Advertising on YouTube offers a ton of potential, but remains a complicated endeavor, creating friction for prospective buyers. To simplify things, Pixability is introducing v3 of its platform, which aims to optimize YouTube TrueView ads by enabling programmatic management of AdWords for Video buying. Bettina Hein, Founder and CEO of Pixability and Andreas Goeldi, CTO, demo'd the new features for me, explaining how they create new value for YouTube advertisers.

Pixability v3 algorithmically identifies and scores YouTube's channels, creating a set of recommendations for advertisers based on their campaign's audience targeting criteria and objectives. This is a critical feature, because, with YouTube's massive content array, it is impossible for advertisers to understand where to run their campaigns without advanced tools. Advertisers then use these recommendations to implement their AdWords for Video buy (note, there's still no API for this, so for now it remains a manual step).

Once the campaign is underway, advertisers can check their Pixability dashboard for an up-to-date analysis of how the campaign is performing in all the places on YouTube it's running, along with who's watching and how much the ads cost (see screenshot below). Based on this, advertisers can continually optimize the campaign for their performance objectives. This also allows for granular testing of sub-campaigns across different channels and placements.

This is another critical part of Pixability's value proposition - the ability to deliver different messages and ads to different audiences, guiding them through the marketing funnel from awareness to action. This is achieved by re-targeting audiences that have already seen particular ads by making subsequent ones more compelling and actionable.

YouTube itself has taken actions to simplify the ad buying process, perhaps most notably by introducing "Google Preferred" at the NewFronts last Spring, allowing advertisers to target just the top 5% of most-popular content in certain categories on the site. Google recently said this inventory is now sold out. But as Bettina and Andreas noted, the top 5% is also the most-expensive content to buy against, and not necessarily best for all advertisers. Pixability's recommendations solve for this by digging deep into YouTube's library to find the optimal and most cost-effective fits for each advertiser.  

To help advertisers get a better handle on YouTube advertising, Pixability has also released a Campaign Benchmark Analysis, with cross-industry YouTube ad performance, and a YouTube Media Guidebook that details YouTube's various ad units and other key information. Pixability is also hosting a webinar explaining its v3 platform on Nov. 5th.