Challenge

• Increase overall revenue for the Back to School campaign;
• Deliver high volumes of views at a low cost;
• Attain an overall YouTube cost of sales of 70%

Approach

With four billion views on YouTube everyday, there's no denying it's an invaluable tool for reaching new customers and increasing brand awareness. There were a selection of targeting options such as the Children's Apparel in-market segment that were ideal for targeting new parents. We used this in addition to relevant topics, affinity audiences, and contextual targeting to gain maximum reach across YouTube.

Convincing users not to click on the "skip ad" button as soon as five seconds has passed is one of the biggest challenges with YouTube, even with a strong video like our Back to School ad. So, in order to make it more compelling and encourage people to engage, we added info cards to the video; a selection of expandable images along the right-hand side which linked directly to different parts of the school uniform range.

Of course, our objective was not just to reach new users, but also to increase revenue and achieve a positive ROI. YouTube is primarily a tool used for prospecting, but a new campaign type at our disposal called TrueView for Shopping, meant that we could combine the direct response of Shopping campaigns with the brand-boosting power of YouTube. TrueView for Shopping campaigns allow you to serve product listing ads alongside your TrueView in-stream video ads, so while users are watching an ad they have the option to click-through to your particular product pages.

To make sure we were serving users highly relevant products, we combined TrueView for Shopping with dynamic re-marketing, targeting recent visitors to our school uniform pages.

Results

This combination of prospecting and dynamic re-marketing had been intended to provide reach whilst achieving a positive ROI and increased revenue, and it certainly did that! During August, our biggest month for Back to School we achieved:

• Over 1 million views at an average CPV of just 2p;
• Beat revenue target at a CoD of just 16%;
• A COD of just 5% from our dynamic remarketing TrueView for Shopping campaign;
• A 73% increase in overall Back to School revenue YOY.

The addition of the info cards to our prospecting, and the shoppable element to our remarketing, helped to encourage our users to engage more with our ad, and made them significantly more likely to click-through and purchase on the site.

“The Back to school campaign was a huge success working with the team. Together we achieved both ROI and reach, especially utilising YouTube to maximise exposure to the right target audience at the right time. Targeting relevant new customers via TrueView using info cards coupled with the dynamic element to encourage previous visitors to purchase, made it a well-rounded campaign to gain that maximum exposure, ensuring we are showing relevant content to the appropriate users. We’re also really proud to achieve such a low CPV which Google said was some of the best results they had ever seen.”

Emma Frewin, Online Acquisition Marketing Manager at F&F, Tesco