Should You Run YouTube Ads In 2026? (An Honest Answer)
Here's a hard truth about how most brands spend their marketing budget.
They fight tooth and nail for the 5% of buyers who are ready to purchase right now. They run retargeting campaigns, branded search, bottom-of-funnel tactics — all aimed at the tiny slice of the market already in buying mode.
The other 95%? The future buyers? They get ignored completely.
And that silence is costing them more than any ad campaign ever will.
This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on YouTube Ads. By the end of this post, you'll understand why YouTube belongs in your media mix. In Part 2, we get into exactly how to build a winning YouTube campaign. In Part 3, we cover how to track and measure it properly.
Let's start with the most important number in marketing that most brands have never heard of.
The 95-5 Rule — And Why It Changes Everything
Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute identified something that should fundamentally reshape how you think about marketing spend. It's called the 95-5 Rule.
The rule is simple: at any given moment, only 5% of buyers are in-market and ready to buy right now. The other 95% will buy eventually — just not today.
But here's where it gets really interesting. Research shows that 70 to 90% of buyers who are ready to purchase today will only buy from a brand they already know.
Run those numbers. Out of 100 potential customers:
- 5 are ready to buy right now
- 4 of those 5 will only buy from a brand they already recognise
- That leaves you fighting over 1 person — the one in-market buyer open to a new brand
And the kicker? Every single one of your competitors is targeting that same person.
Loyalty Is a Myth (And That's Actually Good News)
The marketing academic Andrew Ehrenberg put it perfectly: "Your customers are customers of other brands that occasionally buy you."
Read that again.
Your most loyal customer isn't really loyal — they're buying from five different brands, and yours happens to be in the rotation. Even Coca-Cola's average buyer purchases just one Coca-Cola per year.
That sounds bleak. But it's actually liberating.
It means your job isn't to lock customers in. It's to stay in the room. To be present. To be the brand that comes to mind when the 95% eventually decide they're ready to buy.
That's brand marketing. And that's exactly what YouTube ads do at scale.
Is Your Audience on YouTube? (Spoiler: Yes.)
Five years ago, brands would ask this question constantly. Nobody asks it anymore.
Recent research shows that 90% of US adults use YouTube regularly. And 26% of US adults actively discover products on YouTube.
It's not just entertainment. It's where people go to research purchases, find recommendations, and make decisions. The real question isn't whether your audience is there — it's why you're not showing up when they are.
YouTube Is Three Channels in One
This is where most brands undersell the platform. YouTube isn't one thing — it's three distinct environments, each with its own type of attention:
YouTube Shorts — Short-form, mobile-first, competing directly with TikTok and Instagram Reels. You're working with half a second of attention. Fast, punchy creative.
YouTube Desktop — Longer-form content, product reviews, tutorials, and podcasts. People here are leaning in. They're researching. They're open to discovery. This is where considered purchase decisions happen.
YouTube on TV — This one surprises people. 47.5% of all TV watching is now streaming. And the biggest streaming platform isn't Netflix. It's YouTube.
That's living room attention. Relaxed, undivided, high-quality engagement with your brand. And most of your competitors haven't figured this out yet.
The Cost Advantage Is Real — But It's Not the Main Story
YouTube CPMs typically run between $5 and $20. Meta is usually $20 to $30. That cost difference matters, but it's not the most important part.
What matters is the quality of attention you're buying.
Someone who chooses to watch 15 or 30 seconds of your ad is in a completely different headspace to someone thumb-scrolling through their feed at midnight. One person is leaning in. The other is checked out.
Cheap reach plus quality attention. That combination is genuinely rare in digital advertising, and independent research from Haus.io across 190 incrementality tests confirms what we've seen with clients: YouTube ads drive real, measurable business outcomes — not just vanity metrics.
One More Reason That Most People Miss
Here's something that's becoming increasingly important as AI changes how people search.
Google Gemini — one of the most widely used AI tools for research and discovery — cites one platform more than any other in its answers.
YouTube.
If showing up in AI-powered search results matters for your brand (and it does, increasingly), having a presence on YouTube and building a library of indexed video content isn't optional. It's a strategic advantage that compounds over time.
So What's Actually Your Job as a Marketer?
Strip away the dashboards, the attribution models, and the conversion tracking for a second.
Your job is to be memorable. To be present. To be the brand that the 95% of future buyers think of when they eventually decide to open their wallets.
Right now, most ecommerce brands are allocating almost everything to that 5% in-market today. Which means they're invisible to the 95% who will buy tomorrow, next month, and next year.
YouTube is how you change that. It's the channel that lets you build brand equity, create mental availability, and earn a place in the minds of future buyers — at a cost that makes the numbers work.
The Shift That Changes Your Trajectory
The brands doing serious revenue — consistently growing year over year — aren't just better at conversion optimisation. They've figured out how to build demand upstream. They show up before buyers are ready. So when the moment comes, there's no question which brand comes to mind.
YouTube ads are one of the most effective tools available to do exactly that.
If you're running Google Ads and seeing diminishing returns, or if you've hit a ceiling on Meta, the answer probably isn't to spend more in the same places. It's to invest in the part of the funnel you've been ignoring.
What's Next
In Part 2 of this series, we get into the practical side: the 12 factors that go into building a successful YouTube campaign — from creative structure to targeting to bidding strategy.
You'll want to have read this post first. The tactical stuff only makes sense once you understand why you're doing it.
Ready to start running YouTube ads for your ecommerce brand?
At Banfana, we help ecommerce brands build and run YouTube and Google Ads campaigns that drive real growth — not just clicks. If you want to find out what that could look like for your brand, get in touch with our team.
We'd love to show you what's possible.
