Increasing the power of engagement and creators on YouTube

What’s happening on YouTube is unlike anywhere else on the internet. It’s where billions of viewers intentionally choose content they love and explore their passions across every moment, screen and format. YouTube isn’t for mindless scrolling.

For brands, YouTube is a place where you can reach and engage with audiences throughout the entire buying process, including on YouTube Shorts, which can now be up to 3 minutes long. In fact, according to a survey by Morgan Stanley AlphaWise, 40% of YouTube Shorts users are not using Instagram Reels or TikTok at all. ^{1 2}

Even though today’s digital landscape is increasingly complex, reaching your audience doesn’t have to be. Today, we’re announcing a suite of new ways for your brand to stand out and make valuable connections on YouTube.

Driving and measuring outcomes that matter

You need your campaigns to drive meaningful outcomes. That means measurable, lasting results, which you can get on YouTube. In fact, according to a custom MMM meta-analysis we commissioned with Nielsen, on average, YouTube drives 2.3x higher long-term return on ad spend (ROAS) than paid social. ³

We have AI-powered video campaigns that serve across Shorts, In-stream and the YouTube Feed for any of your marketing objectives, whether you’re aiming to drive awareness, consideration or conversions.

Today’s announcements are designed to make all of these surfaces more powerful, with a special emphasis on Shorts ads. Across buying, formats, and measurement, we’re rolling out changes to give you what you’re looking for from YouTube ads:

• We’re introducing format buying controls to allow customization so you’ll be able to do things like run a campaign exclusively in the Shorts feed, or a campaign that showcases only your horizontal creative in-stream. Already available for Video Reach Campaigns, format buying controls are now available around the world on Video View Campaigns. We’re also in the early stages of piloting Shorts-only buying in Demand Gen with a limited set of advertisers for their performance goals.
• We’re rolling out new ad formats designed to take advantage of the leaned-in, tappable mentality of a Shorts viewer, and drive even more value from your ads. Stickers on Shorts ads will be available to all retailers by the end of the year. Stickers, created automatically from images in your product feeds, make your ads more interactive and match the fun mentality viewers love on Shorts.

We’re making animated image ads globally available for Demand Gen campaigns. This performance solution helps you create and convert demand on YouTube and Google’s most visual surfaces when consumers aren’t searching for you. Animated image ads in Demand Gen pull product images from your Google Merchant Center feeds and animate them into one appealing unit. This helps you showcase relevant products based on customer interest and turn that interest into conversions.

• We recently rolled out new video enhancements on Demand Gen so you can unlock additional YouTube inventory. Google AI flips your original video and creates videos in new aspect ratios, all while preserving key elements so your message can shine across YouTube's diverse formats.
• We’re expanding our source for which viewers of Shorts can be added to your data segments, across both organic Shorts and Shorts ads. You can expect those audiences to grow at a faster rate, as we’ll soon be including viewers with shorter view durations to better align with how long people watch Shorts.
• Finally, we're improving the lift measurement capabilities of Shorts. We'll be introducing third party sales lift measurement for Shorts ads in the months ahead. As users learn about and purchase your products, you’ll soon be able to see the overall effect of those ads via sales lift measurement and reporting from partners like NCS. For Brand Lift, we've also launched Brand Lift surveys in the Shorts environment, enabling us to improve our measurement by meeting users where they are.

Enabling brands to tap into the power of creators

Creators are at the heart of YouTube. And according to a survey by Talk Shoppe, 67% of surveyed viewers say YouTube has the most impactful creator / influencer content that would lead to them researching, considering, or making a purchase, 1.6x the second ranking service. ⁴

Partnership ads powered by BrandConnect are authentic creator videos you can use in your ad campaigns to drive performance. We recently made partnership ads available to all advertisers globally across all AI-powered campaign types in Google Ads. To use partnership ads, link creator videos to your Google Ads account.

Using creator videos in your ad campaigns can improve performance. In fact, based on internal data, partnership ads that live on the creator’s channel drove up to 20% higher conversions on the Shorts feed than ads with advertiser branding alone. ⁵ To make it even easier to link videos, we’re introducing a new video linking API so you can manage multiple requests at once. We’re also enabling creators to tag partners in their brand videos so that either side of your partnership can establish that meaningful connection.

We also want to make it easy to manage collaborations with YouTube creators directly inside Google Ads. That’s why we’re testing a new central place to manage creator partnerships. This new page will be rolling out to relevant accounts over the next few months.

In addition to compelling ads, YouTube creators make videos that people love, with engaged fandoms that brands want to reach. To help brands make the most of creator-fan connections, we introduced the ability to own 100% share of voice on select top creator channels for your awareness campaigns. YouTube Select Creator Takeovers are now generally available in the US, and will be expanding to select global markets in 2025.

Driving a deep sense of connection on YouTube

There’s only one YouTube, and it extends from short-form to long-form, from your phone to the living room and beyond.

As community and interaction evolves on YouTube, ads on YouTube will continue innovating so that you can drive the results you care about. If you want to learn more about how to work with creators on BrandConnect, we’re hosting a digital event on November 14th where we’ll be taking live questions. And subscribe to YouTube Re:View to gain exclusive access to the latest insights and thought leadership in video advertising.