84% of brands missing out on potential ROI despite major media spend
Brands are spending billions of pounds on YouTube content but only 16% are matching the platform’s potential to deliver return on marketing investment, a new report reveals.
The report, published by Navigate Video with support from academics at the University of Sussex Business School, has identified a significant YouTube Growth Gap impacting even brands with the biggest channels in the world.
It means that brands are missing opportunities to build stronger audience relationships and get more value for the business from content they are already investing in – by focusing too heavily on audience size and views alone.
After analysing 998 brand YouTube channels across 10 industries globally, the report revealed multiple opportunities for marketing teams to achieve more:
- 84% of brand channels do not currently combine strong reach with strong engagement
- 94% of brands never pin a comment
- 72% never reply to a viewer
- 7% have switched comments off entirely
- 24% include no external link in any video description, meaning that an interested viewer has no route from the video to engage or purchase
- 97% of brands score higher on setting their channel up than on the work that happens with every upload
Stuart Stubbs, founder of Navigate Video, a YouTube marketing agency that grows global consumer brands through data-driven strategy, said: “There’s a real gap between what YouTube can do for brands and what many are actually getting from it. We’ve been saying it for more than a decade but this data proves it.
“The problem isn’t a lack of content. Most brands are already producing plenty of it. The problem is that success too often starts and ends with the number of views, and views alone don’t tell you whether that content is working for the brand.”
Brands invest heavily in YouTube content but overlook the basics
The scale of the missed opportunity becomes clearer when the sheer volume of content created is considered.
Stuart added: “The 998 brands we analysed have more than 1.4 million videos between them, representing an enormous investment in time and resource in creating content.
“Yet more than 40% of brands we studied have never added a timestamp to a single video, whilst over 30% have never added a tag. Brands are putting huge effort into creating YouTube content, but many are still overlooking some of the basic things that can help people find it.”
Big audiences don’t guarantee YouTube success
Even some of YouTube’s biggest brand channels are being outperformed on channel quality.
The 100 most-watched consumer brands average 48 out of 100 on channel quality in the report’s bespoke ratings.
When you consider that YouTube reaches more people than any other video platform, this could be a serious gap to consider for marketing teams, whether internal or external, looking to get the biggest return on their investment.
Dr. Matilde Lucheschi, Assistant Professor of Marketing at University of Sussex Business School, said: “Numbers tell us what is happening, but not necessarily why. On a channel as powerful and complex as YouTube, pinpointing what drives performance is critical, given the number of potential drivers and the different solutions each may require. Our analysis showed that even the biggest brands can struggle to navigate this complexity. Our frameworks aim to make it easier to diagnose what is driving performance and identify where action is needed.”
Quick wins for brands to build engagement on YouTube
Some of the biggest gaps identified by the research are also among the easiest for brands and marketers to address, including replying to viewer questions, pinning comments and adding external links.
However, brands are also overlooking basic settings that help their content be found. More than two-thirds of brands scored below half for video packaging and metadata, the weakest-performing area measured in the research.
Stuart said: “This is the work that happens on every upload: the titles, descriptions and playlists that decide whether a video is surfaced through search, cited in AI, or recommended to the right audience.
“Brands are investing in creating the content. The opportunity they’re missing is making sure that content gets found organically.
“YouTube has changed, but many brands haven’t changed the way they use it. It’s no longer simply somewhere to host video, it’s becoming an increasingly important part of how people search for and discover information. How to appear in AI summaries has become a hot topic for marketers, and YouTube is now one of the key places that LLMs cite from. Yet brands simply aren’t doing the optimisation work that allows YouTube content to be discovered.”
The full report is available to download here: navigatevideo.com/youtube-growth-gap-report
Source: Navigate Video
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