Google reckons they’ve got ‘a collection of resources to help you test creative variations and measure creative impact’ for your YouTube ads.

Once you cut through the spin, that means they’re now letting us access a comparative mode and view a new analytics dimension.

Contemporary comparatives

There’s a new ‘Video Experiments’ mode that compares different creative on a head-to-head basis.

It’s being touted as a free (apart from your ad spend) replacement for pre-release testing and focus groups. It reports in as little as three days back with a ‘brand lift’ measure.

It claims to tell you the different creative iterations affect key metrics like awareness, consideration and purchase intent.

New retention breakdown

Next time you look at the retention reports for your YouTube ads, you should see an audience segmentation breakdown of your retention data. Nifty!

While segmentation data in retention reports is good, the fact Google is calling it ‘Video Creative Analytics’ is a bit odd. We can only guess that it is so they could shoe-horn it into a broader press release: they announced it in the same breath as the Director Mix and Sequential ad delivery features for YouTube.

While it’s nothing ground-breaking, these new features are definitely improvements. Is it enough, these days, to use Google’s own metrics as your ad analytics, or do you prefer a third-party solution?

Copy Transmission is a Melbourne-based agency :: Better Brands. Loud & Clear.