Driving incremental leads with YouTube for online car marketplace

The Challenge

The secondhand car sales space is crowded and dominated by well-known brands such as Autotrader and Cinch. The competitive landscape, along with the monetary and time investment involved when purchasing a car, means that building trust between brands and consumers is paramount in the automotive industry.

Our client understood the importance of building brand awareness but was mindful that all activity needed to align with its wider business goal of driving leads.

With PPC and paid social activity consistently achieving their lead-generation goals, a new opportunity presented itself in YouTube advertising, which would help the brand achieve additional reach.

To increase awareness of the brand while simultaneously working towards the wider goal of driving leads, Impression devised a YouTube strategy utilising brand lift measurement and regional incrementality testing to evidence its ability to deliver against both top and bottom-of-funnel KPIs.

The Strategy

Strategic insights gathered from first and third-party data highlighted that YouTube is a highly consumed platform among the client’s target audience. In addition, the longer format of video would allow us more time to convey the brand’s message.

The campaign comprised a full-funnel strategy, optimising between in-stream skippable, unskippable, bumpers, in-feed and shorts ads, with ads running across all devices – desktop, mobile, tablet and connected TV. The target audiences were the brand’s key demographics plus users in-market for used cars.

Brand Lift and Search Lift studies were implemented in-platform, which would allow us to quantify how the ads impacted brand perception beyond the media metrics available in the platform.

To prove the value of YouTube advertising beyond brand building, we implemented an incrementality test in which we exposed YouTube advertising to a treatment group of a single region. We chose a region that generalised well, meaning that the test results are likely to replicate in other regions and we chose to experiment with only one region to minimise risk.

We then analysed the non-exposed regions to estimate the number of incremental leads generated as a direct result of YouTube advertising.

Test results

Lift tests

The YouTube campaign drove a significant uplift (16%) in awareness among one of our target demographic groups.

This resulted in an increase of 176% in searches for the client’s website across Google search and YouTube, showing the impact of YouTube ads on subsequent user behaviour.

The highest lift was driven from ads seen via Connected TV as this format reached audiences on the largest, most visible screen in their homes.

Incrementality test

YouTube advertising caused a 3% increase in the number of leads in the test region throughout the duration of the test, equating to 800+ incremental leads.

The observed uplift was largest within the first three weeks of experimentation. During this time, results showed a 10% increase in the number of leads in the test region.