With connected television (CTV) viewing time on the rise (i.e., people watching digital video content on their home televisions), YouTube is looking to enhance its CTV solutions for advertisers to provide more reach and resonance of advertisements similar to those on television at a much more affordable price.
Which could be a key consideration for increasing brand awareness, but to ensure advertisers get the most bang for their buck, YouTube must also be transparent in how it tracks the performance of its CTV choices.
Which is where this new ad comes in. Today, YouTube announced an expansion of its partnership with Nielsen, offering more ways to advertisers to measure the total audience reached by YouTube CTV campaigns.
As YouTube explains:
“Last year we thrown out Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) and Comscore Campaign Ratings (CCR) to help you more easily measure your YouTube CTV campaigns alongside other media. Later this year, YouTube CTV and YouTube TV will be available on Nielsen Total Ad Ratings (TAR) in the US. This launch will include deduplication of YouTube inventory across all platforms (CTV, desktop, mobile, and linear TV) for better compare the reach of YouTube with linear TV.”
In other words, YouTube will now provide more direct comparisons between your ad reach across traditional TV campaigns and YouTube’s CTV, independently verified by Nielsen’s measurement process.
“You’ll also see CTV device metrics within your media mix model (MMM) data feed, which can help measure sales results and share insights about the impact of your YouTube CTV investment. To make the data analysis process faster for customers and easier for our measurement partners, we launched a new data platform for MMM vendors and advertisers to request data, track the status of those requests, and ingest data. directly.”
And again, it’s definitely worth considering: According to Nielsen’s analysis, on average, YouTube CTV is 3.1x more effective than traditional TV at US CPG MMMs.
Expect those stats to continue to tilt in YouTube’s favor over time as more people watch even more YouTube content on their TVs, which is especially relevant when considering the media consumption habits of younger audiences, for whom YouTube has always been a main entertainment option. .
Last year, YouTube reported that more than 120 million people now consume YouTube CTV content on a monthly basis, a number that is projected to continue to rise in the coming years.

In addition to this, the actual reach of YouTube CTV should also take into account more viewers, with further data from Nielsen showing that 26% of the time, multiple viewers over the age of 18 watch YouTube together on the TV screen.
With this in mind, Google will also include co-display metrics in the Nielsen DAR that ensures ad reporting for US advertisers. by the end of Q2, while also adding new frequency controls for CTV campaigns to help prevent exposure fatigue.
It should be a key consideration for almost all brands, as TV campaigns traditionally drive the best response for brand awareness and action, and YouTube’s advanced targeting makes them potentially even more effective and affordable, given the options. of more specific audience focus.
Of course, people can also skip these ads, and for many, that’s almost a stock response (my kids just exit the video and reload to avoid pre-rolls). But still, there is great potential here, and the right targeting and products could end up generating great results from YouTube’s advanced CTV offerings.
You can learn more about the latest YouTube CTV ad updates here.
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