Advertising on YouTube: An Overview

Advertising digitally has become the norm for modern companies, especially with a sprawling internet platform like YouTube. YouTube is accessible to over 1 billion people in over 70+ countries. Because of its influence, YouTube is a smart place to market a new or growing business. YouTube offers many different types of ad placement services tailored to a company’s goals, values, and budget.

The Basics of YouTube Ads

How does advertising on YouTube work? Essentially, you create a video advertisement for your business and upload as onto YouTube with a goal target audience in mind. If you don’t have a video already made, YouTube offers connections to creative services you can partner with to make a video. The algorithm on YouTube allows for your ads to be viewed by the people who fit the target demographic.

The cost of advertising on YouTube is flexible and depends on the company’s budget. Marketing goals also factor into advertising decisions. For example, do you want potential customers to just be aware of the business? Do you want to make people who are already aware of the business more interested in its offers? Do you want to hone in on customers in that moment of decision-making in which they are thinking of buying a similar service?

What are YouTube Ads?

There are three types of ads displayed on YouTube: Bumper ads, TrueView discovery ads, and TrueView in-stream ads.

Bumper ads are for short, concise messages, usually lasting 6 seconds long. TrueView ads show up in search results and on the home page. TrueView in-stream ads are the ads that occur right before or during a video, which can be skipped.

How Much Ads Cost

The cost of ad placement on YouTube is negotiable. It is set based on your business’ budget. Adjustments can be made whenever necessary. According to YouTube, the starting rate is $10 a day to advertise for a local area or audience. Otherwise, you only have to pay when people click on your ad for at least 30 seconds, like the pay-per-click model.

How to Target Specific Audience

Because YouTube is available to millions of people worldwide, businesses must specify the population relevant to what they are selling. In order to optimize your ads, a marketing technique called targeting is necessary. Targeting makes sure that the ads reach your potential consumers, the target audience. Many different types of targeting methods are offered on YouTube advertising.

Targeting can be done by focusing on demographic groups, such as age, gender, household income, or on broader identifiers like college students or homeowners.

Using certain interests relevant to your business can also specify the target audience. Using interests to target an audience can be done in a number of ways:

1. Affinity audience

You can target ads towards people with interests in topics relating to your service or product.

2. Custom affinity audience

Targeting people with a more specific interest within the broad related interest mentioned with the affinity audience. For example, within the topic of artists, you focus on graphic designers.

3. Life events

This is when people are targeted based on recent purchasing shifts due to life changes like moving, graduating, or getting married.

4. In-market audience

This is a target audience based on recent keyword searches of a product similar to that of your own business.

5. Custom intent audience

This is when you target an audience in the final step of purchasing a similar product, again based on recently searched words.

Finally, video re-marketing can target an audience who have already viewed or clicked on past ad videos. This list of past viewers is automatically done by YouTube Ad services.

Optimization

Advertising on YouTube includes real-time updates. This allows businesses to measure the results of their ads. View rate, similar to a click-though rate, is the count of how many people have viewed or clicked on the ad relative to the total amount of times the ad appeared. With these metrics, businesses can see how effective their ad is after a period of time. Then changes can be made to optimize their advertising.

Optimization means improving the performance of a video ad based on feedback. It is much like Social Engine Optimization in terms of optimizing user experience, but it focuses more on content than keywords.

Video campaign optimization encompasses many possible moves you could take to improve results. Optimizing for the view rate might means shortening a video ad or changing titles or calls-to-action. It is also recommended to have 2 or 3 variations of an ad video to prevent viewers from becoming bored. In technical terms, this prevents creative fatigue, in which ad videos are viewed so frequently by the same viewers that it no longer has an effect.

Another way to optimize ad performance is by experimenting with different targeting methods. Try targeting a broader population or more specific population, and see how it affects ad views.

Start Using YouTube Ads Today

Many start-up businesses have utilized YouTube ad services with meaningful results. The Missouri Star Quilt Company founder, Jenny Doan, for example, credits YouTube ad services for reaching more than 1 million people and making thousands of sales. This is the impact of video ads on a small-town quilt shop

Advertising on YouTube is an efficient way for small or medium businesses to gain exposure and increase their consumer base. If you need guidance in advertising both on YouTube and Google platforms, SunCity Advising specializes in running such ads and providing other marketing services with a high return on investment.