Google recently integrated YouTube promoted ads, officially named AdWords for Video, into Google AdWords. You can now manage all of your paid ads under one platform.
Our Google AdWords Certified Search Marketing team handles all of our clients AdWords campaigns and naturally took on the challenge of learning this new marketing segment. I personally was tasked to work with our Media Department to promote videos uploaded to YouTube.
For those who are familiar with the Google AdWords setup, you either pay for an ad when it is clicked, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), or every thousand impressions (CPM). In YouTube's case, they only offer the Pay-Per-View (PPV) option.
When creating an ad, you want something simple, yet descriptive to entice users to want to click on your ad. It is important to have a video advertising strategy that offers something unique to their product or service to set themselves apart from other ads. Similar to Online Campaigns, Video Campaign settings allow advertisers to set budgets and delivery methods. You can target specific locations and languages in the campaign, optimize for views, and target multiple devices (desktop computers, tablets, and mobile).
Targeting the Right Viewer
Something new to this type of campaign was the ability to set a Targeting Group. Within one targeting group, you can set demographics, topics, interests, and YouTube search keywords to all work together. The advantage here is to customize multiple targeting groups based on your consumer profile. If you wanted to target 45-54 year olds interested in travel and sightseeing tours, you can customize a group to that. There are literally hundreds of topics and interests to choose from which in turn can give you an unlimited amount of group targeting possibilities.
All of these targeting factors are used to direct a user to the most relevant video they may be searching for or viewing. You also have the ability to target search keywords. In YouTube, the word you want to associate in your search should be the same word that a video has been tagged with. It is therefore very important to tag your video with keywords you think the user would search for when trying to find your video. For example if your video is about Adirondack Tourism, tags such as "Adirondacks", "tourism", "Adirondack tourism" (as well as other general keywords based on your video) are all important to be tagged. In YouTube it is good to be both broad and defined. Tagging your video with "Adirondacks" will return more results than a tag such as "Adirondack tourism."
Video Ad Formats
In YouTube, four types of Ad Formats have been introduced in which your Video ad can be displayed: TrueView In-stream, In-search, In-display, and In-slate. Click here to view the four types of Ad Formats
- In-stream video ads are shown to a user before a video they have chosen to watch begins. After five seconds, the user has the option to skip the ad. I know when I first started seeing these ad types on YouTube, I clicked to skip them right away, but because targeting has gotten very specific, an ad will be shown to me based on my interests and viewing history within my Google profile. Therefore, I rarely skip some of those ads now.
- In-search video ads are featured videos shown to a user when they search for something on YouTube and are slightly highlighted at the top of the search page or on the right side of the page. Based on the query the user has input as well as topics and interests the user has specified in their profile, the promoted videos can be shown at the top of their related searches.
- In-slate video ads are when a user must choose an ad to watch before their featured video starts. With this format it is important to create an enticing ad to grab a user's intention since they have a few different ads to choose from.
- In-display video ads are when a promoted ad is shown to a user at the top and to the right of the viewing page. This ad is highly visible and is in the list of related videos that the user may like based again on search trends and viewing history.
Video Data Collection
After enough data is collected we start to determine how well the campaign did. A lot of similar features like Clickthrough Rate (CTR), Cost-Per-View (CPV), and Impression Count are evaluated, but if your YouTube account is linked properly, you can collect specific data about your videos. You can segment how many visitors watched 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of your video; you can track which type of ad format was used the most; or you can see what combination of topics, keywords, ad formats, and ads contributed to the best conversion rate which in PPV is considered website clicks. That is when a user clicks on your ad while it is in progress and is taken to your specified destination URL. In most campaigns, the main goal is to get users from an ad to a featured website for further engagement about a product or service.
Currently, there is little support for Google Analytics data integration. Google has confirmed that its engineers are working to create a more accurate display of analytics data to draw from the advertising tab. Until then, we have to use AdWords reporting and high level Analytics.
Adworkshop Advantage
Our clients have seen great interactions with users from promoted ads. We can keep track of how long users have viewed the promoted video and interact directly through comments and messages within the YouTube channel. From a search perspective, the more interaction you have with a video, (e.g. views, comments, likes) the more likely your video may be seen in Organic search results on Google.
As a full service digital marketing agency, Adworkshop continues to expand our expertise in many different fields to allow a client to reach consumers in every aspect of marketing. With the addition of AdWords for Video, our Search Marketers are now even better equipped to promote our clients through multiple marketing channels.
I hope this has given insight into what Google has done with its acquisition of YouTube and how it has integrated its advertising of the Google Search, Display, and YouTube network all under one platform.
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