YouTube measurement

Corina Alonso Updated by Corina Alonso

YouTube measurement: Third-party audience measurement of YouTube campaigns

AudienceProject is one of a few select third-party measurement companies integrated with Google’s Ads Data Hub, allowing AudienceProject to measure campaigns running on YouTube. Via Ads Data Hub, first-party panel data is matched with YouTube campaign data to provide independent audience reach and frequency insights.

Today’s media industry is increasingly defined by walled gardens, different ID universes, fragmented media consumption and privacy. This challenges marketers’ ability to measure and analyse campaigns holistically via cookie-based measurement.

AudienceProject overcomes this challenge by using three different enablers; direct clean room integrations, advanced technology and robust methodology.

One of the major platforms when it comes to media consumption is YouTube. Consequently, the ability to measure campaigns executed on YouTube is crucial to delivering cross-media audience measurement in the digital space. AudienceProject is one of a few select third-party measurement companies that have been granted a direct integration to Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH), allowing us to deliver granular and accurate audience measurement of YouTube campaigns.

How it works

ADH is Google’s data clean room solution. It allows AudienceProject to upload first-party panel data and join with YouTube campaign data. The clean room approach ensures that data is exchanged in a privacy-safe manner and exported from the clean room only at an aggregated level, eliminating any risk of identifying a specific individual in a group. This exchange is performed in a sequence of steps. 

Step 1: ADH is connected to the Google buying platform that is used for your YouTube campaign. Once ADH has been connected, campaign data from Display & Video 360 and Google Ads can be read. 

Step 2: AudienceProject’s consented and representative measurement panel is uploaded to ADH.

AudienceProject’s direct integration with ADH enables an ongoing synchronisation.

Step 3: Campaign data and panel data are matched in ADH. The matching is done in a fully privacy-safe manner, ensuring that Google can only access data that AudienceProject has explicitly granted access to and vice versa. 

Step 4: After the joining of the data sets,  the gender and age composition of the campaign is calibrated via restatement of Google’s own numbers. With the direct integration, AudienceProject has the ability to query raw 1-1 log-line campaign information from ADH. 

Matching of YouTube campaign data and AudienceProject panel data:

When connecting AudienceReport to your Google Ads, you should add the accounts you want to measure with the appropriate clients. For this, click on “Add accounts” and insert the Google Ads account ID of the client you want to measure. You can find this ID on your Data Hub Account links overview.
Note that once you have added your Google Ads account ID to AudienceReport, a linkage request will be sent to you in Google Ads. This is done by our customer support team, therefore it might take a while before you receive it. At the same time, the linkage will be accepted from AudienceReport’s side by our Customer Support team. We expect this to be done within approximately one hour. Remember that the linkage request must be accepted before the integration will be activated.

Cross-media campaign measurement example

The integration enables AudienceProject to incorporate the YouTube part of campaigns into cross-media campaign measurements as well as deliver third-party validated demographics. Below is an example of a cross-media campaign measurement, reporting the relative and absolute reach generated by YouTube, Facebook, open web and linear TV. 

Reporting and benefits

Reporting

  • Metrics: Reach in target group, frequency, hitrate, on-target percentage and events in target group
  • Reach building event types: Impressions and video quartiles
  • Demographics: Gender and age
  • Reporting period: 91 days

Benefits

  • Get independent measurement of YouTube campaigns
  • Understand the total, de-duplicated reach generated by campaigns on YouTube and other channels 
  • Understand the incremental reach generated by YouTube campaigns

How did we do?

Open web measurement

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