From Views to Value: Unlock YouTube’s Marketing Brandformance Power Using Google AI

By Portia Price

 

In today’s marketing landscape, brands should always look for the most effective methods to engage with the right consumers. With YouTube rapidly rising as Canada’s #2 search engine after Google, it offers a powerful platform to connect with 98% of the Canadian population who are streaming, scrolling, searching and shopping daily.

In April, the Tug team had the pleasure of attending Google’s Brandformance X SMB seminar in Toronto, where they gave us the information every marketer needs to know about YouTube Ads.

YouTube’s integration with Google allows advertisers to run YouTube Ads directly through Google Ads, enabling integrated targeting, budgeting, and performance tracking across both platforms.

 

What is Brandformance?

According to Google, Brandformance aims to unlock the full marketing potential, seamlessly blending brand-building and performance strategies with an AI-driven future.

• Goal: Reach undecided customers to grow demand for your brand and product
• Timing: Midterm payback period (30-60 days)
• Metrics: Brand lift/search lift, shallow conversions, cost per landing page hit/view, traffic (time spent, bounce rate, etc)

This is designed to influence consumers in the mid-funnel to create consistent future demand and drive sales growth.

 

The Rise of YouTube

Google’s Brandformance X SMB seminar highlighted key statistics that shed light on consumer behaviour and how it’s shaping digital marketing strategies.

In the last two years, YouTube has accumulated the most watch time in comparison to any other streaming platform including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and more. In other words, YouTube is now the #1 streaming platform globally with 1 billion hours watched daily on TV screens alone.

Viewers come to YouTube on every screen for every format, from the living room TV to mobile Shorts. In fact, 46% of Canadian Shorts users are not using TikTok Reels.

YouTube also allows for an unparalleled connection between creators and consumers. According to a recent study, 61% of Gen Z agree they feel closer to creators they watch on YouTube over other platforms. As a result, YouTube has a 2.3x higher longer term ROAS than paid social.

 

How to Use it

• Awareness: YouTube Shorts only – video reach campaigns
• Consideration: Video view campaigns
• Online Sales and Lead Gen: Demand Gen

 

Audiences

• Google Audiences: demographic segments, interest-based segments, in-market segments, intent-based segments, TV viewership segments, custom segments
• Your Audiences: customer lists/CRM, website data, YouTube viewers and subscribers, app users, expansion solutions to find similar customers
• Lookalike Segments (exclusive to Demand Gen): find new and relevant customers similar to your seed audiences

 

Google’s Creative Guidelines

Creatives are the most dominant driver of ROI. In fact, brands improving creative features can expect to lift ROI by 2.2x.

If you don’t know where to start, be sure to follow Google’s ABCDs of effective video ads:

• Attention: Hook and sustain attention with an immersive story.
• Branding: Brand early, often and richly.
• Connection: Help people think or feel something.
• Direction: Ask them to take action.

 

Google’s Creative AI Solutions

• Trim video: This tool uses Google AI to turn long videos into shorter ones, so you can make multiple six-second bumper ads in just a few minutes.
• Flip video: In this automatic solution, Google AI intelligently turns horizontal videos into vertical or square videos.
• Add voice over: Just type in your script, choose a voice, and let Google AI-powered text-to-speech tech do the rest.
• Dubbing: Make videos universally accessible and enjoyable to speakers of any language, at scale. From English into 10 languages (and growing!).

 

Tug’s Take: What Does This Mean?

Save time, reduce costs and drive impact.

YouTube is not just a platform for entertainment, it’s now one of the most important discovery tools for consumers, and its integration with Google allows for seamless cross-platform campaigns. Whether it’s through video ads, influencers or organic content, YouTube enables brands to connect with the right audiences in a more personal and engaging way.

Beyond that, Google’s AI capabilities help you streamline processes and strengthen connections across the funnel, whether you’re reaching Google-defined audiences, your own audiences or expanding with lookalike groups. 

With YouTube Ads powered by Google AI, you can serve the right ad to the right person at the right time based on data including:

• The user’s device
• The time of day
• How they’ve engaged with advertisements
• How many ads the user has already seen
• Predicted brand lift from the impression
• Your creative quality
• Your bid
• Your goal

 

Looking to unlock your full marketing potential? Start leveraging YouTube Ads and Google AI to turn views into measurable results.