For advertisers looking to get it right, this YouTube data report offers several key insights as well as an action plan. In it, you will find YouTube campaign data for five key retail days: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Some of the most surprising findings? YouTube advertisers aren’t following the money when it comes to optimizing their holiday campaigns and are ignoring parents — a crucial audience during this important time of the year.

Based on this evidence, here’s how advertisers can do better.

Why Mom and Dad should matter to YouTube advertisers

Parents engage with YouTube ads more than non-parents do during the holidays, our data shows. In spite of this, advertisers invest more budget trying to reach non-parents for most of the season.

Parents are also big spenders. Overall, shoppers invest $900 on holiday gifts, but parents alone dish out $422 per child, with some spending more than $500. And when it comes to online shopping, parents spend on average 61% more than non-parents do.

So why are YouTube advertisers focused on parents mostly just around Thanksgiving and Black Friday? It appears due to the assumption that parents have all their shopping wrapped up very early in the season.

To the contrary: 68% of people start purchasing gifts after November, according to the National Retail Federation.

View rates drop closer to Christmas, but parents still have the edge

While it’s true that overall view rates do drop at this time in the year, parents still outperform non-parents. Parents also display higher click-through rates for all of the five days we analyzed.

Improve your YouTube targeting

So, if you’re a YouTube advertiser wanting to get more bang for your buck this season, we offer several suggestions to help tweak your strategies. Download your free YouTube holiday data report now to learn:

• What days to specifically target each audience segment
• Which audience you should be focused on based on your industry
• The day when most advertisers are really missing the mark
• When and how you should be spending your money

The post YouTube holiday data report: Parents ignored by advertisers appeared first on Strike Social.

When we talk about social media advertising, our advice is clear: Listen to the data. Still, because many advertisers don’t understand how each platform works, they make a lot of mistakes in planning their campaigns.

Take YouTube as an example. The platform reaches 81% of all Americans on the internet, with younger folks making up the majority. But what may surprise many is that baby boomers are actually more likely to watch your ads. That’s right, this older generation registers view rates 10% higher than millennials (compare 31.2% for boomers to 28.3% for millennials).

In our latest data report, “YouTube’s Generational Divide,” we examined a year’s worth of YouTube campaigns across 25 industries in the U.S. to understand how each generation engages with YouTube ads. Here’s what we found.

Baby boomers watch and spend more

First, despite having higher engagement rates, boomers are not being targeted on YouTube as often as their younger peers. Instead, advertisers allocate disproportionately more budget to millennials (156% more) and Gen Xers (137% more).

But it’s not just that this older audience engages more with YouTube ads — it’s that boomers spend more too. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, boomers account for 48% of consumer expenses each year, which means that if you target them, you can expect a higher ROI.

Baby boomers watch ads everywhere

Another thing our report debunks: the notion that older generations reject new technology. To the contrary, we found that boomers registered higher view rates across all devices (desktop, mobile and tablet) compared to both millennials and Gen Xers.

The possibilities to reach boomers on YouTube are limitless. They watch more ads than anyone else on every device and have greater purchasing power to pursue their interests.

So how can you reach baby boomers on YouTube?

Now that you know this older generation is ripe for the picking, you need an action plan. The right strategy considers what sort of brands perform best with boomers, targets the devices where they engage the most and selects topics of high interest.

Download our free data report now to:

• Get insights on the topics that attract every major generation on YouTube, including millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers.
• See a list of the 14 industries boomers engage with the most, along with cost-per-view and view rates.
• Access a step-by-step guide to creating a customized plan to target boomers on YouTube.

The post Data report: The audience every advertiser is missing on YouTube appeared first on Strike Social.

YouTube advertising metrics without context are just numbers: meaningless and self-congratulatory. Sure, you can (and should) compare your performance over time to know the success of one campaign from the next. But how do you know how you compare to your competitors? Enter the YouTube ad benchmark report from Strike Social.

Download our full YouTube data report now to dive in.

In this report, we analyzed YouTube campaign results from the past year to determine the average view rate, cost-per-view and view click-through rate across 25 industries. We also looked at different metrics around age, month, gender and more to give you the complete picture of what’s happening in the world of YouTube advertising.

Average YouTube CPV, view rate and click-through rate by industry

Across all industries, the average CPV is $0.044, with a VR of 27.7%. Most industries have a balanced VR, but CPV varies significantly from vertical to vertical.

Is there an age bias among YouTube advertisers?

YouTube is often viewed as a vehicle to reach younger audiences. While it’s definitely true that young audiences are engaged on YouTube, so are older audiences. In fact, audiences that are 45+ have a higher VR than those under 45.

How does your brand stack up against other YouTube advertisers?

It’s important to note that benchmarks shouldn’t be the end-all comparison point for your campaigns. They can, however, help take the pulse of your current results while identifying areas for improvement. Perhaps more could be invested in targeting older audiences. Maybe you need to rethink that mobile-first ad strategy. Start by immersing yourself in the data, and discover some truly actionable insights.

The post 2017 YouTube advertising benchmarks appeared first on Strike Social.

At Strike Social, we examined a year’s worth of YouTube campaigns across 25 industries in the U.S., using our proprietary artificial intelligence, machine-learning and data science tools. In doing so, we discovered that valuable gaming audiences, such as females, older adults and business professionals, often go ignored by advertisers.

The global games market is projected to produce $212.4 billion in 2026. If you’re trying to reach gamers around the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) — one of the biggest gaming events of the year and a prime time to showcase new trailers and demos on YouTube — you should adjust your marketing plan now to get the most for each ad dollar spent.

The tips listed in our free guide (available for download below) are designed to help you succeed when trying to reach new audiences, especially gamers.

So what do gaming advertisers get wrong?

When investing in video game ads, advertisers either go too broad around the “gamer” interest or too narrow around sub-interests like “first-person gamers” and leave their entire campaigns at that. What advertisers need to realize is that gamers visit YouTube to watch more than just gaming videos.

Strike Social’s data proves that the gaming audience is much more diverse than most media plans assume — and failing to account for these nuances only leads to lower view rates and a higher cost-per-view.

Another issue is that many brands assume all gamers are younger males. Our data, however, shows that isn’t the case at all. In fact, women have a higher monthly view rate than men in the second half of the year. Women displayed better results as early as May, when their VR was 38%, while men’s was lower, at 30%. In spite of this, the gaming industry allocates 84% of its YouTube ad budget to men versus 10% to women and 6% to people listed as unknown.

Our report also finds that gaming brands see the second-lowest view rateout of the 25 industries studied, coming in just above retail, when it should be the highest, considering how ripe the gaming market is. In fact, according to Newzoo, the U.S. gaming market brought in $24 billion in revenue last year.

How to improve your YouTube video game advertising plan

To succeed around E3, you can improve your YouTube campaigns by adding audiences, getting more niche and knowing how to optimize in a smart, scalable way.

Breaking up YouTube campaigns into hundreds of micro-campaigns is the best way to get a much better return on ad spend. That way, you can multivariate test and shift your ad dollars to the targeting groups that are performing the best in real time.

Advertisers should also experiment with targeting that goes beyond males. Our report offers numerous suggestions for more sophisticated targeting. As a start, here are some of the groups that tend to respond well to gaming ads:

• World music fans
• Business professionals
• Females

Another tip is to keep an eye on trends across other industries, setting clear benchmarks for view rate and cost-per-view. The highlights of our findings across the 25 industries analyzed include:

• Seasonality isn’t gender neutral, with women and men having different patterns for peak VR and CPV at various times of the year.
• Older audiences (those 45+) are more expensive to reach but also more likely to watch YouTube ads.
• VR on computers is significantly higher than on phones or tablets.

Upgrade your YouTube video game advertising plan

Take these tips into consideration, and check out our free data report when setting up and managing your YouTube campaigns, especially around E3. We also recommend 24/7 optimization in order to reach audiences when YouTube views are at their peak (between 6 p.m. and 2 a.m. during the week as well as throughout the entire weekend).

When most media teams have gone home and are asleep, a lot of gamers are just getting started. So make sure you have a plan to optimize your YouTube campaigns around the clock. Otherwise, you won’t be hitting your targets at critical hours — and you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Expand your expertise. Browse Strike Social’s latest blogs here:

• 
  Planning a Winning YouTube Christmas Advertising Strategy
• 
  Complete Guide to YouTube Advertising in 2025
• 
  How A Meta Ad Agency Can Improve Your 2024 Holiday Advertising Costs
• 
  How Facebook Engagement Campaigns Deliver the Best Results for Q4 2024 Holidays
• 
  Q4 2024 Holiday Ad Trends for Thanksgiving & Christmas
• 
  Getting Started with YouTube Pause Ads – What You Need to Know

The post A guide to video game advertising on YouTube appeared first on Strike Social.

What was once an issue mostly contained to the UK is now being recognized on a global scale: ads appearing next to questionable — and sometimes even unsafe — content online. Over the past week, Google released a series of statements for better control over where advertisers’ videos appear. These expanded safeguards are designed to prevent ads from appearing with “content that doesn’t align with (the advertiser’s) values.”

Immediate actions for brand safety

There are a variety of ways to help control where your ads appear. Used together, these tools can go a long way in safeguarding your ads from being aligned with any harmful content.

• Site-specific exclusions
• Channel-specific exclusions
• Video topic exclusions
• Keyword exclusions
• Category exclusions

Strike Social employs a continuously updated master list, using all of the above controls that are currently available. These controls are leveraged with each campaign we run to ensure our clients’ ads are only served along brand-safe content. Additional restrictions are put into place depending on each brand’s guidelines.

Ad policy changes

On March 21, 2017, Google announced that it would be expanding its current safeguards for advertisers. Part of this change was increased accountability around ad policies.

Tougher stance on unsafe content

Google says it is increasing its scrutiny around “hateful, offensive and derogatory content,” which includes “removing ads more effectively from content that is attacking or harassing people based on their race, religion, gender or similar categories.” Along with tightening partner standards, Google will be updating its community guidelines. This change will not only further restrict what content can be monetized but also what content can even be posted on YouTube.

Tightened restrictions on YouTube Partner eligibility

The YouTube Partner Program lets creators monetize their channels. Part of the eligibility for this program is the need for quality, advertiser-friendlycontent that complies with YouTube’s terms of service and community guidelines.

Google will be tightening standards on this program to ensure only legitimate, complying creators are able to include ads alongside their videos.

Expanded brand safety controls

Expanded default exclusions

This change will restrict what type of content ads can appear on by default. It will exclude “potentially objectionable content.” If advertisers wish, they can remove some of the default restrictions by opting in to advertising on broader types of content.

Simplified and enhanced exclusion management

Account-level controls are being introduced in order to make sweeping changes to where ads can appear. This will increase the ease at which advertisers can manage brand safety standards for campaigns running on AdWords for Video and Google Display Network. By managing general exclusions on an account level, this change will ensure consistency across all campaigns and allow further exclusions to be made quickly. Additional “more fine-tuned controls” will be put into place to enable advertisers to become more selective about where their ads are displayed.

Ensuring your brand is safe

Leveraging these current controls — combined with Google’s rapid response to flagged content (98% of which is reviewed within 24 hours) — should allay many advertisers’ concerns. Google’s increased focus on the issue also leaves less room for error. Investing in the time and resources to create a comprehensive set of exclusions will mitigate the risks of ads appearing next to unsafe videos even further. As a final step, Strike Social can apply Google-approved, third-party tracking tags that measure brand safety.

The post Addressing brand safety measures for Google advertising appeared first on Strike Social.