• by Alex Weprin , October 1, 2018

YouTube is beefing up its video advertising solutions for marketers, improving the company’s measurement capabilities and adding new functionality to ads.

The company will formally announce the expanded solutions at Advertising Week New York on Monday.

YouTube will be adding new extensions to its video ads, bringing functionality similar to that of parent company Google’s search ads. Extensions will allow viewers to take actions like viewing movie showtimes at nearby theaters, download an app or book trips, directly from the ad.

In addition, the company is making efforts to improve measurement of campaigns, in particular the tricky problem of “brand lift.”

YouTube already has a brand lift solution, but is evolving it “to make it simpler for advertisers to measure and act upon upper- and lower-funnel metrics,” writes Vishal Sharma, vice president, product management for YouTube Ads, in a blog post to be published this morning.

Specifically, the company will allow marketers to set up brand lift studies inside of its Display & Video 360 or Google Ads products, and view that data alongside other ad metrics.

YouTube is also rolling out two new metrics, “lifted users,” which measures the number of people influenced by an ad, and “cost-per-lifted-user,” meant to optimize cost-efficiency and effectiveness. 

The company will also add IRI to its list of measurement partners, allowing CPG companies to measure their campaigns.