Tech talk

Measuring cross-channel reach across YouTube & Linear TV

Isabel Mejia

Jul 6, 2022 / 5 mins read
Updated on Jul 26, 2022

By: Ajar Yajvrat, Product Analyst, MiQ

Earlier in this blog series we introduced the topic of data clean rooms, providing information on why they are important and exploring three main use cases for advertisers today. We then took an in-depth look into Google’s Ads Data Hub, discussing the possible insights that can be unlocked using this privacy-centric data warehouse solution, along with the subsequent limitations.

In today’s post, we will be exploring just how MiQ is able to leverage Ads Data Hub to start to bridge the gap between two previously disparate channels, by measuring cross-channel reach across YouTube and linear TV.

Advertisements have evolved across multiple platforms —be it text, display, video or audio— and have allowed advertisers to choose their audience from these various platforms based on their needs. Unifying the experience across these various platforms has caused significant growth over the past decade due to cross-channel marketing, the technique of using multiple channels to acquire, engage & retain users.

Cross-channel marketing is not without its own set of complications. As media campaigns are run across multiple channels, there are no universal standards as to how these silos of scattered data are integrated. This also adds to the problem of measuring multi-platform campaigns consistently.

MiQ came up with a solution for advertisers to monitor cross-channel campaigns and make sense of campaign journeys with the help of relevant data points. In this blog, I will capture one such application of the solution to measure cross-channel incremental reach of YouTube & linear TV campaigns.

Linear TV advertisements vs YouTube advertisements

Linear TV advertisements are often referred to as traditional TV advertisements. They are not targeted or interactive and are scheduled in advance. The ads are unskippable and households tend to see the same advertisement over and over again.

YouTube advertisements are played on Google’s online video platform, YouTube. There’s quite a significant difference in how advertising on linear TV & YouTube works. The advertisements on YouTube can either be skippable or non-skippable, depending upon the campaign goals and need, and the ads can be targeted based on demographics & geolocations.

As the viewership of YouTube content on TV has increased, advertisers now are bundling their TV campaigns with YouTube to expand their reach to a greater amount of people.

What is Google ADH?

Google Ads Data Hub (ADH) is Google’s walled-garden, which was developed as a privacy-safe replacement for DoubleClick, released in 2020, and enables brands to access impression-level data across all of their media campaigns. ADH contains Google Ads data as well as YouTube data which helps companies utilize their data in compliance with GDPR rules, prohibiting advertisers from downloading user-level data.

ADH combines first-party data with Google data, to retrieve aggregated tables by running BigQuery syntaxes.

Source – Google

Let’s look at a few features of ADH

Privacy: Google respects user end privacy complying with GDPR norms.
Campaign Log: ADH maintains event-level logs based on Google IDs, Mobile Device IDs (MAIDs), and User Level IDs.
Activation: Managing audience for use and analysis in ADH
Data Links: In ADH, a user can connect first-party data using data links such as devices, floodlight, cookies & Liveramp IDs.

These features of ADH allow the user to unlock various possibilities with the help of their campaign data. For the purpose of this analysis, we used ADH to understand the duplicate & unique audiences reached through YouTube and linear TV campaigns.

Impact of reach

“In North America, 60% of users use Smartphones while watching TV”

Source– E-marketer

Reach is defined as the number of estimated audiences exposed via a campaign on any given platform. Reach can be used as a parameter to understand and deliver campaigns based on objectives. For example, people are generally engaged on multiple devices, such as their smartphones, tablets, or laptops while watching TV. This makes reaching the audience through a single platform tricky and is the reason why cross-platform media insights prove to be very instrumental in bringing audiences together.

Insights

To understand the performance of the campaign, insights can be visualized using Google Data Studio, which captures linear TV & YouTube campaign performance along with incrementality. The metrics can be selected such as impressions, clicks & conversion based on user input which comes as functionality in Google Data Studio

Process flow of how we can use TV data for Cross channel measurement

YouTube

“YouTube ad revenue in 2021 has increased by 61% in the last 4 years”

-Statista Report

As the data streams into DataStudio, you can monitor YouTube Campaigns based on defined metrics/KPIs such as CTR, conversions & impressions using ads data connector in DataStudio. These insights are broadly captured on –

Demographic level: Distribution of metrics by age and gender.

Campaign overview

Geo-location Insights– Distribution of audience based on DMA’s, country, cities

Campaign impressions based on Geo-location

Strategic Insights: Distribution of delivery of campaign based on creatives, ad-groups, audience

Impression shared by YouTube Ad Group

As cross-channel measurement insights consider audiences of two platforms, the story is half complete if we focus only on YouTube insights. TV campaign performance along with YouTube can bring out a broader understanding of cross-channel campaigns and tweak YouTube campaign delivery as well. TV insights such as demographic details, creative distributions, and channel information can help drive campaigns.

Cross-channel measurement Insights

To measure the cross channel reach across TV & YouTube, we can understand the overlap of duplicate audiences on both platforms, unique audiences reached & get the incremental population on YouTube to understand the success of running cross-platform platforms together.

Linear TV YouTube Campaign overlap