Google Update: Ad Frequency Targeting For YouTube Campaigns
With this update, Advertisers have more control over the times they want to show their ads to people on YouTube.
Prior to this update, you can only control ad frequency if you’re running connected TV campaigns in Google Display and Video 360
Google explains how this new feature can help advertisers reach their goals without their target users feeling annoyed with too many ads:
“This will help advertisers optimize towards more precise reach and frequency, while ensuring that we continue to provide a suitable advertising experience for viewers. Target frequency allows advertisers to select a frequency goal of up to four per week and our systems will optimize towards maximum unique reach at that desired frequency.”
If you’re new to Ad frequency, this lessens the risk of diminishing returns when you’re showing the same ads over and over again to people.
What it does to users is that they will get tired and tune out eventually and will likely lead to fewer conversions.
Google is quite aware of this issue and even acknowledge that this is frustrating for users and can lead to wasteful ad spend for advertisers.
In fact, according to a a Google-commissioned study, the results finds that when TV advertisers’ ad frequency exceeds by 6+ weekly impressions it decreases their ROI by 41%, representing 46% of TV impressions served.
This is what Google says about this:
“Almost half of the linear TV impressions in our study were considered waste but the same study from Nielsen shows that brands can increase their average weekly frequency from one to three on YouTube with a consistent ROI.
This is a huge opportunity for marketers to maximize their impact across the same set of people they are already reaching today.”
With this update, Google’s goal is to help advertisers with their impressions without negatively affecting their ROI.
So how does this work then? You can select the frequency target, and leave Google the rest of optimization towards the maximum reach at the frequency goal.
On a testing that Google did, they said that over 95% of target frequency of YouTube campaigns achieved its frequency goal when setup following their recommended best practices.