Misaligned ad spend is essentially wasted money, and misused money is never what any brand or business wants. When it comes to YouTube marketing, ad misuse can come from several sources: targeting mistakes, poor content and messaging, wrong placement, and more. But just because we can identify where ad spend is being misused, doesn’t always mean that brands know how to solve the issues and use their budget more successfully.
As the popularity and demand for digital advertising increases, the amount of misused ad spend grows along with it. And to make things even more complicated, when new and complex purchasing routes get introduced, brands have additional hurdles when measuring the performance and effectiveness of their ads.
But there is no need to fret, the VuePlanner team is here to help! While eliminating digital advertising waste can seem challenging, businesses can take actionable steps toward this endeavor by following our easy tips below.
- Lean on Analytics
Using reliable analytics tools to track KPIs is a key factor in any advertising strategy. Monitoring your KPIs throughout a campaign allows you to identify areas of misuse, decrease it, and adapt your marketing strategy to prevent further misuse.
- Use Audience Targeting
If your marketing strategy is too broad or untargeted, it will be ineffective and unnecessarily costly. Instead of casting a wide net, understand who your target market is and divide them into further segments based on relevant criteria like demographics, geographics, or behavior characteristics. When you have a true understanding of your ideal consumer, you can develop advertising campaigns that are tailored to them.
- Include Keywords Thoughtfully
Effective keyword selection is imperative for creating a successful YouTube advertising campaign, but you don’t want to go overboard. Adding too many words to the block list or inclusion list can unintentionally limit your campaign strategy. As an example, blocking the word “shot” in hopes of avoiding any violent videos will also result in preventing your ad from appearing on thousands of sports videos on high quality channels. When developing keyword exclusion lists, it is important to carefully consider the denotations and connotations of every word to ensure you are not blocking any suitable content where your audience could be reached. Consider making your keywords as specific as possible, this will increase the chances of your offering matching the user’s intent.
- Play on the Right Platforms
While it may seem tempting to start your video advertising journey by populating as many platforms as possible in order to see what sticks, it may not be the best way to ensure you are using your ad budget effectively. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and the leading platform in streaming entertainment. As video advertising experts, we will always recommend focusing your campaigns on YouTube’s incredible platform.
- Track & Optimize
Once your campaign has been launched, you may think the hard work is done. Nope! Accurate and consistent reporting and monitoring are important to any successful ad campaign. The campaign performance will need to be monitored during the campaign and deeply analyzed after completion in order to identify potential performance issues or misused spend.
Misused ad spend is a serious problem in the advertising world and it take the right strategies, tools, and partners to avoid it. VuePlanner helps brands and marketers invest their advertising budgets in contextually relevant, brand suitable, and effective ways that bring results and eliminate misused ad spend. We help our client maximize their campaigns with the power of YouTube. Get in touch with our team today to learn how we can help you to avoid misused ad spend.