Google’s Zanele Matlala is the YouTube lead for Africa who plans and optimises end-to-end video solutions for marketing teams across the region. Eunice Worifah is a principal analytical lead at Google, based in New York City, where she partners with leading brands to unlock growth through data-driven marketing strategies and advanced measurement solutions. She recently shared her insights around improving media effectiveness and measurement maturity with some of sub-Saharan Africa’s brands and marketing executives at an event in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The traditional marketing funnel is one-dimensional. Marketers work to move consumers down the stages of awareness, consideration, and conversion. However, this process inadequately accounts for the new set of consumer journey behaviours — streaming, scrolling, searching, shopping — that make video the crux of any successful full-funnel marketing strategy.
These video-centric behaviours are fundamentally changing how consumers shop and digest digital content. Video is so powerful that 76% of South Africans say YouTube helps them decide what to buy.1
Today, full-funnel video marketing is more informed, strategic and trainable in the era of media effectiveness. However, there has been a historical lack of awareness around what makes a profitable full-funnel strategy, partly due to rapidly changing technology and consumer behaviour.
Here’s how top marketers implement media effectiveness and full-funnel video marketing into a blended strategy:
CMOs, here’s why video is a marketer’s full-funnel hero
Seventy-eight percent of South Africans say YouTube is TV,2 showing how penetrable video is across media and marketing consumption. For marketers, this insight is invaluable. It presents brands with the opportunity to meet them where they are and develop platform-specific content instead of shooting in the dark with mass dissemination.
Makro, a grocery retailer in sub-Saharan Africa, took that opportunity to heart with a full-funnel video campaign using Demand Gen to drive awareness and YouTube Shorts to increase consideration. Makro improved across the funnel, including a 41% increase in video watch-time, 8% higher conversions, and a 20% increase in revenue value; meaning it brought in more profitable conversions.
Video marketing also presents CMOs and their teams with the ability to measure how ads and broader campaigns are contributing to their marketing objectives. Performance is ingrained into the platform at every stage of the marketing funnel. In fact, YouTube extends reach by fueling 18% more search demand.3
This allows businesses to move consumers down the funnel towards conversions, without the fog that has previously dimmed marketing’s contribution to growth and profit.
Baking media effectiveness into your full-funnel video strategy
The power of your video marketing strategy is only as good as your media effectiveness maturity. Effective brand measurement involves metrics that sit within three pillars: quantity, quality, and outcomes.
- Quantity: This is all about reach and efficiency. Is your message reaching a wide enough audience of people with the potential to become customers? This is about creating ads, such as in a Video Reach Campaign, that reach enough of the right people.
- Quality: The quality of your message affects the performance of your campaign. Are you improving brand recall and brand awareness? Are consumers moving down the funnel? By remarketing to people who’ve already engaged with your content, you can improve brand recall and consideration.
- Outcomes: Do your marketing efforts meet your business goals? In other words, is your chosen conversion metric, such as sales or leads, being met? Travelstart, a flights and holiday booking platform in sub-Saharan Africa, set the example of connecting their business goals to their marketing objectives. By refocused their marketing towards performance, it saw a 50% increase in revenue per booking.
Quantity benchmarks may include views, on-target reach, and frequency. Quality benchmarks may include video completion rate, brand lift, search lift . Lastly, outcomes involve business drivers such as leads, cost-per acquisition (CPA), or return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).
Measurement tools to optimise your video marketing strategy
Each funnel step has measurement tools and features to support implementing the three pillars.
For the upper and mid-funnel stages: Awareness and consideration
- Incrementality testing: Search Lift studies give you the percentage increase of people who searched for your brand or product after seeing your ad. This is key to understanding the influence of an ad. It gives three-dimensional value to a static metric like reach, which simply tells you how many people saw your ad and not how they behaved after.
- Experimentation: Video experiments measure which version of an ad resonated best with your chosen audience. This takes the guesswork out of deciding which creative went furthest to achieve your marketing objective.
- Remarketing lists: By tracking interactions from engaged users who have already watched your video ad, you can create remarketing lists to retarget them. This increases brand recall by keeping your brand top of mind and maximises the effectiveness of each ad.
For the lower-funnel stage: Conversion
- Data-driven attribution: When consumers go on complicated journeys to make a purchase, being unable to assign which ad helped make the purchase weakens your media effectiveness strategy. Data-driven attribution looks at every interaction along a singular shopper’s journey to tell you which keyword, platform, interaction, or type of creative led to a sale. Data-driven attribution is enhanced when paired with Google Analytics.
- Incrementality testing: Conversion Lift studies are a type of incrementality testing that measure how many conversions, such as online sales, came directly from your ad. This helps optimise budgets to campaigns that are leading to conversions over ones that aren’t. Consider using Conversion Lift when users are closer to your primary conversion action such as in the lower-consideration or conversion stages through Demand Gen and Performance Max campaigns.
- Conversion Tracking Tags: This is a tracking tool that helps capture the revenue value of each conversion — not just the fact that it happened. It also helps with cross-channel attribution. For example, if a person saw your video ad on YouTube but converted through a Search ad, Floodlight captures this information. This allows you to measure which ad led to meeting your business goals.
Mastering full-funnel video starts with testing and learning
It’s clear that media effectiveness does not have to be a murky concept shrouded in confusion. And a culture of testing is key to this success: advertisers who experiment at least 15 times a year saw a 30% increase in performance in that year, followed by a 45% increase the following year.4
Start your full-funnel video journey by mixing and matching creatives with different audiences in a cyclical fashion to foster improved marketing and measurement maturity.
