Youtube gets more focused on targeting

In response to increased pressure from Facebook, which aims to drive increased revenue from video ad serving, Youtube has upped their video ad targeting capabilities in an announcement last week.

Essentially Youtube has now joined forces with parent company Google in adding google user search data, demographic information and more to the targeting mix. YouTube's looking to make their ads more focused and relevant by enabling advertisers to use information associated with people’s Google accounts for targeting.

Mobile first

While YT has had the option to target users site wide cookie data for quite some time, and Google brought YT into the adwords platform way back in 2015, these latest round of changes is geared towards providing advertisers options across multiple devices with a major emphasis on mobile, combined with serving up ads based on google search user analytics.

As fully 50% of all YT traffic now comes from mobile, the aim here is to ultimately target the user with relevant ads across mobile searches. Youtube's example. “If you’re a retailer, you could reach potential customers that have been searching for winter coat deals on Google and engage with them with your own winter clothing brand campaign at just the right moment.”. Zero moment of truth stuff.

Additionally, Google announced that starting this year that pixels and cookie based YT tracking will give way to tracking based on user sign ins and mobile identifiers. Again a tactic focused on providing relevant ad serving.

Personally as a major YT user that has been constantly bewildered by YT's previous targeting capabilities in real time, it's a major relief to see an attempt to provide relevant ads based on my user analytics. In a YT universe inundated with 15's and 30's that seem to come out of nowhere, the hope here is that YT will be able to provide the insights and tactical support necessary to drive an increased ROI on all of our campaigns.