Google Adds New Viewer Attention Metrics for Display and Video 360 Campaigns

Google’s looking to provide more video marketing insights for advertisers, via two new custom bidding measurements for Display and Video 360 campaigns.

First off, Google’s adding new audience reach considerations into its custom bidding tools, which will help advertisers maximize their campaigns for ‘attention’, in addition to its existing goals.

As explained by Google:

“A growing number of marketers are looking to optimize their bids with the goal of capturing user attention. Attention is a particularly relevant metric for brands reaching their audience in lean-back environments such as connected TV. Optimizing towards users’ attention is especially beneficial when direct conversions are difficult to measure. For example, buyers can estimate the attention an ad will get based on its size or whether the video ad is audible or muted.”

With this in mind, advertisers will now be able to measure ‘player size’, which relates to the size of the screen on which the viewer is seeing the ad, and ’audibility’, which will measure whether an ad was viewed on mute.

That’ll facilitate all new ways of assessing video ad response, with these extra variables providing more insight into actual likely engagement rates, based on more specific viewing elements.

It could be a big factor for larger brands, in understanding how audiences are consuming their content, though for smaller advertisers, too, it’ll give you a better idea as to how your YouTube ad performance is going, with these factors playing an increasing role as Connected TV viewing continues to rise.

On another front, Google will also now enable advertisers to use first-party data from their Google Analytics account, no matter which version of Analytics they’re using.

“We know that many of you have moved or are working on moving from Universal Analytics to the new Google Analytics. So we made sure that data coming from any new Analytics 4 property – either standard or 360 – can be activated in Display & Video 360.”

That will ensure that more marketers can utilize their own audience data within their targeting process.

These are interesting additions – not game-changer by any means, but some new tweaks in video ads assessment, that may well alter approaches to video ads.

And again, with Connected TV viewing on the rise, the capacity to measure these additional elements could be a big benefit in maximizing ad reach and response.

The new updates are rolling out from today across Google’s ad tools.