YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, making it the perfect advertising platform. Marketers and creators are using this to their advantage by expanding their reach to an infinite number of audiences globally. YouTube has more than 2 billion active users, allowing brands to attract new customers and build a loyal audience.
In this guide, we will explore the world of YouTube Advertising and how it benefits YouTubers. Read to the end to learn about the best YouTube advertising practices.
What Are YouTube Ads?
YouTube Ads are videos that play on the platform and are tailored specifically to each brand. In 2006, through Participatory Ads and Brand Channels, YouTube allowed businesses to place ads on the homepage and video ads. Today, it has many more tools and features to run YT advertising campaigns efficiently and customizable.
Now, let’s look at how profitable YouTube advertising is and what its benefits are.
How Does YouTube’s Ad Platform Function?
Before you understand how to advertise on YouTube, you need to first familiarize yourself with how YouTube advertisement works.
How YouTube advertising works depends on the ad campaign’s aim, budget, and campaign purchase. The pricing model also considers understanding how YT advertising works. There are two primary pricing models: cost-per-view (CPV) and cost-per-engagement (CPE). Cost-per-view is a pricing model where you pay for each time a viewer watches your ad without skipping it.
On the other hand, the cost per engagement is paid when viewers interact with the ad. Various ad formats, including in-feed, stream ads, skippable ads, and unskippable ads, determine a creator’s earnings. You choose the one for your video, and YouTube takes care of where they want to place it. You may need to take some time to understand how it works; it might take a few YouTube ad campaign creations to grasp the concept.
Benefits Of Advertising On YouTube
Here are the five benefits of advertising on YouTube:
1. Expand Your Reach
As mentioned before, YouTube has a vast audience base who use the platform daily. This expands your reach and exposure, bringing in more significant opportunities for your business. In addition, you can drive in a lot of traffic through views and subscribers. A huge subscriber base makes you eligible to receive brand sponsorships. You can also buy YouTube subscribers to build a stable subscriber base in the initial days of your YT growth journey.
2. Find Relevant Customers
YouTube makes finding your audience and loyal customers easier. YouTube advertising lets you set your audience’s demographics and target them specifically. In addition, the placement targeting option enables you to place your ads on your chosen pages.
3. Ads Customization
YouTube ads give advertisers the freedom to experiment with a wide range of possibilities. Brands can use YouTube to share their stories, information, and products. Additionally, it’s affordable and flexible compared to other advertising platforms.
4. Cost-effective ad Campaigns
YouTube advertising campaigns are comparatively cheap. You can choose the campaign type you want to run without burning a hole in your pocket. Through your Google Ads account, you can track views and costs and understand if your ads are reaching the right audience.
5. Measure Your Ads
Lastly, through YouTube Analytics, you can get detailed data and statistics about your ads. For example, you can check how long your customers are watching your videos, at what point they leave the video, which are the best-performing ad formats, and much more. This valuable insight can help you boost your ad campaigns and increase your customer base.
Types Of YouTube Ads
There are officially six types of YouTube video advertising formats. You would have been aware of all of them already if you were a creator who ran ads on their videos. If you don’t, here is the list you should check out.
1. Skippable in-stream ads
Skippable in-stream ads are those you see before or between videos, which can be skipped within 5 seconds of the ad playing. As a creator, you pay for this ad format when the viewer watches the video ad for over 30 seconds.
2. Bumper ads
Bumper ads also appear before or between the videos, but they cannot be skipped. It is way shorter than usual ads. The time duration goes from 5 seconds to 6 seconds. Creators pay for the number of views this ad format generates.
3. Discovery ads
Discovery ads are also known as search ads, which appear in the search results when a query related to the ad is searched. Advertisers pay for the ads when viewers click and watch the video. These are usually used to promote the brand’s video to the potential viewers.
4. Sponsored card ads
Sponsored card ads appear on the screen while viewers watch the video. They appear in the corner of the video with a CTA, which can be easily dodged with the cross icon available. They are less annoying ads that creators use to keep their videos uninterrupted.
5. Non-skippable ads
Just like skippable ads, they also appear before or during the video that are nonskippable. They last up to 15 to 30 seconds, which helps in brand awareness to your target audience. According to the stats, more than 70% of people skip ads, and advertisers can’t make more profits, but this ad format makes the viewer watch till the end.
Besides these five YouTube advertising formats, YouTube also had ‘Overlay Ads,’ which used to appear on the screen of the video audience watches as a small poster. However, it was discontinued because viewers used to find this ad format disruptive.
YouTube Video Advertising Best Practices
1. Create A Dynamic YouTube Channel
Your YouTube channel is the face of your business. Your videos and content must represent an image and create an everlasting impression for your channel. You can start by uploading product reviews, FAQs, behind-the-scenes videos, etc. When a user comes across your ad and then decides to visit your channel’s homepage, make sure to create the best impression by organizing your channel and providing all the necessary information to turn them into loyal customers.
2. Re-engage With Your Audience
The best thing about any social media platform today is that you can remarket to engage with your audience. Using YouTube ads, retarget your viewers for better engagement since they’ve already come across your brand. Sometimes when users see an ad again, they tend to click on it to know more.
3. Optimize Your Ad Performance
Optimization is the key to ranking on YouTube. Moreover, it helps bring in more views and new audiences. Therefore, it is highly recommended that to increase your ad’s performance, you should start by optimizing your targeting options. For example, if your previous ad performed better among women, you can create the next ad focused on men to cover all the areas. Hence, YouTube Advertising plays a huge role.
6 Key Strategies for Effective YouTube Advertising
Check out these six amazing YouTube video advertising principles before launching your first-ever ad campaign.
1. Create A Strategy
Create a strategy for presenting your brand to your viewers and stick to the plan. You have to focus on things that can help you build a relationship with your audience, such as testimonials, demonstrations, or answering FAQs.
2. Create Attention-Grabbing Content
An attention-grabbing ad hooks your viewers and entices them to watch the entire ad. Start your video with something that intrigues your audience. It could be an interesting fact, shocking news, or a unique way to give an intro that hits the pain point of the viewer.
3. Optimize Your Ad Campaign & Testing
Optimizing your ads and performing proper A/B testing are needed to estimate the campaign result. Understand what ad formats work best for your campaign and bring the maximum profit. YouTube offers features to optimize your videos better. Use them to attract the desired outcome.
4. Remarketing Your Audience
Remarketing is like retargeting your existing audience, browsing your website and channel but not making the purchases. This happens for several reasons, and one of them is simply forgetting. Remarketing will remind them of the undone task and entice them to take action.
5. Conduct Production Review
Today, 98% of customers purchase based on testimonials and reviews of other purchases. Creating an ad campaign that involves real-time product users can help gain the trust of your target audience easily and effortlessly.
What Factors Determine The Cost Of YouTube Ads?
Many factors influence the cost of YouTube video advertising, including your campaign objective, target audience, ad formats, competition, ad placement, cost-per-click, and cost per thousand impressions. Understand each below.
1. Advertising Objective: Your objective determines what you seek from an ad campaign, and that influences your YouTube ad cost.
2. Advertisement Formats: Every ad format requires a different budget figure, which must align with the dollar you have in your pocket.
3. Ad Competition: The ad cost is also influenced by the competition for ad formats. The one with the highest demand requires more money.
4. Audience Segment: You need a heavy pocket if you want to target a specific audience through your ad campaign.
5. Ad Positioning: Be mindful about where you want to place your ads, as it can also influence the ad cost. Understand where your audience hangs out the most before placing ads.
6. CPC or CPM: Your advertising cost depends on whether you are willing to pay for clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM). Both pricing models impact the budget strategy.
YouTube Video Advertising Targeting Options
When you are off to create an ad campaign for your brand channel, you first determine what you are targeting. Here are the targeting options creators usually look for.
1. Demographics: This targeting option allows you to focus on a specific audience, determining their age, gender, and location.
2. Keywords: The keyword targeting option enables the creator to understand user intent and target the exact keyword or phrase.
3. Remarketing: This targeting option helps retarget the audience previously involved with the brand.
4. Audience Interest: Be mindful of your audience’s interests, as what they are interested in watching plays a crucial role in the ad campaign’s success.
5. Custom Audience: Custom targeting options aim for users who are your potential audience.
Key Metrics To Measure YouTube Ad Success
Once your ad campaign is done, as a marketer, you will look into its result, right? But at what metrics will you understand the performance of your ad campaign? Here’s what you need to look at.
1. Click-Through Rate: CTR tells you the number of people who have clicked on the ad campaign.
2. Cost Per View: This will tell you the number of people who have viewed.
3. Return On Investment: Return on investment (ROI) is the amount you have earned through the ad campaign.
4. Conversion Rate: The conversion rate tells how many people have taken action after watching the ad through CTAs.
5. Brand Presence: The number of people who discovered your brand through the campaign is what you see under brand presence.
6. Engagement Metric: The engagement metric shows the number of times people have interacted with the ad campaign.
Conclusion
If you still haven’t started leveraging this magnificent video platform for advertising your business, you are probably leaving a large potential audience to your competitors. Apply the best practices stated above and reap the benefits of YouTube advertising for your business growth. A month back, YouTube also tested the new YT mid-roll ad placement, where the ads appear when the viewer pauses the video.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What are the best practices for YouTube ads?
Include engaging content with a real story in your YouTube ads. Usually, ads that don’t look like ads tend to perform well on YouTube. In a nutshell, your ad should draw your audience’s attention right from the beginning, integrate your brand values naturally, and establish a connection with the audience through an intriguing story.
Q2. How much does a 30-second YouTube ad cost?
YouTube ads are run using the Google Adwords network, and the price of running ads involves a lot of variability. However, based on the general data, the cost of reaching 100,000 viewers is around $2000, with an average cost-per-view ranging between $0.010-$0.030.
Q3. How do you advertise on YouTube for beginners?
To know how to advertise on YouTube, have some knowledge of how YouTube ads work, and then launch ads to test their effectiveness. As a beginner, you might have to experiment a little to target the right viewers.
Q4. What are the 3 types of ads in YouTube advertising strategy?
The 3 types of YouTube ads often used in advertising strategies include skippable in-stream ads, non-skippable in-stream ads, and in-feed video ads. Additionally, you can also launch Bumper ads and out-stream ads in your YouTube video advertising strategy.