Do you want to attract new customers, develop your business and make it more successful? In this article, we’ll show you how to do it with YouTube Advertising!
Modern advertisers are not static – they are continuing to evolve and improve. They seek to comprehend secrets and new methods on how they can influence users.
One of the most effective techniques to disseminate information is through video advertising. In order to satisfy the desire of our customer, we offer a variety of sources, including the use of the largest video platform in the world like YouTube.
1. Why Should You Advertise on YouTube?
Reason #1: Huge Audience
- The entire YouTube audience is over a billion people. Almost one-third of the Internet users. Billions of hits and hundreds of millions of hours of play per day come from its platform.
- Among U.S. residents aged 18 to 49 years old, the YouTube mobile app and website are more popular than any U.S. cable TV network.
Reason #2: Wide Geography
- YouTube is localized in more than 88 countries.
- The YouTube interface is translated into 76 languages. 95% of Internet users can use it in the language that is native to them.
Reason #3: Convenience for Mobile
- Viewers are increasingly watching YouTube from their mobile devices. The average duration of a single browsing session in a mobile environment now exceeds 40 minutes.
- Mobile devices accounted for more than half of the hits.
As you can see, YouTube is a really huge platform which provides many opportunities for advertising. And our goal is to make YouTube advertising as efficient as possible.
Huge global corporations such as Samsung, Sony, Adidas, Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, etc. have understood the benefits of advertising on YouTube and use it to boost their positions as market leaders.
The more often a person hears about a product, the more confidence is subconsciously inclined to it, because frequent repetition causes the effect of familiarity.
This technique is well known to all marketers. When you are selling a new product and already know who your target audience is, you should create an ad-reminder for each step, even when potential buyers are already aware of your product. As a result, when a buyer has a choice to make, he tends to take a step in favor of the most familiar product because it’s perceived as well-known and, therefore, places his trust in it.
2. Play It Safe = Develop a Plan
Before jumping into Google AdWords or YouTube, let’s talk about your plan. Depending on your KPI’s and the specifics of your site, you need to ask yourself and decide what you want to achieve with video advertising.
Whether it’s to focus on increasing the downloads of your mobile app, buying products from your company, or maybe you would like to promote general video advertising of your services with a focus on your target audience?
Either way, you should first have a Google Adwords account and YouTube Channel and link to it. It’s very important to give access from YouTube to Adwords with all the permissions so that in the future you can use all the features that you want to use in your video ads.
Finally, your account should look like this:
Google AdWords gives several possible options to create a video campaign, e.g. create campaigns for different goals:
- Mobile app downloads
- Shopping (in this case, you should definitely link your Google Adwords and Merchant center and operating channels data)
- Standard video campaigns
Primarily, you should remember that any video advertising should be aimed at promoting the brand awareness of your products and increasing audience loyalty.
The key to success is to create interesting video content that highlights the preferences of the target audience, which would then entice them to interact with the site. We recommend using the campaign logo in the video and some tips like “Learn More”, “Subscribe”, “Buy”, “Now”, “Download”.
The length of the video ad depends on the type of video format you choose. Do everything to ensure that your ad is more noticeable for users.
Most users often choose to use a “Standard” campaign. It’s the most popular type, so let us consider this. Read more about how to use it below.
3. Create Standard YouTube Adwords Campaigns
In fact, a “Standard” campaign has two video ad formats:
- In-Stream and Video Discovery ads: Using this format, your ads will appear before, during, or after the main YouTube video playback. You can skip the ad 5 seconds after it starts, and such advertising can be displayed on the websites of Google Partners and inside applications.
- True-View Discovery (formerly TrueView In-Display): Shows your ads to people who are looking for videos on YouTube in the search results of related videos on the main page, on the websites of Google Partners, and in the applications in the Google Display Network.
- Bumper Ads: Since May this year you can use Bumpers Ads, which is the new video format that Google announced. These are short (up to 6 seconds) videos that are aimed at increasing the reach of the users and promoting the brand. Campaigns like Toyota and Coca-Cola have long enjoyed such short advertisements to attract new users.
– It’s a short and unskippable ad type.
– The fee is charged for every 1000 impressions advertising (CPM)
This format is more popular than other formats of video advertising, because it is short and informative, and it’s comfortable to show it on all devices.
- Shopping Ads: A “Shopping” video type is automatically selected for the “In-Stream ad.” Choosing this type of True-View, first of all, you should ensure that it’s linked to your AdWords account, your Google Merchant Center account and that your product feed is available.
Also, choose specific products from your Merchant Center account that you’d like to use in your campaign, create custom filters, and enter the attributes. Show listings with product details from your linked Merchant Center account. Connect viewers to products they’ve already seen or that are related to the video they’re watching.
The goods can be displayed directly within the video, thus stimulating the user to purchase. It looks really interesting.
4. Add Interactivity to Your Adwords Ads
Many advertisers forget about the interactive elements of video ads, which can have a positive effect on the audience’s loyalty and encourage users to interact with your advertising. These settings can help make your ad more visible, so, why don’t you start using it?
Consider Using a Call-to-Action Overlay
The chosen overlay will be showed with the each video (even if it begins as a result of clicking on an ad). Users have the opportunity to close this ad.
Remember about a Companion Banner
A companion banner is an image or a group of images that appear next to your ad, which is used only with in-stream types of ads. You should know that by default, a companion banner is automatically generated from the videos on your YouTube channel. But we recommend you use the auto-generated image that is easier to integrate into different platforms, such as desktops and mobile devices.
Select Between Customized and Auto End Screens
End screens can help you achieve your campaign goals by encouraging viewers to perform an action, such as installing your mobile app or buying your products. The screen will appear for a few seconds after your video finishes playing. Auto end screens are currently available for in-stream ads in mobile app installs campaigns only.
5. Target Your Audience on YouTube Correctly
Show your ads to people who are interested in or would be interested in your products or services. These would be people who potentially match the image of your potential buyer.
Just as in the Google Display Network, you can target your video ads to users based on their interests, keywords, topics, demographics, placements, etc. You can also base this on remarketing or similar audiences. YouTube is a tool for branding and attracting attention to your products and services. Therefore, explore it in detail to reach the right audience.
If you didn’t use any type of targeting, you would display your ads just by the demography. So we advise you to use such topics and interests, keywords, etc., which you already used in GDN and had good results from.
To better track the effectiveness of video ads, we suggest you make different groups in each type of video campaign.
For example, if you have created an “In-Stream” campaign, it’s better to create groups for the different segments as “Interests” or “Topics.” These groups will be targeted at the interests relevant to your users.
6. Remarket Your Video Campaign
YouTube also enables you to create video remarketing campaigns, which offers a great opportunity to repeatedly show ads to users who, for example, have already been on your channel before. Video remarketing campaigns demand that you create a special audience in the shared library:
Then choose the preferred type of a remarketing list. It’s important that you target just a special audience of users who visited a channel page or subscribed to a channel.
7. Your Ads Annoy Users – Now What?
We all understand that ads can often greatly annoy users. To avoid this situation, we advise you to configure the “Frequency Capping” in the “Advanced settings” of any video campaign.
The frequency capping allows you to limit the number of times your ads are shown to the same user. This can help you focus on showing your ads to new people.
For maximum coverage, it is necessary to keep the limit between 2-3 impressions per week. The development and optimization of such a video campaign should depend on adding well-performing audiences and continuously expand the list of users.
8. How Often to Deliver Your Ads
The ad rotation settings determine how often your video ads will be delivered in relation to one another:
Try to select an ad rotation that will be preferable for you. When you finally get around to optimizing and analyzing your performance campaign, you may find that you need more traffic. Use “Accelerated delivery,” in “Delivery method.”
Accelerated delivery shows your ads as soon as reasonably possible, which may cause your ads not to appear at all later in the day. However, it’s better to do this carefully as it directly affects the flow of funds, so you better set up the daily budget limit on your campaign.
Takeaway Points
- Before launching any advertising campaign, it is necessary to set objectives, have a plan and strategy as to what exactly it will bring to you, e.g. more traffic, more conversions, etc.
- It’s important to check the basic settings of your account such as language, frequency capping, location, ads delivery settings, etc.
- Remember to exclude irrelevant traffic after the launch and first analysis.
- Add interactive elements in your ad (companion banner, overlay call-to-action, end screen) that will push the users to interact with your video ad.
- For the first 3-4 days of your campaign, make your rates higher up to 50% of the planned CPV to deliver better results. And four days after the launch reduce the maximum bet. It will help to optimize and analyze campaigns and get better results gradually.
