Mobile Advertising: How to Work with YouTube Influencers in a Right Way

Almost every person knows what YouTube is. The average user spends daily about 40 minutes watching the videos. But a lot of us do not even guess how powerful this video-sharing service might be for mobile games promotion. The fact is that more than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices and the second popular section of videos on YouTube (after "music" section) is games.

 
However, planning and carrying out such campaign is a very complicated and challenging process. These are the main difficulties you are sure to face: 
 
1) Attribution, i.e., how to keep tabs on the total number of installs attracted by the video review from a particular channel? How to attribute installs made by users, who firstly watched the video on their PC and only then downloaded the game from the store using their smartphone?
2) How to predict the cost-effectiveness and number of installs?
3) Should we enlist channels that only review mobile games or entertainment channels in general?
4) Which format is the best - video review / let’s play / TOP lists?
5) Productive communication with bloggers.
 
This is hardly a complete list of tasks that you’ll have to deal with when you launch a campaign with video-bloggers.

So in this article, we will talk about the most important moments you should consider when running ad campaigns, and give an advice on how to run YouTube campaigns efficiently.
 

Define Clear Strategy and Objectives

Creating a cost-effective campaign is a rather difficult task that requires one to have a well-structured strategy and clear-cut objectives. If you see your main task in getting “as many installs as possible”, the vision of your objectives is not clear enough and thus needs to be revised.

Apart from the expected overall number of installs, it is useful to have additional sub-goals. They help assess intermediate results and any soft spots, and therefore allow adjusting and refining your campaign in time.
 
Below is an example of campaign goal setting.
 
Main goal is to attract 10 000 installs within the budget. 
KPI 1: Ensure the coverage of 1 200 000 views by the target audience.
KPI 2: Achieve CTR > 5%.
KPI 3: CPI is less than 3$.
KPI 4: Stimulate a surge in organics of +20%.
KPI 5: Achieve cost per view of <0.05$.
 
The main problem is that you don’t have the option of clear targeting by geo, gender, interests, devices and everything that we use when setting up a Facebook ad campaign. Naturally, the blogger can provide some statistical data on their audience, however, there is no way he can guarantee that, out of the full sample, his video will be watched only by US-based men aged 25+ who are interested in hard-core games with fantasy-setting, neither can he know for sure the exact number of them who will download your game. That is exactly why your content presentation strategy, posting periods, frequency of video postings, message to the audience and format will eventually heavily influence the RR% of your campaign.   
 
If you are launching a massive campaign with heavyweight bloggers, think carefully about how they are going to interact with each other, how often they will post promotional videos, which format will be the most advantageous for your product, what message you want to share with your target audience, etc. It is the story, which you share through the creators and their channels, so it’s important to think through all details. You also need to clearly understand that big fish usually swim with their like. It is extremely hard to get through to them, especially if you are an indie developer, besides the budget can be considerable.

 
Here are the resources you can use for estimating different channels:

Selecting Your Right Channels

When choosing effective channels for cooperation, many marketing specialists focus exclusively on the number of subscribers and the main theme. 
 
This is one the fundamental problems. Using more profound and specific metrics will help you choose the most appropriate source.

1. Estimate the Average Number of Video Views

You should do that for each particular channel for the last couple of months. Of course, you can also measure the average number of views for the whole channel lifetime. It’s easier. You need only to divide the total number of views by the number of videos on the channel. (Example: Canadian LoL blogger Redmercy has 1600 videos on his channel with the total number of 361,901,135 views. So, averagely he has 226 188 views per video). But it’s not always gives you the most precise information. Usually the old videos of bloggers have much less views and can negatively affect on the whole channel statistics.

It works only if the channel is relatively young and has a little number of videos. Keep in mind that channel might have different types of video (review, challenge, vlog) and, as result, different average number of views per category. You should pay attention to how stable the number of views is. For some video-bloggers, the gap between the numbers of views of different videos can reach as high as 60%. This brings some risks if you are unlucky enough to get into the “unpopular” video.

You can also check the recent views statistics of any YouTube channel using the popular statistics website Socialblade.com. Using this platform, you can discover the progress with video views and subscriptions on every specific YouTube channel. You can find steadily growing channels and use this information for comparing two or more bloggers.

2. The Scale of Audience

Less doesn't mean worse. Especially in terms of the number of subscribers. Usually small channels have more strong relationships with followers and their audiences are more engaged. As a rule, small channels have close-knit communities of people who are willing and eager to interact. Moreover, influencers on these channels more likely to answer questions and share their feedback in comments below the video. This fast definitely leads to the increased traffic and sales for the advertiser.

3. How to Define the Engagement Level?

We also suggest you to assess how much the audience engages with the channel. The total sum of likes and dislikes, comments on YouTube and social networking sites compared with the number of views can help you see the situation more clearly and compare the channels to choose the best one. Let’s get to the numbers.
 
The good tip for measuring engagement success is comments/views ratio = 0.005%.  The clearest ratio for measuring success when it comes to Likes on the influencer video is likes/views = 4%, that’s 4 likes for every 100 views. If the channel is not clearing these averages, then these videos aren’t doing as well as you can expect. Viewers will take the time to like a content if they find it informative and entertaining, so if the channel likes count remains low, find another one.
 
When analyzing the channel with 100 000 subscribers, you should expect between 12 000-16 000 views per video. That’s an average ratio of views/subscribers = 14%.  Ratios can change depending on the video, of course, but they are a good measurement stick to use across the channel to see how well it is doing.
 
For instance, let’s take the video named “Patchnotes-Rundown 7.4” from the quite popular german MOBA channel Letsreadsmallbooks. Statistic of the video as for April 20, 2017 is following: total views - 190 854;  comments - 1 047; likes - 11 778. And applying to the ratios we mentioned above we should expect in average, at least, 954 comments and 7 634 likes. Comments and likes indexes in the case with this video is quite higher than average. That’s good sign!
But another similar ‘let’s play’ video from his channel named “Gunblade Leblanc” have quite different results. With 147 930 views it has: comments  - expected - 740 / real - 281; likes - expected - 5917 / real - 5379. Well, sometimes content of the video is more interactive, sometimes - less. 

So here is the tip. Consider, at least, 5 videos from each channel for more accurate indexes.
 
As for likes, we were considering only likes/views ratio. Likes/dislikes is another ratio, deserving our consideration. It is litmus paper, which shows us the degree of subscriber’s loyalty to blogger and inner shell of the content. Influencer personality means a lot in this instance: if he/she is distinguished by nice personality traits, and respect the audience by providing them with quality materials only - this ratio always will be in his/her favor. 
 
The huge number of dislikes with the huge number of channel followers at the same time could mean ambiguous content or abrupt position of the blogger on a particular issue. Sometimes the video content may even offend or abuse some groups of followers, thereby causing the flow of disagreement and indignation from their side in the form of dislikes. 
 
For instance, videos on the channel Pants are Dragon have approximately 4%-9% of dislikes in comparison to likes. As for channel Domingo-PA - 1% - 5%. That’s the level of audience loyalty and must also be taken into account as can show us how followers support and trust bloggers. So you can compare few channels for finding the most loyal viewers for your product.

4. Periodicity and Frequency of Publishing the Videos

Bear in mind the periodicity and frequency of publishing the videos on the channel. You can find an interesting channel with appropriate content and see that the last video was uploaded few months ago and the video before that - another few months ago. Or vice versa: the blogger, who publishes video every day or few videos per day. Sometimes bloggers can drop the existing channel for a new project and, as a consequence, for the new YouTube channel.

5. What Do ‘Targeted Views’ Mean?

As the audience of channel grows, its thematic coverage expands as well. If you focus on the field-specific audience, you can assess the targeted views. By using the statistics of channel with filtering options and considering the target GEO, gender, age, platform, you can estimate the proportion of targeted views and use it when assessing the coverage. Mind that the closer channel’s profile is to your target audience, the higher Result Rate you can expect from your campaign.

6. YouTube Influencers Collaborations

Working on your brand awareness, the good practice is to take a look on the bloggers, who collaborate with the similar YouTube creators. When several bloggers unite to introduce the integrated interactive reviews or challenges through their channels that could be helpful for audience reach expansion. Don’t get rid of the small channels as well: they have small, but still a valuable audience. Sometimes you can contact a little, but relevant and perspective channel, and it’s good chance to build strong connection with the blogger, while he/she is easier to reach out and the prices for campaign would be lower.

As a conclusion, we should say that choosing the most appropriate channel for the game - one of the most important steps to conducting an efficient campaign. But there are plenty of things to know about workflow in case you want to create an efficient campaign with influencers without wasting budgets. For more information and hints about communication, planning and measurement results check our eBook "Ultimate YouTube Influencers Marketing Guide".