Brand Lift Study: A Metric for YouTube Success

Views and clicks are two of the most common and useful metrics for measuring the success of online video ads. But they don't always give the clearest picture of how your advertising campaign has changed the way your target audience thinks about your problem. And as digital video advertising becomes famous, more businesses are using YouTube to boost their top-of-funnel prospecting. Advertisers on YouTube can't rely on last-click conversion statistics in the same way that they can't rely on view count data for gauging display prospecting. YouTube's Brand Lift Study is a great tool for this purpose.

The Brand Lift Study (BLS) on YouTube is a good way to determine the efficiency of video ads with their target audience, whether they raise awareness or make people more likely to buy something. This tool can be used to learn about the role that movie promotions play in making a product well-known.

There are approximately 2 billion unique monthly visitors to YouTube, and these people collectively view over a billion hours of video per day. With YouTube's metric instrument, you can measure how your short clip marketing initiatives are affecting your business's image with this vast audience. There are many applications for the YouTube BLS:

The first step in the study is to divide the target demographic into two groups: those who will not view the ad (the randomized control group) and those who will (the target exposed group) watch the YouTube commercial. The effectiveness of a campaign is often measured across a number of dimensions, including

• Relative Lift- This is the percent positive in the exposed group over the percent positive in control group 1. This indicates the percentage difference between the exposed and the control groups.
  
  
• Absolute - This is the percent positive in the exposed group minus the percent positive in the control group. This is the difference between the affirmative reactions of the exposed and control groups (for recall, interest, consideration, etc.). The absolute boost would be 20% if the favorable answer percentage increased from 10% to 30%.
  
  
• Headroom - This statistic is determined by dividing the absolute by 1 minus the baseline group's favorable response rate. Your commercials' effect on product sentiment is relative to their growth potential. For instance, a 25% headroom occurs when the exposed group's excellent survey responses rise from 20% to 40%.
  

The number of "lifted" users is a measure based on the survey population. It is the total number of YouTube viewers whose opinion has been "lifted" to a positive quality, usually by becoming aware of something or giving it a better thought. Even though Ads doesn't officially allow retargeting lifted users, a paid search team can come up with a unique way to measure these groups by finding out how well an audience interacts with your creatives in a quantitative way.

Then, user surveys and natural search engine queries will be used as signs of success. There are five different types of questions that can be used to measure in consumer surveys, and your research objectives will dictate which forms you use. These five types are

• Ad Recall
  
• Awareness
  
• Consideration
  
• Favorability
  
• Buy intent

Along with your own business name, the survey questions will also include the names of three of your competitors. Search engine and movie-sharing site usage might help you gauge product demand. The first one simply compares the organic search behavior of the control and exposed groups. Note that the results of the research are not guaranteed because the feedback depends on the number of people who take part.

When you've settled on the parameters you want to track, your budget, and the length of time you want the assessment to last, it's time to get in touch with a Google representative to begin setting up the experiment. This step must be taken before making your campaign public. Sadly, the measure cannot be initiated once marketing has already begun. To that end, here are some guidelines and expectations:

• Starting at $3,500 for one question and rising to $56,000 for five questions, the minimum required investment for the first week is dependent on the number of questions you wish to include in the user surveys.
  
• Time on air must be at least one week, and ideally at least two weeks. After the initial seven days, if you decide to keep the service running, you can reduce your expenditures.
  
• You don't need more than one creative and montage; however, launching numerous versions is encouraged for more relevant insights because the research can show varied outcomes and impacts for different creatives.
  
  
• Like any other Google advertising campaign, you should employ targeted audience selection to make sure your ads reach the right people.
  
  

It's important to remember that statistical significance is not guaranteed, so think of the BLS as an added bonus to the attention your clip will receive. Moreover, brand and creative interest may be quantified. Google tracks this by looking at the number of people who perform more organic searches on the search engine and YouTube after watching your clip ad.

Google has announced Brand Lift 2.0, the newest version of its measuring tool. The main difference is that the old version stopped getting answers once there was enough data to find a pattern. They are started by someone from Google and end when the evaluation results are given. This feature may not be necessary if you just want to run the ads until a pattern is found, but it is helpful if your campaign costs are higher than what is needed to get the tool's results. It is also impossible to organize a BLS 1.0 using a given channel. As an added bonus, this option requires a smaller financial investment than BLS 2.0. However, with 2.0, you can measure your campaign's progress in real-time and make adjustments as they're needed for maximum effectiveness. See if your movie drove the highest boost for a specific demographic and report on the cost per lifted user with the new segmentation and effect KPIs available in Brand Lift 2.0. With BLS 2.0, it's easy to stop ads, copy campaigns, set up a search pattern, and then start new ones. Because of its flexibility, you may be able to keep the survey data you have already collected.

Brand Lift Study is a unique option for digital marketers because it relies on first-party data. Instead of using hard-to-understand attribution models to figure out if a campaign worked or not, you might just ask the customer. In terms of its functionality, explicit and implicit ratings in collaborative filter suggestion algorithms are the best way to measure them. Based on the number of clicks, visits, comments, etc., implicit ratings can tell how interested a user is likely to be in a certain product.