The new year will bring big changes to the YouTube advertising space. In a recent article, YouTube announced that they will be removing all existing content targeting settings from video campaigns that drive conversations.
This change could result in a major blow for marketers. The granularity that contextual targeting provides is beloved by many advertisers and marketers. With the current targeting strategies, advertisers can pair their ads to channels or videos to deliver a more tailored ad experience for audiences. This change will put an end to the hyper-targeted ads that make YouTube so appealing to advertisers.
These contextual changes are going to affect the Video Action Campaigns most significantly. VACs are conversation-oriented, lower funnel and designed to drive action, whether that be website visits, sales, newsletter sign ups, etc.
Video Action Campaigns are one of the ways VuePlanner recommends deploying and ecommerce campaign on YouTube. These campaigns can drive more conversion by expanding the campaign to run both on and off YouTube and drive more conversion while still optimizing for the lowest CPA. VACs can improve campaign performance by combining inventory from the YouTube Home feed, YouTube watch pages, Google video partners, and more. One additional benefit is that VACs can easily be scaled to run on mobile, desktop, and TV in one campaign without set bids and budgets for each inventory source.
Not only are contextual targeting capabilities being removed, but keyword targeting is as well. While keyword targeting on YouTube has not been as powerful as traditional search, it has been a useful way for marketers and advertisers to help answer queries with their video content.
It is worth noting that these changes will go into effect in early 2023. And not only will they effect new campaigns, but they will automatically be applied to existing campaigns as well. For those who are actively running campaigns with our VuePlanner team, rest easy. Our experts are aware of this impending change and are already working on strategies to adjust your campaign to still be as effective as possible.
While contextual targeting will remain one of our favorite strategies to use, we are not going to be able to leverage it on all campaigns going forward into the new year. VuePlanner will continue to be experts in the YouTube advertising space and maintain a comprehensive understanding of all of YouTube’s product capabilities. We are already developing new strategies to ensure our client’s campaigns are as effective as possible and utilize the best YouTube products to meet their needs. Our team is adapting so that you don’t have to. We will continue to keep you updated as topics like this evolve.