When creating an audience for your YouTube campaign, Google provides a range of demographics and segments to narrow down the reach of your content to those who may find it interesting.
Audience Creation
At the very basic level of audience creation, you will select your genders, age ranges, parental status, and depending on what country you’re targeting, you may also be able to select household income.
The next step in the audience creation process goes into a lot more detail and will refine down your audience by a large degree.
Further detailed demographics are available, such as marital status, home ownership and level of education. Interests and habits can then also be targeted, based on the types of website the user frequently visits. Targeting an interest group of ‘Cooking Enthusiasts’ will mean your campaign is shown to those who frequently visit recipe websites.
Using the In-Market audience options allows you to target users who are currently in the process of researching a service, for example, recent visitors to a flight comparison website.
The final option allows you to target remarketing lists, such as all visitors to your website within the last 30 days.
Campaign Focus
With the massive reach available via YouTube, it’s worth using as many of the above options as possible to narrow your campaign’s focus down to a more relevant audience. But what guarantees are there that the person watching your YouTube campaign actually falls into the target audience you’ve created?
With YouTube quickly becoming the world’s busiest babysitter, Britain’s children under the age of 3 are now spending an average of 44 minutes a day using a smartphone or tablet. With the UK’s youth only being able to open a bank account once they’re 14, and only being able to start earning to fill that bank account at 16, the purchasing power of kids aged 3 and under remains low. Knowing this, we’re sure you’d agree that any budget spent showing your YouTube campaign to a toddler would (99.9% of the time) be considered wasted. Below we will show you how to find out if your campaign is reaching the youngest of demographics, and how you can stop it from doing so.
How to find out who your campaign has been shown to
First and foremost, there is no way to find out who exactly has been seeing your YouTube ads, but we can see which YouTube channel’s videos our ads have been run on and make an educated guess.
To do this, simply click into your YouTube campaign within Google Ads, and click ‘Placements’ on the left hand side. Any mentions of ‘Nursery Rhymes’, ‘Toys’ or ‘Kids Songs’, and you can safely assume your campaign is being shown to toddlers.
How to prevent this from happening
We can’t prevent this by making changes to our target audience; after all, the toddlers are likely using their parents YouTube account, and that parent more than likely fits nicely into your selected targeting options.
But we can limit the YouTube content that our ads show on as a workaround:
When you’re in the list of channels, you can check the box next to each offending channel, click edit towards the top and exclude the channel from your campaign. This will prevent your ads from appearing on videos from this channel going forward.
Whilst excluding channels individually will give us the desired result, a much more effective way of managing where our ads appear is by adding a topic as a placement:
Whilst in your campaign, click topics on the left-hand side. You can now add a relevant topic to limit your ads to appearing on videos within that topic on YouTube. For example, if your campaign is for a brand which sells beauty products such as make-up, you may want to add the ‘Beauty & Fitness’ topic to your campaign.
You can do this at any point during your campaign, but you can also add the topic whilst you are performing the initial setup, meaning not a penny of your budget is wasted on 2 year olds! You can find the option to add a topic to your campaign just after you define your audience.
Return can make sure you get the best outcome from your YouTube campaigns, reaching your target audience effectively and frequently. If you’d like to speak to one of our team about YouTube advertising, get in touch.