Everything You Need To Know About YouTube Ads

You’re sure to have come across ads while watching YouTube, but have you ever thought about how it works, or rather, how you can leverage it to improve the outreach of your business?

YouTube ads is one of the best ways to make your content known to people, but it is very different from normal social media marketing, and to properly make use of it, we have compiled some facts and tips to get you started.

What is YouTube Advertising?

On YouTube, your videos can be found by relevance from the search engine or being suggested on the homepage or feed. To make your content more visible to consumers, you can use YouTube to advertise and reach a wider audience.

YouTube also provides marketing tools, such as YouTube Analytics, to understand how your video is performing, and reach your desired demographic.

Source: YouTube

In recent years, Google has also made multiple improvements to how YouTube Ads work that would make it worth your investment.

On mobile platforms, where more than 50% of content is being viewed, advertisers can reach more viewers through targeted advertising using keywords and viewing behaviours.

Types of YouTube Ads

YouTube provides different formats of advertising to suit your needs, such as:

• Skippable in-stream ads
• Non-skippable in-stream ads
• Bumper ads
• Video discovery ads
• Masthead ads
• Responsive display ads

Knowing which type of advertising format to use and aligning it with your marketing strategy can improve your ROI greatly.

Source: YouTube

Let’s go through a few of the formats that are commonly used.

Skippable in-stream ads

These are used when you have content to promote before, during, or after other videos on YouTube, and across websites and apps running on Google video partners.

After 5 seconds, the viewer is given the option to skip the ad.

With Cost Per View (CPV) bidding, you pay when a viewer watches 30 seconds, or the full duration if it is shorter than 30 seconds or interacts with your video.

This format is suitable for sales, brand awareness, and website traffic.

Bumper Ads

These are used when your content is short and to-the-point, and when you want to reach a broad audience.

Bumper ads are 6 seconds or shorter, and play before, during, or after another video, and can not be skipped by viewers.

You pay based on impressions with target Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM).

This format is suitable for brand awareness and reach.

Masthead Ads

These are used for driving awareness and reaching a massive audience in a shorter period, but they are only available on a reservation basis through a Google sales representative.

They appear on the top of the YouTube home feed, or app player, and viewers are taken to watch the full video when they interact with it.

Costs are rated by your sales representative based on your campaign impression goals.

How to advertise on YouTube

After you’ve created your marketing video to advertise on YouTube, its time to upload and set up your campaign.

When you access the dashboard of Google Ads, you are given the option to set up an advertising campaign. You will then be prompted to select a goal, and your campaign type. Choose the goal you prefer and select ‘Video’.

There are subtypes for the video campaign for you to choose from: Video reach campaign, outstream, or ad sequence. Choose the type that best suits your needs.

In the same screen, you can select the format we have discussed before that you wish to use: Efficient reach (Bumper, skippable in-stream, mixed) or non-skippable in-stream.

Next, enter your campaign name, then set your budget per day for the entire campaign. Setting a daily budget will ensure you have a fixed investment amount throughout your start and end date.

You can also define the demographic of your target audience and create separate campaigns for YouTube search results and videos to reach different viewers with different viewing behaviors.

These include gender, language, age group, income, interests, keywords, topics, and parental status. Narrowing down or broadening your campaign’s target audience can yield different results, and it is up to you to test and see which one works for you.

You can also set content exclusions to show your ads on content that is relevant to your brand.

Next up is bidding. Here, you will set the max price to pay for each view, and you can adjust the amount to get as much unique impressions as you want.

Finally, link your video. You are given the option to display your URL in-stream on top of the video and create a short title and description. You can also include a companion banner made from images of your video that appears on the right side of the ad.

When you’re done, you can click on Create Campaign to start advertising.

Tips on making the most out of YouTube Ads

To get even more out of your video content marketing, here are some tips to up your game.

Hooking your audience

A hook can be visual appeal, catchy audio, a strong first impression, or familiar faces. Suspense, horror (scare-factor) and humor, when done right, can also be used.

The first few seconds are the most important when it comes to ads, it determines whether the audience will sit through or interact with your ad, or simply skip it.

Setting a story and emotion

If you have a good narrative for your video, you can choose to tell a story that grips users by their emotions.

When a viewer is intrigued by the story that your content shows, they are more likely to continue watching and find out more about your brand.

Prompt your audience to interact

Setting up clickable elements in your video is one way to increase your success on YouTube ads. You can set up TrueView for action campaign that shows your viewers what to do so that they can click through before the end of your video.

Having interactive elements also provides an ease of access to your site for your viewers, and you want to make the most out of the screen time to maximize your ROI.

What’s Next?

Now that your first ad campaign is out there, Google has a few nifty tools at your disposal. These include:

• Views and impressions
• Audience
• View Rate
• Conversions

You can use these categories to check how your video is performing, understand how people are interacting with your ad, and determine if your ad is giving you a high ROI.

While you are trying to expand your reach and view count, your ad is bound to be seen by people who have no interest in your brand or content. Although it seems counter-intuitive, you should account for such viewers and encourage them to skip the ad, so you don’t have to pay for the view, and they don’t have to waste their time.

Video content marketing is a must have for any digital marketing strategy and provides huge returns when done right. (self-promotion)