Are you responsible for proving the impact of YouTube ads on your business? There are plenty of stats on why YouTube advertising should be a part of your marketing mix. But they won’t help you prove to your business how the money you spent on YouTube ads last month impacted customer acquisition and revenue.
Defending YouTube ad spend is hard — and so is optimizing YouTube campaigns to increase conversions and reduce CPA. But that’s exactly what your business expects you to do.
This blog provides 5 strategies to help you do both. It explains how a critical source of marketing data – phone leads and conversions – is the key to successfully defending your YouTube ad spend and optimizing your campaigns to drive significantly more sales, appointments and revenue.
YouTube Has a Big Influence on Customer Journeys
Let’s start with some pretty incredible facts about YouTube:
- YouTube is the internet’s biggest streaming video platform. U.S. viewers watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube video content a day on both TVs and mobile.
- YouTube is the most-used app in the US. It has more monthly visitors than Facebook and Google search.
- YouTube reaches more people than social media apps. For example, 45% of YouTube users are not on TikTok.
YouTube’s enormous popularity helps it play a big role in influencing customer journeys:
- 2 out of 3 purchase journeys for new customers involved either Google or YouTube.
- 86% of purchase journeys with 5 or more touchpoints include either Google or YouTube.
- YouTube cuts down the average shopping journey by 6 days.
- YouTube ads on CTV screens helped drive over 1 billion conversions last year.
YouTube Ad Spend Is on the Rise Despite Economic Uncertainty
Businesses continue to invest more in YouTube advertising every quarter. In 2024, marketers spent over $36 billion on YouTube campaigns, 14% more than they did in 2023. And in Q1 of 2025, YouTube ad spend was up 10% over Q1 of 2024.
This increase is happening despite macroeconomic uncertainty that’s causing many businesses to reconsider their digital ad spend. Tariff chaos is leading businesses to scrutinize their ad budgets and consider pulling back on spend. Perhaps some of you reading this fall into that boat.
Whether you are increasing spend on YouTube ads or pulling back, you are likely facing pressure from your business to prove returns. Businesses that spend more expect that spend to result in more customers and revenue, while businesses that pull back on spend want to know that every dollar they do invest is spent wisely.
5 Strategies to Prove and Improve YouTube Advertising ROAS
1. Measure Phone Leads and Conversions from Your YouTube Ads
You can’t prove the impact of your YouTube advertising and defend your spend if you aren’t getting credit for phone leads and conversions. For most industries, phone calls to your business are the most valuable leads, converting to customers or patients at higher rates than web forms — and for more revenue.
For marketers in industries like healthcare, telecom, home services, insurance, financial services, automotive, or travel, 30% to 90% of your conversions driven or influenced by YouTube ads come from phone calls.
The first strategy is to get accurate data on those phone leads and conversions. To defend your spend and prove your business impact, it’s not enough to know that someone called after seeing or clicking your YouTube ad — you need to know if that call is a lead and if it resulted in a conversion. Invoca can provide you with that data.
When someone calls your business viewing or clicking on your YouTube ad, Invoca tracks the source of the call and uses AI to analyze the conversation to detect if the call was answered, if the caller is a lead, if they converted on the call.
Passing phone lead and conversion data into the tools you use to report and optimize YouTube ad performance — like Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Adobe — gives you a complete view of performance, online and over the phone. With all your conversion data in one place, you can measure every lead, appointment, and sale to prove your true impact on business results and defend your spend.
2. Don’t Forget About Enhanced Conversions
To get data on as many conversions as possible, you should also consider turning on enhanced conversions. Enhanced conversions help you get attribution for Google Ads conversions blocked by data privacy — like when Apple blocks Google Click IDs from ad clicks on Apple Safari private browsing.
For YouTube ads, enhanced conversions also help you get attribution for more of your engaged-view conversions – when a user watches at least 10 seconds of your video ad (or the entire thing if the ad is less than 10 seconds), doesn’t click on it, but converts later.
There are 3 types of enhanced conversions to turn on:
- Enhanced conversions for web that attributes website conversions like online purchases.
- Enhanced conversions for leads that connects web form leads to offline conversions, like when someone schedules a test drive online and later visits the dealership and buys the car.
- For phone calls, Invoca offers enhanced conversions for phone leads that can attribute phone leads and conversions from Google Ads when no Google click ID is present. Enhanced conversions from Invoca also helps you get more attribution for YouTube engaged-view conversions from phone calls.
3. Improve Optimizations from Smart Bidding and Performance Max with Phone Lead Data
Feeding the platforms that you use to optimize YouTube Ads data on your phone leads and conversions helps smart bidding and Performance Max drive better results on your behalf.
You need the AI algorithms making optimization decisions to know what’s driving the right types of calls, and equally important, what’s driving the wrong types of calls – things you don’t want to waste your budget on. The AI can then make better optimizations to drive better outcomes for your business.
With Invoca, you can also tell the AI the relative value of each call, so it knows if a call is for a more expensive service like car engine repair versus a lower-value service like an oil change. By passing how much revenue the call generated — or the expected profitability or CLV — the AI can do more powerful value-based bidding.
4. Segment Callers Into the Right Audiences to Power YouTube Ad Performance
When consumers call your business, those conversations give you clear data on each caller’s intent and the outcome of the call. Regardless of what marketing channel they called from originally, you can use conversation data from AI to segment callers into the best audiences for your YouTube campaigns. For example:
- For phone leads who didn’t convert, retarget them with YouTube ads for the product/service they called about to increase conversion rates and ROAS. Many Invoca users say that phone leads that didn’t convert are their most valuable audiences, engaging and converting with video, social, and display ads at the highest rates.
- For callers who converted, put them into the most relevant upsell or cross-sell campaigns. You can also add them to lookalike campaigns to target new consumers resembling your best leads.
- For callers that aren’t leads or already converted over the phone, reduce wasted ad spend by suppressing them from seeing and clicking on your YouTube ads. Since these callers already converted recently, any subsequent call from them is likely support-related — calls that most marketers do not want to waste ad budget on.
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5. Increase YouTube ROAS by Answering and Converting More Calls
No matter how well your YouTube campaigns generate phone leads, your performance suffers if locations or contact centers do a poor job answering and converting them. You can see video ad benchmarks for your industry below.
Marketers can use Invoca reports to see what percentage of calls to locations and contact centers connect in conversation with a person, if they are a lead, if they converted on the call, and more. Use this data to determine if low conversion rates are the result of inefficient campaigns or poor call experiences.
If your contact centers or locations struggle to answer calls, you can use data for when calls are missed to inform staffing decisions, ensuring your business is ready to handle high call volumes. For calls coming in when your business locations are closed, you can use an Invoca IVR to qualify the caller and text qualified leads a link to convert on your website. For calls when business locations are open, you can use Invoca’s call routing to ring multiple phone numbers at once until someone answers, including re-routing unanswered calls to a contact center.
For calls to contact centers, you can use data Invoca captures from each caller’s online experience to automate the right call experience and improve conversion rates. With Invoca’s PreSense call routing, you can automatically route calls based on intent data from their digital journeys, ensuring your high-value phone leads are quickly connected with a relevant agent who can convert them.
If your business has trouble converting the phone leads they do answer, you can use Invoca’s AI to analyze what contact center agents and location staff say on calls to diagnose the reasons why. The AI can detect if the agent or location staff gave a proper greeting, qualified the caller correctly, overcame objections, mentioned the right promotions, asked the caller to book an appointment or place an order, and more. You can use this data to pinpoint where issues exist and help your contact center and location managers deliver the right coaching to improve conversion rates — and your ROAS.
Ready to Defend Your YouTube Ad Spend with Phone Lead Data?
YouTube can be an effective channel for influencing conversions, but you need the right data to prove and improve your results. Request a demo of Invoca to see how your phone lead and conversion data can help you defend your YouTube ad spend and increase your ROAS.
Want to dive deeper into optimization strategies for Google Ads? Watch our Google Ads Masterclass webinar on-demand now →
