The Benefits of YouTube Advertising -

If you’ve ever watched a video on YouTube, you’ve probably come across some adverts. YouTube advertising is becoming increasingly commonplace and is an extremely effective marketing tool that can drive more traffic to your site and boost brand awareness on a global scale.

What are YouTube Ads?

YouTube adverts come in four key formats, giving you a huge amount of flexibility over how your adverts are displayed.

Display ads are placed to the right of the video player and above the video suggestions list, and work in much the same way as normal display ads (read our blog post on display advertising).

Overlay ads are semi-transparent and appear on the bottom edge of the video player. They can show either text or images, and can be set to appear at specific times during a video.

Video adverts are played full-screen before the actual YouTube video. Two different formats are available – skippable and non-skippable. Skippable adverts are often up to thirty seconds in length but give users the option to stop watching the ad after about five seconds. Non-skippable ads are usually shorter in length but users are forced to watch the whole thing.

How do they work?

Display and overlay ad formats can be managed in a similar way to normal PPC campaigns, but the process of creating a video ad is slightly different. To start with, you need a good quality video that can serve as your advert. It’s vital to ensure the ad is very engaging – especially if you plan to use skippable ads, where your video only has five seconds to grab people’s attention.

Your advert has to be uploaded to your YouTube account, then you can easily set your daily budget and target the ad to a specific audience. Then it’s ready to launch!

What are the benefits?

Incredible reach
There’s no shortage of people browsing YouTube – over four billion videos are viewed every day, and more than 1 billion people from all over the world visit the site every month. Research has also shown that YouTube reaches more US adults aged 18-34 than any cable TV network. Thanks to YouTube’s immense size, you’re almost guaranteed to find a large number of users within your target market.

Intelligently target your audience
Similar to almost all online advertising, you can specifically target your YouTube ads to ensure they are only seen by your chosen audience. You can target customers based contextual keywords and topics, or target users based on their geographic location, language and interests. This means you don’t have to waste money showing adverts to the wrong audience.

You only pay if someone watches your ad
If you’re running a video ad campaign, you only have to pay when someone clicks on your ad or watches at least thirty seconds of the video. This means you don’t have to waste money on customers who aren’t genuinely interested in your business – if they skip, you don’t get billed.

Extremely cost effective
Unlike television advertising, which is very cost-prohibitive and will only reach a small percentage of your target audience, YouTube advertising is extremely cost effective. You only have to pay when someone clicks or watches your whole advert and you have complete control over how much you spend. This strategy is very affordable and if managed correctly can generate a good return on your investment.

Incredible flexibility

You can take advantage of remarketing (also called “remessaging” or “retargeting”) techniques by linking your YouTube account to your Google AdWords account. This automatically creates a dynamic list of users who have watched or liked your videos, subscribed to your channel, or viewed one of your YouTube adverts. Since these people have a higher chance of being interested in your business, you can easily target them with tailored content and adverts on other websites or channels across the Google Display Network.

Drive more visitors to your YouTube channel
A good, engaging video advert will also help boost views on your channel and increase subscriptions, creating more opportunities to communicate engage with your customers.

Summary

In summary, YouTube advertising is definitely worth the investment. It’s extremely cost effective and can reach a huge number of customers who are specifically targeted to match your business. You can quickly boost traffic to your site and increase brand awareness for a global audience while maximising the return on your investment.

If you think a YouTube advertising campaign would be beneficial for your business, please get in touch and we can help you run a successful and lucrative campaign.