YouTube Ads Competitor Targeting

In last week’s video, Michelle talked about how you can target your competitors on either the Google or Microsoft search networks. Today, I’m going to take that one step further. I’m going to go over how you can target your competitors with YouTube ads.

YouTube offers some unique targeting options that you can’t get anywhere else, and it can be much more cost effective than bidding on your competitor keywords. So we’re going to go over a few of my favorite targeting options and tactics I like to use to get in front of users who may be looking for your competitors.

The first way I try to target competitor audiences on YouTube is to try to get my video ad placed on videos talking about my competitors, and when we’re hand picking our placements, we typically call that manage placements. So right now, I’m in an ad group that was already posted live.

So on the left hand side, you see I’m already under placements and then I can look right here at starting to add placements. Now, if you’re creating a video campaign for the first time, you’ll eventually get to the step in your ad group creation when you can start selecting your targeting options. When you do, you will see a screen just like this, and instead of editing your placements, you’re just going to be adding them, but the research process in this view is the same.

I already made a video going over the placement targeting options we get for YouTube; you can check that one out right here. But when I’m going after competitors, I typically like to stick with two different placement options that’s going to be YouTube channels and YouTube videos.

So to start researching it, we can go specifically to the search bar, enter specific keyword phrases for your competitors, whether it’s just the brand name, a specific product name, whatever and as I hit enter we started to see numbers appear next to the placement targeting categories.

The first one is a YouTube channel, and there we see the official brand’s channel. I can go over and click on that option, and when you add a channel, you’re telling Google if we’re eligible, you can place my video ad on any of the videos underneath the channel, every single one of them. If I go back and hit the back arrow, we can then look at specific YouTube videos.

This could be the better option if you find a channel that has certain videos that are great for competitor targeting, but not every single video for a particular channel is worth having ads placed on them. You can then start scrolling down, and choose each specific video you would like to target. I’m purposely skipping the videos on the keep channel, because I already targeted the entire channel.

But you can see from the scroll bar there are a lot more I can keep going and adding. Let me go back up, hit back one more time and then I may want to check out websites, because your video ads can appear on websites that are part of Google’s display network. I know I already said I like to try to stick on YouTube with competitor targeting as much as possible, but I will check out websites as my third option if I’m not finding enough competitor placements that are to my liking.

Or maybe I don’t think the YouTube portion of it will have as much reach as I want it to, and that’s what Google’s recommending for the website targeting. So for me, right off the bat, none of this looks relevant, so I’m just going to stick with the channels.

So if I click save, we see the specific targeting options that I have selected. Now every time I run a manage placement campaign, I keep an eye on the placements I have chosen, because there have been several instances where I’ve hand selected placements and all of a sudden, I see zeros for certain placements that I have selected.

Even if my cost for view bids are higher, or I know I have an automated bid strategy that should get me impressions on these specific channels, and that can happen for a couple reasons. So to show you this, I’m going to click on the blue edit button and go back to the placement selection screen, and I want to highlight this little fine print right here.

It says your ad can appear on any eligible Google display network placement and then only the following YouTube placements. So I see this happen in accounts when they have placement selected, but then they also edited other targeting layers whether it was topics, in-market audiences, whatever.

So for whatever reason if you’re not eligible to have your video ads show up on any of the channels or videos you have selected, Google does have the right to ignore those video placements and then just show your ads to the audiences that you have added as your additional targeting layers. It’s exactly why I said monitor your managed placements very closely right after launch, make sure that they’re actually appearing on those specific placements.

Keep the ones where you’re seeing decent performance, you know you’re getting in front of your competitor’s audience, but then remove any of them that may have zero impressions and try to research new options. I want to keep my managed placements as controlled as possible.

Even if you’re seeing success for managed placements, or you’re just looking for new ways to get in front of a competitor’s audience, my second favorite option will be to create a custom audience segment. You may be more familiar with the older term of a custom intent audience.

In order to start creating these audiences, we need to head up to tools and settings and then click on audience manager under the shared library. First, you’re going to see the main data segment overview, but we need to go over to the next option which is our custom segments, and then we’ll want to go to the blue plus button to start creating our new custom segment.

Now, the default option that’s selected, we see the other smaller blue circle that it’s selected is for the option of people with any of these interest or purchase intentions. For YouTube advertising, we actually want the second option, and that is people who search for any of these terms on Google.

We look at another piece of fine print that I’m highlighting right here, this option is for campaigns running on Google properties, and if you didn’t already know, Google owns YouTube, so YouTube is a Google property. In this article here that I’m sharing on the screen, this is how Google describes how custom segments work for video campaigns. These audiences are built based upon keywords that users have recently searched on Google.com.

So this is pretty much keyword search history targeting. So I know highlighted the search terms bar, and then start pasting in keywords or search terms related to your competitors brand name, products, other options on here people looking for support. If they’re looking for help or have issues, with your competitor, add those terms to the mix.

Another option I have right here is the brand name plus alternative, they’re looking for other options besides your competitors. They’re looking for trials, specific features. So if you have video creative that can showcase why you’re better than your competitors, why you could be the better solution for them, include all those keyword variants within this targeting. So that’s one option.

Before I can save and create it, I have to name it, and now I can create. So that’s one option, let me go back up and create another custom audience. Okay, this time I’ll name it first and then I’m going to skip this first section, that is really good for adding in keywords. But we also have different targeting options for custom audience segments, and that is going to be people who browse specific types of websites.

So right now, on a different screen, I’ve pulled up all of my competitor’s websites or maybe landing pages, and then I’m going to start adding them to this specific custom audience segment. So what I’m trying to tell Google is get in front of users who like to visit these types of websites.

To clarify, this is not a remarketing audience based off your competitor’s websites. You cannot do that if your code is not on their website, but it’s giving Google good behavior signals of the type of audience you would like to reach. Now I could go up, X out of the keyword options, and try to focus just on the website browsing behavior. But one thing I may like to do is bring back the keywords and potentially start adding some of the non-branded type keywords.

Maybe I want to add keywords around small business CRM, add a variety of those, so I’m still mostly going after non-branded search history within Google.com, but using browsing behavior based on my competitor’s websites to at least hone in on a more specific audience, it’s going to be your call to see how specific or broad you want to make this custom segment. But know that we can also add URLs instead of just going after your competitor’s keywords.

If you’ve been paying attention to the segment insights on the right, you probably see weekly impressions are a lot whether I’m choosing URLs or keywords. So personally, I like to take each competitor name and create their own custom audience. That way when I’m adding them to specific ad groups, I get to see which competitor can I really utilize the most. If I’m finding a specific competitor custom segment is performing way better than the others, I’ll be able to split that one out into its own campaign or ad group, because we will be able to see the performance for each competitor differently because we’ve broken them out. I’m going to x out of this one and then save it and stick with just the URLs.

Now let me show you one more option on how I like to target my competitors with YouTube ads, but first I want to show you an example. In this particular example, we can see a search query was typed in the search bar on the top, and in this case, it’s a branded search. When you do this on YouTube, you are going to get a list of search results.

Since this is YouTube, yes, most of them will be video suggestions, but we see different ads on the top. What we see right now are search partner ads, so these are text ads that these brands are running through Google ads, this is just one of the partner placements. Instead of text ads, you may see shopping results, those are going to be for the e-commerce accounts. Then instead of text or shopping ads, you could see a video ad, these are called video discovery ads, formerly known as TrueView discovery.

So in the case of competitor targeting, if someone goes and types in your competitor name, and you’re targeting those competitor keywords, your video ad could be the number one position. This is a great way to have your video at the very top of the results, to have people look at your ad or your placement first. Let me show you the main reason I love discovery ads. We see in the network settings in this particular campaign, discovery was the original option that allows you to target just the YouTube search results.

Discovery ads can also appear as recommended videos on a video watch page. But if you really want to focus on user intent, you can select just the search results, and this particular network setting is done at the campaign level. So if I’m looking at targeting just the YouTube search results, this is pretty much the only time that I would use keyword targeting for a YouTube campaign.

So now for my discovery ads, I will go add new keywords, I’m just going to use the same keyword list I did for the custom audience segment, then I will save. So now when anyone goes on YouTube, types my specific competitor’s keywords, potentially my ad could show up at the top. Another way to capitalize on users search intent from your competitors to showcase your video.

One thing I will say about targeting just the YouTube search results with discovery ads is that we typically see volume lower than we expect. Remember on the example I showed you, there were text ads, I said there could be shopping ads depending if it’s e-commerce product, so your video ad isn’t guaranteed to show up all the time. But what I will say is that when we do show almost every time we see higher view rates, and we see the highest percentage of users watching the entire video ad.

With discovery ads, which we have another video right here, we can walk through the entire setup of a discovery ad, you’re paying for that view every time, and users are sent to the watch page. This is not like an in-stream ad where they have a chance to skip it and go see the actual video, they are actually going to your video watch page.

So if you’re paying for the video every time, choose a longer video format that really showcases the value of your brand over your competitors. Whenever I’m trying to do conquesting for my video campaigns, I’m pretty much starting with one of the three examples I walked through, it really depends on the creative the client has and the targeting opportunities that are available depending on who the brand is or maybe what industry they’re in.

Definitely had brands that we wanted to target that just flat out don’t have a YouTube channel, so we can’t do placement targeting like we would want to. We’d either have to rely on third-party videos, or just go straight to the custom audience segment option, where we can utilize search history.

Take all that into consideration and I can’t stress enough how good video creative will have an impact on the performance of the campaign, but use the videos that really showcase why you’re the better option. If you’re choosing the in-stream options, make sure you’re utilizing all your cards, possibly a video action campaign, to drive more traffic to your website and have landing pages that showcase your features and why they’re better than the competition.

Written by Joe Martinez