Brand awareness and reach Google Ads

With the continued rise of digital video, advertisers and brands are changing their strategies, driving brand awareness and proving campaign impact. YouTube’s new tools reduce the effort needed to keep up with these consumer trends while achieving strong awareness results. Here are three approaches marketers should consider.

Outline a plan with Reach Planner

Before setting up your campaign, make sure you plan for maximum effectiveness. Reach Planner uses real-time YouTube data to show you the expected reach based on your campaign settings: audience, budget, ad types, and more. Tweak your inputs and you’ll see how they affect your campaign’s projected reach and frequency by audience.

Carter’s, the children’s clothing store, used Reach Planner for its “Hello Optimism” campaign to understand the reach and frequency of both its first-party audience and Google audience segments for new moms. Carter’s agency, Merkle, was able to identify the right budget and strategy required to drive the most impact for a large unique audience. As a result, the team’s YouTube campaign delivered a unique reach of 51 million at a 40% lower cost-per-view than their average YouTube campaign.

With TV in Reach Planner, you can also plan YouTube alongside TV to understand the combined reach and improved efficiency of your overall campaign. In this two-minute case study video, the team at Pepsi Vietnam explains how they used TV in Reach Planner to achieve 19% more reach for a campaign promoting Mirinda, a leading Vietnamese soda.

Optimize your media buys with Video reach campaigns

To drive maximum brand awareness and ad recall, we recommend using two or more CPM formats (skippable, non-skippable, or 6-second bumper ads). To take the guesswork out of allocating budget between the CPM formats you select, we developed Video reach campaigns. Video reach campaigns can automatically optimize across multiple ad formats to reach as many people as possible for the lowest price. In testing, we saw that, on average, Video reach campaigns drove from 29% to 44% more reach at a 16% lower CPM than campaigns using individual formats.1

L’Oréal Portugal achieved its highest campaign reach ever by using Video reach campaigns to promote Elvive Dream Long serum. Relying on automation to maximize reach and awareness outcomes, L’Oréal reached 32% more viewers while simultaneously lowering its cost per reach point by 41% compared to its manually optimized YouTube campaigns. This YouTube campaign helped Elvive Dream Long achieve the top ranking in the European serum market.

Measure your results and adjust your campaign with Brand Lift

Lastly, measurement solutions are critical when it comes to fully understanding campaign impact and adjusting in real time. Brand Lift allows you to measure ad recall and brand awareness impact directly attributable to your campaign. And now it supports accelerated measurement to help you gauge impact in the critical first days of your campaign. A new remeasurement option can help you also understand the impact of any mid-flight optimizations or creative swaps.

In addition to our Brand Lift solutions, we’ve also partnered with third-party measurement solutions to understand performance relative to other media platforms. In a marketing mix model (MMM) meta-analysis we commissioned with Nielsen, YouTube showed greater incremental sales per impression than TV in 91% of CPG MMMs that measured YouTube, other digital, and TV from 2017 through 2019.2 To help you take advantage of these results at scale, we’re dedicated to making it easier and more efficient to find and engage consumers on YouTube with these new planning, buying, and measurement solutions.

To learn more details about these products and other brand awareness methods, check out the Google Ads Help Center.