I recently came across somebody asking about whether or not they should run a Youtube Ad campaign for brand awareness purposes.

I’ll put aside my opinion on running any type of ad for ‘brand awareness’ purposes and just say that yes, Youtube Ads can be a good way to let people know your brand exists.

Whether or not you should run this type of a campaign is another question entirely.

It’s not that I don’t think any business should run “brand awareness” ad campaigns, I just think that most businesses should be focusing on ads that generate a positive return on ad spend that can be attributed to those ads.

Most brand awareness campaigns don’t generate a positive return on ad spend and if they do it’s not easy to track. Most times you’re determining the success of a brand awareness campaign more holistically; “are more people coming to our website from searching our brand in Google? It must be from our brand awareness campaigns!”

If your business has a limited ad budget I would first focus on bottom of the funnel (BOF) campaigns via Google Search. Targeting users who are searching keywords with high intent, users who are more likely to actually become a customer for your business.

Once you max out your ad budget on these type of BOF Search Ads and you still have more ad budget to spend, that’s when I consider it to be a good time to run Youtube Ads for top of the funnel or “brand awareness” purposes.

There are exceptions to this however.

If you are offering a product that is an impulse purchase type of product, say under $100 or $50, then Youtube Ads can possibly generate a higher ROAS than even Google Search Ads and you should definitely test these simultaneously. In fact, Google Ad’s “Performance Max” ads are designed to do just that.

So to reiterate, if you have an impulse purchase type of product, YouTube Ads aren’t simply a channel for “brand awareness”, they’re a channel you can actually generate sales conversions from and should be tested immediately.