Today’s advertiser is looking for ways to use video content in ads to increase visibility, engage, and convert leads.
The good news is that getting started with video ads is easier than ever.
Video ads appear on many websites and apps across the web as well as on YouTube, which has over 2 billion active users per month.
YouTube enables advertisers to target specific audiences, behaviors, or intentions, making it an effective way to get results throughout the stages of the customer 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 getting up and running on YouTube ads through the Google Ads platform as it is the largest video platform.
And because they’re managed through the Google Ads platform, YouTube ads are also convenient to incorporate into your current PPC search and display ads.
Here’s what you need to know to get started.
First, let’s take a look at the video assets you have available.
Once you are happy with your video, it must be uploaded to YouTube. Get the YouTube video URL ready to create the ad later.
YouTube and ‘Think With Google’ have a Find My Audience tool to get the creative juices flowing to help you think about building your audience profile for these new attention-getting video ads.
This tool allows you to select either in-market or affinity audiences in a limited number of categories such as Autos & Vehicles, Business Services, Media & Entertainment, Software, and more.
This is not a full campaign builder tool, but more of a tool to inspire what you are about to start next.
If you haven’t yet set up your YouTube, you’ll learn how to do that here.
Now, you’re 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 at times you might feel like it is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book.
If you select a campaign goal type, you will get various suggestions to help on campaign subtypes and ad formats towards that goal as you create the campaign.
It is okay to select Create a campaign without a goals guidance.
The campaign objective you choose will generally fit into one of the three main goals: awareness, consideration, or action/purchase.
Moving further into the set-up process will present you with options that best fit those goals.
You will be presented with various campaign type options, depending on the goal first selected.
For action objectives, they will also present the Google Ads account conversion tracking goals they will use for bid optimization.
Here we want to get to choose the Video campaign type.
All of the campaign goals except App and local allow the Video type.
Next, you will be presented with various subtypes, depending on the previous selections.
Some of the options are drive conversions, video reach campaigns, out-stream, non-skippable in-stream, and others.
Again the process is guiding you to the ad format, targeting, bids, etc. best suited for your campaign goals.
Each campaign subtype will prompt for general settings.
Throughout the set-up, campaign estimates are generated on the right-hand side to give you an idea of the volume you can expect.
Here we will see several campaign settings including campaign name, bid strategy, budget and dates, networks, locations, languages, content exclusions.
A few of these settings need a more detailed explanation.
At the adgroup level, we get to the fun part of selecting the targeting, similar to the search and display campaigns in Google Ads.
Finally, use the YouTube link to your video to create the first ad.
What can be frustrating at this point is not all ad types are available to create and you will see “This ad format is not available because of the subtype or goal of the campaign.”
YouTube Ad Formats
The best guarantee here is to plan ahead to ensure you have the campaign goals and subtypes aligned with the type of ad you would like to run.
After setting up and running the first few YouTube campaigns, performance data will flow in and inform optimization and future campaigns strategies.
YouTube offers a great opportunity to reach your audience at all stages of the purchase cycle.
This is also a great opportunity to gather data at scale on the targeting and creative that is successful to roll out to other paid video ad platforms.
More resources:
Featured Image: VELvector/Shutterstock
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