YouTube 2019 updates

With these kinds of number, it is no surprise that Google is making enhancements to developing video ads for YouTube and Googles marketing platform properties. Googles new Discovery Ads (see more here) are just one of the ways that marketers can tap into the power of video using YouTube’s home feed. However, your business might not be actively crafting videos and developing video marketing so what use is it?

Well, YouTube seems to have developed a solution that suits both those who are actively utilising video and those who are yet to produce video content. Bumper Machine is a new product from YouTube that will be releasing later this year for Discovery and YouTube.

Bumper machine is designed to make it easy to maximise your ads through video. Using machine learning, ad creators can upload images onto the platform and bumper machine will craft a 6-second video that will focus on elements such as human faces, motion, information and brand.

It will asses these and then present 3-4 variations for you choose from. All of this is done in a matter of minutes making it super easy for marketers to create a video. If you are already using video in your marketing strategies and ad campaigns, you can also benefit from the Bumper Machine tool. You can feed any of your long-form video ad (under 90 seconds) URLs into Bumper machine and it will again create 3-4 variations of 6-second bumper ads.

Again, this uses the power of machine learning to put out the optimised ads. If the variations are not to your liking or you want to tweak them, there will be light editing tools available to tweak your video ad and also adjust or change its audio. Now you might be asking why Bumper machine only outputs 6-second videos for you to use in your campaigns?

Especially when its more than likely that most video ads you may have seen are usually at least 30 seconds long on most platforms. Well in Google's own testing and in conjunction with some of its beta partners, Google discovered that having three 6-second video ads within the video has more effect on viewers than a full 30-second advert.

The results of the shorter ads delivered a 107% higher ad recall with 134% higher purchase intent than the traditional norms. Google also found that those using these types of ads actually saw an increase of 50% on conversion for the same amount of investment. Given the effectiveness of Bumper machine and its output, the tool will be rolling out to Googles other marketing platforms for both creation and delivery.

YouTube is also combining Bumper machine with other machine learning to create new tools within its own platform and Googles other properties. One of the new tools has been developed by merging the current customer affinity tool and customer intent into a new tool called custom audiences. This new workflow is designed to make it easier to reach new and existing audiences.

The first way of using customer audience is to imagine the customer you want your ads to be placed in front of and thinking about how you can describe them and what interests they may have in relation to your product. Once you have that you simply type the description into the customer audience creation tool. Google will also suggest relevant keywords, websites, apps and more that are relevant to your description criteria. As you do this, you will be able to gain insights and impression forecasting in order to help better optimise your video ad before you use it actively within your campaign.

Once your campaign is finished, you can use and import your custom audience you have built across Googles other products. This includes Google search, Google Discovery, Display, Gmail and additional YouTube campaigns. Additionally, YouTube will also be introducing the new Audience Expansion tool in order to be able to scale up your campaigns. This additional tool is designed to find more people that share similarities with your custom audience.

Utilising a simple slider tool, you can slide it left or right to customise how close you want to match your custom audiences’ key traits. The tool will also display weekly estimates and forecasts so that you can see the impact on your reach. More importantly, this is done in real-time allowing you to optimise as you go in order to better reach your goals.

Once your campaigns are complete, reports will be generated for both your original custom audience campaign and the modified audience results. Once the reports are generated, you will be able to conduct a comparison between the two.

The aim of these new tools is to closer merge Digital and TV buying teams together to maximise output and performance while increasing video inventory on both YouTube and Googles other properties. YouTube will be crafting a dedicated space on Googles other properties that will optimise the buying and campaign creation for all TV and digital media related inventory.

This will be extremely useful given YouTube has been working on helping develop new tools for Display 360. This includes the ability to push video ads to connected TV with new partnerships being developed for streaming platforms. Traditional TV viewers can also be reached as Display 360 can push video campaign as to national tv stations and cable networks although this only seems to focus on the US market for the moment.

The final announcement and one of the most exciting YouTube developments will be the implementation of shopping functionality. This means that users can buy products featured within a video they are watching without leaving the page or the video they are watching. There will be more details to come but expect this to release at some point later this year. This also provides Google Shopping with some great potential going forward especially when you consider the enhanced offering on local marketing. You can read more about Google Shopping in our dedicated blog here.