YouTube Ad Objectives and Types of Ad Products

As I mentioned in the previous post, 'Getting Started with YouTube Ads', the most important first element before launching YouTube ads is -- as with any project or campaign -- having a clear purpose for your YouTube advertising. Depending on what objective we have in mind when running YouTube ads, everything can change: from the creative assets to the ad product type, the bidding strategy, and even the overall approach to operations.

In this post, we'll tackle the first step in YouTube ad operations: defining your advertising objective, your marketing goal, and choosing the right ad product type. Before we get into it, let's first explore the key marketing goals when leveraging YouTube ads and the types of ad products available, then do a quick classification by objective.

The Purpose of YouTube Ads

Since YouTube is a video platform built around content consumption, many people assume that the only purpose of YouTube advertising is "building awareness -- in other words, branding." You know the type: opening a corporate YouTube channel, uploading various videos, running ads, using it as a channel to communicate with consumers, and managing brand image.

Of course, "branding" is still one of the primary goals of YouTube operations and advertising. But an increasing number of advertisers are leveraging YouTube ads with conversion-focused objectives -- driving purchases directly -- and Google has been rolling out various conversion-oriented ad products as well.

So what kinds of objectives can we pursue with YouTube advertising? In short, we can leverage YouTube ads across all stages of what marketers call the "funnel": Awareness >> Consideration >> Conversion.

The Marketing Funnel and YouTube Ad Products

Unless you're a YouTube Premium subscriber, you've probably already encountered many different types of ads while using YouTube. And if you have a keen eye or work in marketing, you've likely already noticed that YouTube ads come in quite a few varieties.

Whether we're consciously aware of it or not, there are indeed many types of YouTube ads. These ad products can be categorized in various ways -- by marketing objective, bidding strategy, ad format, and more. But in this post, let's use the marketing funnel as our framework and broadly classify them into three categories based on advertising goals.

1. Awareness

The first stage of the marketing funnel is the "Awareness" stage, where the goal is literally to spread the word about your brand and boost recognition. The ad products available for this stage include:

• Masthead (CPD/CPM)
• Bumper Ads
• Non-skippable Ads
• TrueView for Reach

The key characteristic of these awareness-stage products is that they force exposure on users -- viewers have no choice but to see the ad. They're specialized for impressions, reach, and views.

2. Consideration

The second stage of the YouTube funnel is the "Consideration" stage -- the point after you've built reasonable brand awareness. The goal here is to reach deeper into the minds of customers who already know your brand or have been exploring your industry, competing brands, or your own brand. The aim is to make a stronger impression and, going further, to get them to actively seek you out. The ad products available for this stage include:

• TrueView In-Stream (+ Call-to-Action extension)
• TrueView Discovery
• Video Ad Sequencing

Starting from this stage, unlike awareness-stage ad products, the ad formats and their characteristics begin to branch out into more diverse variations. I'll cover the details in a future post on ad product types and their specific features.

3. Conversion

The final stage of the funnel -- "Conversion" -- is more demanding and complex. Like any conversion campaign, you need to collect and track all conversion-related data generated through your YouTube video ads. This is, quite literally, a "conversion" campaign. To run conversion-focused ad products, you'll need to embed conversion tracking code on your website and set up the conversion actions you want to track in Google Ads. The video ad products designed for conversion goals include:

• TrueView for Action
• Video Action Campaigns

In this post, we explored the types of YouTube ad products available for different advertising objectives and classified them by purpose. In the next post, I'll take a deep dive into the products used in the "Awareness" and "Consideration" stages -- examining their features, similarities, and differences in detail.