With over 2 billion monthly users, YouTube has emerged as one of the most powerful advertising platforms for brands looking to reach their target audience and diversify their paid media investment.

If you need help figuring out where to start, this blog will take a look at how the team at Bamboo builds and executes a winning YouTube advertising strategy for their clients. 

‍Set your goals and investment: Before diving headfirst into YouTube advertising, clearly defining your objectives is crucial. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, or boost sales? Understanding your goals will shape your advertising strategy, from the type of ads you create to how you set your campaigns up.

When Trupanion first launched YouTube ads in partnership with Bamboo, their goals focused on increasing brand exposure, pet care education for the general public, and down funnel conversions, such as requesting a quote on pet insurance rates and new member enrollment. Based on these goals, the Bamboo team built a full-funnel YouTube strategy that included In-Feed Discovery Video, Consideration, and Video Action campaigns. The investment was allocated between these multiple initiatives to ensure the test was set up for success.

When setting up your campaigns, remember to start with a balanced approach, splitting your investment evenly until you can optimize based on performance and eventually allocate based on what stage of the funnel your audience is most likely to convert.

‍Create compelling content: On YouTube, your creative will significantly vary depending on the audience, product, and campaign objectives. However, certain types of content have consistently been shown to engage viewers and drive results:

1. Storytelling Ads
2. How-to and Educational Content
3. UGC and Testimonials

Ensure creative is visually engaging and easily understandable on smaller screens, with clear audio and visuals. For creative, more cuts and fast transitions perform best. TikTok meets YouTube-style content should perform well. It’s crucial to make sure your content is mobile-optimized too, as lots of views are mobile.

Leverage advanced targeting capabilities: YouTube enables targeting based on demographics, location, interests, in-market behavior, remarketing, customer data, life events, content, and devices, allowing advertisers to reach specific or broad audiences tailored to their campaign goals.

Based on Trupanion’s work with the Bamboo team to develop a full-funnel strategy, here’s a quick example of how different YouTube ad formats can work best for specific audiences:

Top-of-Funnel (Awareness)

• In-Stream Ads (Skippable Ads): Ideal for broad audiences, enhancing brand awareness.
• Discovery Ads: Targets users searching for related content, great for sparking initial interest.

Middle-of-Funnel (Consideration)

• Non-Skippable In-Stream Ads: Delivers full messages to highly targeted audiences, keeping users engaged with your brand.
• Action Campaigns: Although optimized for conversions, they can also be effective here by encouraging users to learn more about your product or service.

Bottom-of-Funnel (Conversion)

• Action Campaigns: Best for audiences ready to take action, with clear CTAs aimed at driving conversions.
• Remarketing: Targets users who have previously interacted with your brand, guiding them towards making a purchase through a series of strategically ordered ads.

TIP: Make sure to implement YouTube Enhanced Conversions before getting started because that is how the algorithm optimizes over time.

YouTube offers various bidding strategies, including cost-per-view (CPV) and cost-per-click (CPC), allowing you to optimize your ad spend for maximum efficiency. Use Trueview for Actions ad type and bid toward what you actually care about (similar to Facebook). 

Another great feature YouTube offers is "engaged view through" which is view through + people who watched 10 seconds of your video. Experiment with different bidding strategies to find what works best for your campaign objectives and determine your total budget based on your goals and expected ROI before launching. 

Use YouTube Analytics to track the effectiveness of your campaigns regularly; monitor metrics such as views, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Pay attention to your attribution windows. At Bamboo, we've found success with 30D click + 7D view or less. The default is 30 + 30, which is too much. 

Some things we recommend not doing: Don't mess with any of the other non-action ad types for Direct Response, they will exhaust your budget and give you little in return. Don't pause down action campaigns too quickly at the beginning. One of our biggest successes saw a ~90% decrease in CAC as the algorithm optimized over the first few weeks when compared to day 1. The algorithm takes a bit longer than Meta’s to optimize, but once it gets locked in you'll be able to scale it well. 

Test and iterate: Successful YouTube advertising requires continuous testing and iteration to improve results. Experiment with different ad formats, and test out messaging variations and targeting parameters to identify what resonates most with your audience. Identify trends and insights to refine your targeting, messaging, and creative elements for future campaigns. Continuously refine your approach based on data insights to maximize your YouTube ROI.

Through testing various high-quality visuals, information, and value props across YouTube Discovery, Consideration, and Action campaigns, they were able to improve cost per pet insurance quote by 75%, decrease cost per enrollment by 93%, and increase enrollment volume by 170%. Trupanion successfully increased enrollments and improved unit economics by unlocking the power of YouTube Ads.

Bamboo helps clients make the most of their media, creative, and data to turn advertising programs into business outcome powerhouses. If you’re in the market for paid media, creative strategy, and/or growth insights support, check out the ways we can help.