Non-skippable YouTube is not a lead channel

We recently audited the full video history of a group of senior living accounts: seven YouTube campaigns across five communities, $28,954.54 of spend, 5,004,983 impressions, 2,476 clicks and 3 conversions.

The easy conclusion is that YouTube does not work for senior living. That is the wrong conclusion. The money had been spent on a screen that cannot respond, in a format that cannot be skipped, and graded on a metric the campaigns were never set up to produce.

Where the money went

TV screens took $22,957.82, 79.3% of all YouTube spend, and produced 425 clicks, 17.2% of the total, at a 0.0106% click-through rate. Mobile took 15.6% of spend and delivered 73.7% of all clicks. All three conversions came from a single campaign, on mobile.

Non-skippable 15-second spots made up 43.6% of spend at a 0.0268% click-through rate. One named-resident testimonial spent $441.59 for zero clicks.

None of that is a verdict on CTV. Nobody clicks a television. A 0.0106% click-through rate is what the surface does. The problem was elsewhere: TV was the default rather than a decision, it was priced like performance inventory ($5.75 CPM on TV against $5.72 on mobile), and nothing downstream was set up to measure reach. No view-through conversions, no brand-lift study, no frequency reporting. A reach buy with no reach measurement is not a strategy. It is a default setting.

What did work

The skippable buy was strong on the metric it is designed for: a 46.39% view rate at $0.0107 per view. Skippable lets weak creative fail cheaply. Non-skippable makes you pay full price for it.

Creative showed a clear pattern. Place-led spots (amenities, apartments, dining) all ran above a 50% view rate. A spot explaining the community's culture ran at 33.74% on the same audience. Families want to see the apartment and the dining room before they hear the philosophy.

The same format, built for reach

This summer we ran non-skippable YouTube for a Midwest tourism board in Chicago and Milwaukee, and planned it as what it is. 99% of impressions landed on connected TV. $7,000.54 reached 780,651 unique people at $8.97 per 1,000 reached, with about 1.2 impressions per person and 95.1% of impressions watched to the end. The flight drew two clicks in total, exactly as expected, and it was read through branded search and site visits, not clicks.

Same platform, same format. One buy was judged on clicks and looked like failure. The other was judged on reach and did its job.

What we take from it

• Decide what CTV is for before you buy it, and size it as a decision, not a residue.
• Measure reach as reach: unique users, frequency, completion, view-through conversions, and brand lift where the budget allows.
• Keep non-skippable a deliberate, frequency-capped minority of a lead-generation buy.
• Put response budget where response happens. On these accounts, that was mobile.
• Lead cold reach with place. Save testimonial for people who already watched.

A click-through rate is not a verdict on a television. Neither is a lead count.