Understanding The Power Of YouTube Advertising
Founded in 2005 in California, YouTube was born to provide the World Wide Web with a place to share video content. What started as a place we all flocked to hear a child yell that Charlie has bit his finger has how evolved into the biggest streaming platform in the world. Every minute, over 500 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube and it would take you an estimated 17,810 years to watch every single video.
So what does all of this have to do with advertising?
Firstly, YouTube is a global platform and a place that attracts billions of users – it’s like the Times Square of online advertising (but without the eye-watering advertising fee). Secondly, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, following Google. Although there has been a huge shift in users opting to use TikTok as their main search engine, recent data shows that YouTube is still overtaking the video app in categories such as: automotive, tech, fashion, crypto and hair & beauty.
This means for businesses and marketers who are looking to put themselves in front of their target audiences (and are already using Google Ads) then YouTube is the next step in expanding your reach and finding your ideal users when they’re streaming their favourite content.
How Does YouTube Ads Work?
We’ve all felt the bubble of frustration when you click on a YouTube video and then have to sit for the longest 6-10 seconds of your life whilst the advert either finishes, or you can finally skip it (lets not even mention the fury when there’s actually two adverts to sit through). But this is just one way of advertising on YouTube. In fact, in your Google Ads platform, you can find a suite of YouTube ad formats to choose from that can help you with your marketing strategy. This is another reason why YouTube ads can be crucial to your marketing strategy, as it can work across all marketing funnels; from brand awareness, to driving action, they have an ad format for everything!
So here’s a quick overview of how YouTube ads work.
The ads I was referring to earlier are called In-Stream Video Ads that can show either before or during a YouTube video (depending on how long the video is). This type of ad format can help you across the different marketing funnels but they rely on you getting your message across to the user in a very short window. Either the user skips the video after a few seconds (known as skippable In-Stream ads) or they are forced to watch the whole video but forget about it the second their video starts agin (known as non-skippable or Bumper Ads), none of which are desirable outcomes.
The other format that is the newest (and most exciting) is YouTube Shorts. On September 2020, YouTube launched their own version of the TikTok style of video streaming, where users can watch short, portrait-orientated videos in addition to their traditional streaming formats. It quickly became a hit with users, as on March 2021, YouTube surpassed 6.5 billion daily views globally. For marketers, this news opened up another marketing avenue with great potential. For YouTube Shorts, similar to In-Stream Ads, keep your content short, snappy and straight to the point. Unlike In-Stream ads, users can scroll past your ad whenever they want, so every second of your ad counts.
Our Top Tips For YouTube Ad Campaigns
YouTube Ads allows you to unleash all of your creativity and grab your viewer’s attention in multiple ways. This means, content is key. You can have a meticulously detailed marketing strategy with rich ad copy and accurate tracking, but none of this matters if the content is poor. When you’re planning your content, choose the ad formats you’re going to use first and then tailor the content to the format – no one wants to see a landscape video shrunk down on a portrait ad format.
If you’re an ecommerce brand and have a shopping feed already set up for your Google Shopping ads, YouTube allows you to attach this shopping feed to your In-Stream YouTube ads. So when the user is watching your ad, you products will then appear underneath the ad and can take them straight to shopping them on your site.
Finally, our most important tip for YouTube Ads – test, test, test. Don’t rely on one ad format or one piece of content for your full YouTube strategy. When this happens, you never know if the strategy you’ve chosen is the best one for the business. Test content, test ad formats, test audiences, test everything!
