaign (as opposed to incidentally correlated.)

Today, we are now able to provide Campaign Insights results for some YouTube advertising campaigns that are reserved in advance (not bought in the AdWords auction). We can currently only measure the effects of relatively large campaigns, but we’re working hard to expand this opportunity to smaller campaigns as well.

Representative graph showing potential effect as measured by Campaign Insights:

Please contact your Google sales representative if you are interested in measuring the effectiveness of your YouTube campaign using Campaign Insights.

Peter Sherman, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “The Cove”