Bring awareness to your brand through Trending Music on Shorts

The opportunity to reach Gen Z doesn’t end there. This audience uses short-form video to participate in pop culture, discover new hits and engage with their favorite musical artists. YouTube Shorts has amassed over 1.5 billion monthly logged-in users and over 50 billion daily views. That’s why, in the coming months, we’ll begin piloting Trending Music on Shorts for advertisers.

Music takes on a life of its own on Shorts, skyrocketing in popularity through trends and challenges. Recently, Gen Z fans across the world took to Shorts, using Miley Cyrus’ ‘Flowers’ as the backdrop music to their content, showing all the ways they’re practicing self-love.

These Shorts received millions of views and speak to all the creative ways in which Gen Z uses short-form video on YouTube to express themselves and connect with artists. Soon, your brand can get in on the love by surrounding Shorts using trending music.

In a time of multiple screens and countless ways to stay entertained, it can be challenging to get your audience’s attention. But even with so much content available at any time, people are drawn to moments they can experience together: a new movie release, a big game, a product launch, a holiday. And these are key opportunities to connect with a brand. Marketers, you know this well: you center advertising campaigns around the tentpole moments most likely to inspire your audience, shift perceptions or influence a purchase decision.

To help you show up in those big moments, we recently launched a Cost-Per-Hour Masthead on YouTube. This new way to buy YouTube’s most prominent placement gives you exclusive ownership of the Masthead during the hour(s) leading up to, during or after priority moments.

The activation strategies are endless, but here are a few ideas to get you started.

Achieving the right video ad frequency for both viewers and advertisers has always been a juggling act.

That challenge has only increased as linear TV viewership in the US has dropped from 100 million households in 2014 to a forecast of just 44 million by 2025. As reach declines, the number of times the audience sees an ad on TV is increasing. Seeing the same ad repeatedly can be a frustrating experience for viewers and proves wasteful for advertisers. On average, TV advertisers’ return on investment (ROI) decreased by 41% when frequency exceeded 6+ weekly impressions — which represents 46% of TV impressions served, according to a MMM meta analysis commissioned with Nielsen.

Almost half of the linear TV impressions in our study were considered waste but the same study from Nielsen shows that brands can increase their average weekly frequency from one to three on YouTube with a consistent ROI. This is a huge opportunity for marketers to maximize their impact across the same set of people they are already reaching today.

At YouTube, we are helping advertisers deliver a better advertising experience for viewers without any compromise in ROI. Based on this commitment, earlier this year we announced our frequency management solution on Display and Video 360 that allows marketers to manage the number of times people see their ads across YouTube and third-party networks. We’re now taking that a step further to revolutionize reach and frequency-buying on YouTube.

To help marketers harness this impact, we’re announcing the launch of Target frequency globally for YouTube campaigns. This will help advertisers optimize towards more precise reach and frequency, while ensuring that we continue to provide a suitable advertising experience for viewers. Target frequency allows advertisers to select a frequency goal of up to four per week and our systems will optimize towards maximum unique reach at that desired frequency.

We recently partnered with Triscuit to see how the brand can drive incremental impact to its reach campaigns with a frequency target. Triscuit’s goal was to ensure that the brand stays top-of-mind with the consumer. The brand set up a Video experiment to determine the incremental ad recall that a weekly frequency of two could deliver. The Target frequency campaign achieved a 93% higher absolute ad recall lift compared to the non-frequency optimized campaign, at a 40% cheaper cost per lifted user.

2. Take an asset-first approach for bigger creative impact

Keeping today’s consumer engaged across platforms requires creative finesse at scale—and a multi-asset approach for campaigns like social and video to enable more visual and authentic storytelling. Nearly half of consumers say they are more likely to purchase a new product or brand they see in a video ad.

You can now scale your assets to Shorts, YouTube’s new short-form video experience, to drive visual momentum with consumers watching everything from workout clips to recipe walkthroughs. You can make the most of this mobile canvas by bringing your best vertical video and image assets to the Shorts experience with Video action and now Discovery campaigns for images.

We’ve seen this asset-first creative approach across campaigns drive better results: more than 60% of advertisers who combine Video action campaigns with Discovery ads see incremental conversions at or below their original cost-per-action.

Invertironline is an Argentinian fintech company that turned to video creation in Google Ads for its efficiency and flexibility. “We always thought about YouTube, but we didn’t want to enter in the design loop until video creation in Google Ads appeared,” says Ariel Peralta, acquisition marketing lead of the financial technology company. With the help of templates, Invertironline reduced the time to produce video ads from two days to just 15 minutes. Compared to previous video ads, conversion rates doubled and the cost per acquisition was cut almost in half.

Another aspect of video creation we’d like to simplify is adding voice-over to videos. Audio is a critical factor in driving creative effectiveness on YouTube. The ABCD guidelines for effective video ads consistently show that videos with voice-over drive better performance. That’s why we’ve launched an easy way to generate a voice-over for YouTube videos, powered by Google’s industry-leading text-to-speech technology. This feature is accessible directly from the asset library.

Simply type in your script, select your preferred voice and with one click we’ll overlay your voice-over onto your video. We currently offer 7 voices in English (US) that are specifically created with advertising in mind. We also offer general text-to-speech voices in the following languages: Filipino, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Malaysian, Mandarin, Spanish and Swedish. We plan to add more ad voices and languages in the future.

In studies, creative is often the most significant driver of advertising return on investment. That’s why we’re so focused on helping you create and curate great assets for all of your Google Ads campaigns. We hope the asset library fosters more collaboration and smooth campaign deployment for your teams, freeing up time for you to develop creative ideas. With easier video ad creation and voice-over in Google Ads, we’d like to help you fully unlock the benefits of video advertising.

Learn more about the asset library, video creation and voice-over in the Google Ads Help Center.

Increase relevance with customized ads

Consumers expect — and prefer — relevant ads: 80% of viewers say they are more open to advertising or branded content relevant to them. But delivering this experience in practice, and at any kind of scale, can be complex and cost prohibitive, especially for video ads. For this reason, many marketers have had to forgo the effectiveness gains that come from highly relevant, customized advertising. That changes with ad customization in Ads Creative Studio.

Now you can create multiple or even hundreds of versions of a single display or video ad. They can be customized for different audiences, locations, languages or contexts. Simply tell us what element of the ad creative — like a product image, superimposed text or sound — you want to set as ‘swappable’ and provide different versions of that element based on a set of rules you create. The rules include the audiences you want to reach or contexts you want to match.

For example, you might make a rule to change the text overlay on your video creative based on whether your audience is in the market for cold-weather gear or warm-weather travel. We’ll apply the rules quickly to all videos and render the different versions in a matter of minutes. Then, you can create and share a preview that shows every video, along with the rules that apply to that video, with anyone who needs to review it.

These features are available today for video creatives and will soon be launching for display.

We recently partnered with several top YouTube creators to test our new live shopping features, including Simply Nailogical, who launched her new nail polish collection to 2.8 million fans on her Simply Not Logical channel, and Hyram, who dropped his new ‘Selfless’ skincare line to 4.5 million fans.

We’ve also tested shoppable livestreams with leading retailers on their channels. Raven Elyse went live to sell her favorite home workout gear and morning routine essentials from Walmart, Sephora beauty directors hosted a live Q&A about makeup foundations, and Target performed a live style haul celebrating fall style.

“We think about YouTube as a connector to our customers — reaching people through inspiration, entertainment, and creativity,” says William White, Chief Marketing Officer, Walmart. “At Walmart, we continue to innovate on behalf of the customer, and we are excited about our work together. Through our partnership with YouTube, we will continue to evolve how we link inspiration and commerce.”

Building on the success of these pilots, the YouTube Holiday Stream and Shop will kick off on November 15 with a week of shoppable livestreams. Fans tuning in will be able to score new products, unlock limited time offers, and get their product questions answered through live Q&A and polls with creators and other viewers. To start the week, the Merrell Twins will share their holiday wish list featuring products from Walmart, Samsung and Verizon. Stay tuned for more details as the holidays approach!

Whether kicking back with a movie or kicking their fitness routine into gear, more people are choosing to experience YouTube on the big screen. When they do, they can watch longer, enjoy multiple shows back to back, and experience it all from the comfort of their couch with friends and family. Many even build a routine around it. In the U.S., over 120 million people streamed YouTube or YouTube TV on their TV screens in December 2020.¹

To help consumers more easily learn about the products and services they’re interested in, we’re making YouTube ads on connected TVs more shoppable. Today, we’re expanding Video action campaigns to CTVs to help advertisers drive more online sales or generate leads, and grow their business. 

With a quarter of logged-in YouTube CTV viewers watching primarily on TVs,² the living room is becoming an essential place for brands to drive incremental conversions with new audiences. In early experiments for Video action campaigns on TV screens, over 90% of conversions coming from CTV would not have been reachable on mobile and desktop devices.³

Developing privacy-safe advertising technology

Time spent with digital media increased 15% last year, according to eMarketer, as people turned to devices like smartphones, connected TVs and computers. As they use digital tools to manage more aspects of their lives, people want to know that their privacy is protected and we expect these concerns will only increase in the future.

A healthy ads ecosystem is critical to keeping the internet open and accessible for everyone, but we must also ensure that people feel safe when they are online. Now is the time for our industry to rethink our practices and take bold action to regain people’s trust. That’s a key reason why we announced earlier this year that we won’t build alternate identifiers once third-party cookies are phased out. 

The good news is that it’s possible to improve privacy while still delivering business results. We’re collaborating with the web community to build solutions like those in the Privacy Sandbox. It’s an open-source initiative to develop new technologies centered on privacy techniques like anonymization, aggregation and on-device processing designed to support key advertising use cases such as interest-based ads, measurement and more.

Did you know searches for corsages and boutonnières are one of the top trending categories this month in the U.S.? Meanwhile in Italy, one of the top growing categories of searches this month is charms and pendants. And in Japan, searches in the drawing and painting kits category have grown over 100% in the past month.¹ 

People around the world turn to Google to be inspired, discover new brands and find what they need. Consumer behavior is changing rapidly, so we’ve been busy building products to help you be ready for what’s next. 

Register now for Google Marketing Livestream on Thursday, May 27 at 8 a.m. PT. You’ll be the first to learn about Google’s new products, the latest trends, and actionable best practices. You’ll also hear from many industry leaders, including: