The growing popularity of watching YouTube video for entertainment, news, or general information has led YouTube advertising becoming a key communications approach for brands to convey messages and interact with their target audiences.

To help brands discover and identify suitable audiences for companies, YouTube has developed an online tool called Find My Audience.

Find My Audience is completely free and easy to use and lets you find in-market and affinity audiences based on categories you want to target. The categories are:

• Beauty & Wellness
• Food & Dining
• Home & Garden
• Lifestyles & Hobbies
• Media & Entertainment
• News & Politics
• Shoppers
• Sports & Fitness
• Technology
• Travel
• Vehicles & Transportation

For example, if you’re a cosmetic brand, you can select affinity audiences and Beauty & Wellness as the category.

Once selected, YouTube will recommend YouTube audiences that fit the criteria. For example, when you select affinity audiences and Beauty & Wellness, Find My Audience will recommend two audiences whose interests and habits are related to Beauty & Wellness. The audiences are:

• Beauty Maven
• Frequently Visits Salons

You can select the audiences to learn more about them and use the information for your YouTube ad campaigns. For example, you can select the Beauty Mavens audience to see which YouTube channel this audience tends to watch, the type of cosmetics this audience is researching, and other consumer insights.

Once you have attained this information, you can use it to specify the channels you want to serve your YouTube ads on or which type of products (e.g. makeup or cosmetics) are suitable for certain YouTube channels.

YouTube campaigns are setup in Google Ads and you can specify the target audience details in your Google Ads account.

If you have any questions about Find My Audience, YouTube advertising, Google Ads, or digital marketing in general, please feel free to get in touch.