Google announced more robust YouTube advertising tools on Friday, adding how its new offerings were designed to help advertisers target and measure their campaigns more efficiently. All of the new tools are focused on mobile users, most of whom access YouTube using the company’s dedicated mobile app. Diya Jolly, Director of YouTube Product Management, said that smartphones and tablets currently account for more than half of all YouTube views, which is why the new advertising tools for the service were designed with mobile users in mind.
As a part of its efforts to improve YouTube advertising tools, Google started building new cloud-based analytics tools which are expected to debut at some point in 2017. The Mountain View-based company promised that its new offerings will provide advertisers with better insights into their campaigns while simultaneously protecting user privacy. Google isn’t developing this solution alone as the tech giant enlisted the help of some leading analytics companies like Nielsen, comScore, MOAT, and IAS. All of these firms will ennoble the company’s new analytics tools with their own measurements, allowing advertisers to track the efficiency of their campaigns using independent solutions. The company also announced changes to its advertising algorithm which will now take more information into account when serving ads. Diya specifically said these changes will allow Google to serve YouTube ads based on user activity history and consequently enable advertisers to reach an audience that was previously searching for specific products online. Additionally, new AdWords tools will provide advertisers with more options to reach their high-value customers using Customer Match for YouTube.
Despite announcing more robust advertising tools, Google will still allow users to have control over what kind of ads they see on YouTube and will stick with its policy of not sharing personal user data with advertisers, the company confirmed. The Internet giant is also planning to provide users with better options for blocking ads, as Diya said that a cross-platform block feature is in the works and will roll out in the coming weeks. Once it’s out, this functionality will allow a user to block a specific ad on Google Search and automatically stop it from showing on YouTube. Finally, the Internet giant will soon limit the use of pixels and cookies on YouTube as it deems them “legacy technologies” that aren’t the best solution for serving ads to consumers who use YouTube and other online services on mobile devices.