Today’s advertiser is looking for ways to use video content in ads to increase visibility, engagement, and lead conversion.
The good news is that it’s easier than ever to get started with video ads.
Video ads appear on many websites and apps across the web as well as on YouTube, which has more than 2 billion monthly active users.
YouTube enables advertisers to target specific audiences, behaviors, or intent, making it an effective way to get results through the stages of a customer’s buying cycle.
In addition, the majority of paid ad platforms offer a video campaign or ad format including Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
For the purposes of this post, we will focus on starting and running YouTube ads through the Google Ads platform as it is the largest video platform.
Because they are managed through the Google Ads system, YouTube ads are also suitable for inclusion in existing search and display PPC ads.
Here’s what you need to know to get started.
YouTube ads video assets
First, let’s take a look at the video assets you have available.
- Do you have existing video ads? you can use?
- any Rework/edit existing video clips?
- Or do you need to Create new videos with a video producer Or use templates?
- video contentFor ads, the video should start quickly and grab the user’s attention. There is a great place to start learning best practices for effective YouTube video ads Lessons in Google Ads.
- length and quality: The shortest video ad length is 6 seconds and it is recommended to ultimately limit it to 3 minutes or less. A good rule of thumb is to start with 15-second to 30-second video ads to get your message across.
- Do-it-yourself video tools: Google has a video creator (beta), as well as paid online tools like promo or Animoto Offers subscription-based video template capabilities.
Once you are happy with your video, you should upload it to YouTube. Get your YouTube video URL ready to create your ad later.
Learn more about audiences
YouTube and “Think With Google” have a file Find my audience A tool to get the creative juices flowing to help you think through building your audience profile for new, attention-grabbing video ads.
This tool allows you to identify either market audiences or convergent segments in a limited number of categories such as autos and vehicles, business services, media and entertainment, software, and more.
This isn’t a full campaign builder, but more of a tool for inspiring what you’re about to start next.
The step-by-step process for creating YouTube ads
If you haven’t set up your YouTube yet, you’ll learn how to do so here.
You are now ready to start advertising.
In the campaigns tab, click the blue plus button to start a new campaign.
This is a general step-by-step process, but sometimes it can feel like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
If you select a campaign goal type, you’ll get various suggestions to help with campaign subtypes and ad formats to achieve that goal during campaign creation.
It’s okay to choose Create a campaign without targeting.
1. Choosing the right goals
The campaign objective you choose will generally fit into one of three main objectives: Awareness, Thought, or Action/Buy.
Going through the onboarding process will present options that best fit those goals.
2. Select the type of video campaign
You will be presented with different campaign type options, depending on which goal was selected first.
For business objectives, they will also provide Google Ads account conversion tracking objectives that they will use to optimize bids.
Here we want to choose a file Video campaign type.
All campaign objectives except app and local allow the video type.
3. Define subgenres
Next, you will be presented with different sub-genres, depending on the previous selections.
Some of the options are increasing conversions, video reach campaigns, off-stream, in-stream non-skippable, and others.
Again, the process guides you to which ad format, targeting, bids, etc. are best suited to your campaign goals.
4. Configure settings
Each campaign subtype will be required General Settings.
throughout the preparation period, Campaign estimates They are created on the right side to give you an idea of the size you can expect.
Here we will see several campaign settings including campaign name, bid strategy, budget, dates, networks, locations, languages and content exclusions.
A few of these settings need a more detailed explanation.
- Bid strategy: Video ads will allow bidding on an impression, per view, or conversion basis. For awareness campaigns, CPM (cost per thousand) and maximum cost per view (CPV) are suitable bid strategies to use. If the campaign is action/conversions based, then the Target CPA and “Maximize Conversions” strategies will maximize your ROI.
- networks: It is worth mentioning the video partners on the display network. This will help maximize your reach outside of YouTube, however, if you want to limit ads to the YouTube website only, you will need to opt out of these networks.
- Content exceptions: It’s important to pay attention to this area to determine which inventory types and content labels you find acceptable to display your brand’s ads on. Expand or limit the types of content placements to suit your brand values.
5. Create ad group targeting
At the ad group level, we get to the fun part of defining targeting, similar to Google Ads search and display campaigns.
- demographics: age, sex, parental status, and household income.
- audience segments: remarketing, events in the market, affinity, events in life.
- Detailed demographicsYou can find a few more nuggets here including recruitment targeting.
- contentKeywords, topics, and placements added here narrow the audience. Note, here you can target specific YouTube channels or videos here.
6. Create a YouTube ad
Finally, use the YouTube link of your video to create your first ad.
What can be frustrating at this point is that not all ad types are available to create and you’ll see “This ad format is unavailable due to campaign sub-type or intent”.
YouTube ad formats
The best guarantee here is to plan ahead to make sure you have campaign goals and subtypes that are compatible with the type of ad you want to run.
Final thoughts
After your first few YouTube campaigns are set up and running, the performance data will flow into the optimization and strategies of future campaigns.
YouTube provides a great opportunity to reach your audience at all stages of the buying cycle.
This is also a great opportunity to collect data at scale on targeting and what creativity it does on other paid video ad platforms.
More resources:
- YouTube fixes search results
- 20 proven facts about the YouTube algorithm
- Social Media Marketing: A Complete Strategy Guide
Featured image: VELvector / Shutterstock
