YouTube advertising: formats, audiences, measurement

Rarely and not immediately. It mostly works as a first touch: a person saw, remembered, returned through search or from remarketing within a week or two. Measuring a video by the number of orders from the first viewing is almost guaranteed to lead to disappointment and closing the channel in the second month. We measure differently: the growth of brand inquiries, the size of the segment of those who looked, and the cost of further conversion from this segment. If you are ready to look only at direct sales from viewing, it is better not to start, we will say so in the evaluation.

Indeed, there is an arithmetical side to it. In the skip format, the viewer can click skip at the fifth second, and the view is credited to you when he has watched 30 seconds or the entire video, if it is shorter. That's why 29-second and 31-second videos are charged differently, and this should be decided in the editing room, not in the office. The six-second format is generally paid per thousand impressions - "view value" does not exist in it as an indicator. We check the cabinet rules before each launch: Google periodically changes them.

No. Filming from the workshop, unpacking the product, a short story of the owner often work better than a slick video, because they look authentic, and not like advertising. There are two requirements: original quality (do not upload via messenger) and the essence in the first seconds. The verdict is the absence of any material together with the unwillingness to do it. In this case, it is more honest to give the budget to the search, and we will write it in the first email, and not after a month of showings.

By three things: how many people watched, how much the remarketing segment grew from them, and what happened to branded search queries. All of this requires GA4 and the Google Ads tag to work on the site. Here is an unpleasant statistic from our own measurements: of the 33 sites we analyzed, seven had the Google Ads tag, and six had no counter at all. There is simply nowhere to record the delayed video effect on such a site. To be honest: GA4 shows a trend, not an accounting truth — blockers, consent mode, and browser restrictions on cookies cut off part of the data, and it is necessary to consciously reconcile its figures with the cash register.

Placements are adjustable, but exclusions are more important here. We compile a list of excluded topics and channels before the launch - it saves you from being shown next to content that harms the brand, and from children's channels where your audience does not live. It is impossible to completely predict the location of the show, and it would be untrue to promise it. What is possible is to open the placement report every week and manually turn off the channels that have gained views without care. At the start, this cleaning gives more than the correction of rates.

Less than one might think in terms of viewing cost, and more than one might think in term. The video needs to accumulate reach: two weeks with a meager budget does not have time to reach anyone, and the report for such a period does not make statistical sense. We calculate the minimum reasonable budget based on the size of the audience we want to cover and call it fair - even when it turns out to be larger than expected. At the same time, impressions are debited from your Google account, this money does not go through us.

No, and this is the most common mistake. The vertical is viewed differently: faster, with a different rhythm, often without sound - that is, the key should be visible in the text. A horizontal video cropped to vertical almost always looks like an editing error: the forehead and half of the microphone remain in the frame. We either compile a separate version for the format, or we don't use this format at all. There is no half-baked option here, and it eats up the budget more quietly than anything else.

Through the audience. Those who watched the video or interacted with the channel are included in a separate list, which is already served by search and display remarketing with a specific offer. Thus, video ceases to be an isolated expenditure and becomes the upper level of the funnel, the effect of which is visible in subsequent campaigns. There is only one technical condition: the channel must be yours and linked to an advertising account. We don't keep videos on our channel as a matter of principle - if you disconnect, you would lose both the video and the accumulated lists.