The Band’s Visit, a new musical in the 2017-2018 Broadway season was looking for ways to drive excitement and awareness for the show.  Knowing that the show had little brand recognition, we believed that video was a great canvas to give audiences a taste of the musical and create buzz.  Since launching paid YouTube campaigns approximately four weeks prior to the show starting performances, video campaigns reaching prospecting audiences delivered strong completion rates, but the interest in the video content was not driving the site traffic we wanted to see.  We needed to look for a way to physically get people further into the purchase funnel and into The Band’s Visit’s remarketing pool.

Since launching YouTube TrueView campaigns, completion rates were consistently high across all target audiences meeting or beating our internal benchmark of 30%.  However, click rates were never as strong as we wanted them to be, despite a few creative refreshes in an effort to drive higher engagement.

We took our three top performing affinity audiences (Arts & Theater Aficionados, Book Lovers, and Avid Investors) and implemented YouTube for Action which, at the time, was in beta.  These affinities were originally chosen as audiences we were reaching in our overall marketing mix due to them being top behavioral segments of The Band’s Visit site visitors and ticket buyers in Google Analytics.  As we got ready to launch YouTube for Action campaigns, we were heading into a period where we were spending more on digital video than we had in previous weeks which helped to quickly garner data.

We were immediately pleased with results.  Click rates increased significantly over the course of a week, all beating our .30 click rate benchmark.  The Arts & Theater Aficionados campaign went from a .22% to a .39% CTR, which is the first time it was beating our projections in months.  The .28% CTR for the Book Lovers campaign increased to .37%, and the Avid Investors campaign went from a .19% to a .47% CTR.

In addition to the improved click rates, we continued to see high completion rates so all main KPIs we evaluate with video were seeing strong results.  We were also extremely pleased to see that the quality in site visitors was not sacrificed from the increased spend; overall we saw that traffic driven from the newly launched campaigns stayed on the site for the same amount of time as prospecting audiences from previous YouTube campaigns, and we also saw an increase in intent to buy.

Since our initial YouTube for Action test, we continue to see strong results and this kind of campaign has become a staple across The Band’s Visit’s YouTube TrueView campaigns.