The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Google TrueView Youtube

Google to make Trueview mobile ads more ‘actionable’ on YouTube as in-stream tool celebrates five years

Author

By Seb Joseph, News editor

April 8, 2015 | 3 min read

Google is looking to push more Trueview ads to mobile devices, promoting to brands an update it claims will make its in-stream ads more “actionable” on smaller screens and connected TVs, as it marks five years of one of its core ad products.

The ads take the form of "Cards", an update of its annotations tool, showing viewers information about other videos, playlists, websites and more while they watch a post. Where the annotations were only effective on desktops, Google is pitching the new format as a way for advertisers to create one Trueview ad to run across all screens, including connected TVs for the first time.

Merchandise, fundraising, video, playlist, associated website and fan funding are the initial cards advertisers can use though Google has said more are incoming. “Our goal is to have these [Cards] eventually replace annotations,” a YouTube blog on the tool reads “but this will happen only once they can do everything annotations can do today, and more”.

It changes the Trueview dynamic by counting a click on a card as a view and not just when someone watches a video. Advertisers will be billed for these clicks, similarly to how the service charges for app promotion campaigns. This change will roll out to all TrueView in-stream ads in May but the service has been available to brands since last month.

The arrival of Cards opens the latest chapter in the Trueview’s five-year rise to prominence within Google’s advertising arsenal. Google originally conceived the service as a video version of its search offering, whereby brands only pay for targeted ads if people click on them. Despite early apprehension from the industry, according to Google, Trueview has won over brands, with the number of advertisers using it rocketing 45 per cent in 2014 while all the top 100 global brands used it in the period.

Moving forward, YouTube believes there are further rewards to be reaped from clicks at a time when video growth is being spurred by advertiser appetite for personalised content. Indeed, the business is more clearly defining the clickable areas of a video in an attempt to elevate the value of the ads. Previously, clicking anywhere on a Trueview video would register a click, now only clicks to cards, calls to action, the video header, companion banner or a link at the bottom of the player signal that it has been viewed.

YouTube’s net US video revenues totalled $1.13bn in 2014, according to eMarketer, representing nearly a fifth (18.9 per cent) of the US digital video ad market. Though its video ads are growing, the platform’s growth is stunted due to its video ad placements not being consistent across the board, the research firm added and is starting to come under pressure from rivals like AOL and Yahoo.

The recent updates to Trueview suggest that a solution is in hand for YouTube even if the company has remained coy on future plans for now.

Google TrueView Youtube

More from Google

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +