Best Practices for Awareness and Consideration Video Campaigns

Strategic brand building on YouTube with awareness and consideration campaigns is the key to unlocking future demand and propelling your business forward. YouTube is uniquely positioned to help advertisers meet their toughest challenges: reaching customers across a fragmented media landscape while delivering business outcomes more efficiently. Leveraging awareness and consideration campaigns also paves the way for successful performance campaigns.

Awareness Campaigns

• There are three strategies for driving awareness on YouTube:
  
  • Grow brand awareness along with higher impact ad placements to increase brand association and maximum campaign impact to remain top of mind with your target audience.
  • Maximize reach and frequency on your campaigns to optimize your return on investment (ROI).
  • Broaden exposure to new audiences in order to capture more market share.

Our product recommendations for each awareness strategy are:

Consideration campaigns

For driving consideration on YouTube, we recommend a strategy that focuses on creating interest in your brand & growing brand equity by optimizing for views when you tell your brand’s story to an engaged audience.

Learn more about Video Reach Campaigns Efficient Reach and Video View Campaigns.

Campaign implementation best practices

We recommend that you review the following aspects for overall campaign implementation best practices:

• Planning: Before your campaign launches, use our planning tools, like our performance estimates tool and Reach Planner to help ensure your setup will meet your performance goals.
  
  • Adjust your bids, budget, flight dates, and targeting settings to achieve your desired outcome.

• Reach & Frequency: To maximize your ROI and grow sales, it is important to consider how many people you’re reaching and how often.

  • As a general rule of thumb, we recommend setting your frequency to 3x per week, and incorporating a 2X multiplier when planning for a month instead of a week or when planning for peak seasonality¹.

    • According to a study in the U.S, a typical brand could improve their ROI by 19% by achieving 2.7/wk avg. weekly frequency².
  • For more precise reach and frequency guidance, leverage Meridian to identify your optimal frequency and anticipated ROI uplift or Reach Planner to understand the reach required to achieve optimal frequency.
• Targeting: To maximize performance, we recommend you choose demo, detailed demo, affinity, or custom affinity audiences.
  
  • Content Targeting doesn’t work on home feed (will block serving). While you can use this at your own discretion, be aware that content targeting will limit serving.
  • Shorts has limited reach with contextual targeting and may sometimes also block serving when placement targeting is used.
  • We suggest going as broad as possible to allow for Google AI to optimize your multi-format Video Reach Campaigns for Efficient Reach and/or Video View Campaigns.
• Creatives: To better engage YouTube viewers across devices, it’s best to upload a variety of different video creatives across orientations—including horizontal, square, and vertical videos—for your video campaigns.
  
  • For Video Reach Campaigns, aim for a mix of videos of different lengths. Include a ‘short’ <10s (6s for bumper formats), medium 10-20s, and long >30s asset with varying orientations (horizontal and vertical) The effectiveness of campaign can be increased by adding more assets and ensuring the brand is featured early and often in the creative.
    
    • VRC campaigns that included portrait and square aspect ratios in addition to landscape were more effective at lifting brand awareness.³
  • For Video View Campaigns, take more than 30s to craft a compelling narrative that keeps viewers engaged; leverage vertical and square videos to reach customers where they are; and drive relatability by featuring authentic stories through testimonials, creators, or real-life moments.
    
    • VVC campaigns that included portrait and square aspect ratios in addition to landscape were more effective at lifting brand consideration.⁴
  • To start creating vertical video assets, learn more about Video creation in Google Ads.
  • Tailor your ads to the YouTube ABCD creative best practices for awareness. Play with storytelling styles and aim to hit at least 80% of the ‘Awareness’ ABCD principles in your videos.
• Placements: To reach more people, reduce redundancy and drive better results, we recommend you mix formats via automation.
  

  • Using a fluid mix of formats provides a blended performance view for the overall campaign. While reporting still allows you to see metrics broken out by each ad format, the campaign’s blended average will inherently look different compared to a single-format campaign.

    • Mixing In-Stream, In-Feed and Shorts in video reach campaigns can drive 35% more Unique Reach on average than In-Stream only.⁵
    • Video View Campaign mixes of In-Stream + In-Feed + Shorts (VVC) deliver 94% higher ROAS than In-Stream alone.⁶
• Bidding: Keep in mind that a competitive bid is necessary. We recommend that you focus on bid guidance in-platform.
  
  • Make sure you start competitive bidding based off of historic CPM bids for skippable In-stream for Video Reach Campaigns Efficient Reach and CPV bids for skippable In-stream for Video View Campaigns.
  • Low bidding can cause under pacing, and low bids can also prevent you from serving on some formats. You will find bid guidance in-platform during campaign construction that takes into account all of your campaign settings and targeting.

• Measurement: Align campaigns with the correct key performance indicators (KPIs).

  Strategy	KPIs
  Grow brand awareness	Brand awareness lift Incremental reach to TV Completion % of CTV impressions Watch Time
  Maximize reach and frequency	ROI Reach CPM Frequency
  Broaden exposure to reach new audiences	Reach Search Lift increase
  Create interest in your brand & grow brand equity	Consideration Lift Views Search Lift Earned Actions

  • Use Brand Lift study to provide insight into how people feel about your product or brand. Prior to initiating a brand lift study, please ensure you are meeting recommended budget minimums based on your market.
  • Search Lift measurement determines how your ads impact a person’s likelihood to search for your product or brand on YouTube and Google Search.
    
    • To use Brand Lift and/or Search Lift, contact your Google account representative.
  • With Format Segment Reports, you can get granular reporting at the format level on key brand metrics such as impressions, spend, and views within Video Reach Campaigns Efficient Reach and Video View Campaigns. Segmentation includes In-feed, Skippable In-stream, and Shorts.
    
    • View Through rate (VTR) and viewability can be broken out by individual format. To use Format Segment Reports, go to “Segment’ > Format (Video only) reporting feature.
  • Use Cross-Media Reach Measurement to measure deduplicated, on-target reach and frequency across video campaigns on YouTube and TV. Cross Media Reach Measurement helps compare efficiency, optimize ad investments, and understand unique reach across devices and formats.
  • Leverage Attribution Reports to show you the paths customers took to complete conversions and provide insights into how your Brand advertising efforts work together to create conversions.
  • Use Meridian to understand X-media ROI and drive better business outcomes.