Over the past few years, Youtube has quickly become the second largest search engine after Google. With YouTube your message has the potential to reach billions of folks who watch millions of hours of videos everyday on their computers and mobile devices. On Youtube, one can place promotional videos, Image and text ads which is made possible through the Google Display Network. In this post I will outline a few benefits you can enjoy by advertising on Youtube.
Benefits of YouTube Advertising
1. You can create a video ad that clearly tells your unique brand story
2. You can reach billions of people who are engaged with the videos
3. Since Youtube does not have a standard of acceptable videos you can easily and quickly create your own video ad on a small budget
4. Youtube provides highly advanced analytics to track the performance of your ad.
5. Youtube is the least expensive advertising channel on the google adwords platform. You can literally start advertising on Youtube for pennies on the dollar.
6. Youtube allows you to reach a precisely defined target audience and may be the platform to check out if your deep-pocketed competitors are making it hard for you to acquire customers affordably.
Setting Up your First YouTube Campaign
The first thing you want to do is sign up for a free google Adwords account if you haven’t already done so. You can sign up for one at adwords.google.com.
The next step will be to link your youtube account to your adwords account. Instructions can be found at https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3063482. Then check the red “campaign” and select the online video options.
The steps above bring you to the “adwords for video” tool. It looks different from the Adwords dashboard. The "Adwords for video" environment allows you to see youtube-specific metrics. Going forward you will be able to access the Adwords for video tool by checking the “all video campaigns” link to the left under “labels”.
Next you will want to select your campaign options such as; your daily budget, or your desired locations etc.
And lastly, you get to upload a video ad and choose a target audience.
Step 1. Select your Bid Type
As a beginner to youtube advertising, you want to select the “maximum cost per view” option. This selection allows you to determine how much you pay each time someone watches a portion of your video ad. You can either select a single bid to be applied to all advertising formats or select different bids bids for each advertising format. Most youtube advertising forums will suggest a starting bid of $0.10-0.40 and roughly $0.05-A.20 for instream ad units. Don’t panic! You can always change your bids later.
Step 2. Selecting a Target Audience for your Youtube Ad
At this stage, you can select which group of youtube watchers you would like to target. There are five ways to accomplish that objective.
1. People interested in, also referred to as “affinity categories.” This option allows you to target people with specific interests like "Late night Snackers", "CrowdFunding Junkies", "Savvy parents", etc. This option allows your ads to show only in videos which your target audience would be interested in.
2. Demographics: You can choose a target audience based on age, gender, income etc.
3. Keywords: This functions just like the google keywords selection from Google text ads and Google Display Network.
4. Placements: This option allows you to target individuals by adding the URL as a placement target.
5. Topics: Youtube allows you to target individuals based on over 2000 different topics your audience is interested in. For example If you listed a promotional video for your startup and you were looking to raise money via crowdfunding, you could target individuals interested in crowdfunding.
