Did you know: YouTube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine (behind Google). Why should you care? Because believe it or not, not all of those searchers are interested in cat videos. Some of them might be interested in your products (and if you sell cat products, that’s the perfect storm). The best part: you can target those users with ads in a ton of different ways.
If you haven’t given YouTube ads a try, today’s Read is here to change your mind. It’s a beast of a blog post so buckle up.
There are 6 different types of ads you can run on YouTube:
- In-Stream Ads — Skippable video ads that play before, during and after a YouTube video. Best part: advertisers only pay when someone watches the entirety of the ad, or 30-seconds, whatever comes first.
- Bumper Ads — Unskippable 6-second ads. Example from Old Spice.
- Non-Skippable Ads – These are 15 – 30 seconds, but you need a serious media buy to run these…like $30k serious. Here’s one that Geico ran.
- Display Ads — You probably know these already – just the traditional display ad.
- Overlay Ads — These ads appear directly over a video, at the bottom.
- Sponsored Cards — These are so, so dang good for ecomm right now. You can essentially run Shopping Ads next to the video that displays products showcased in the video.
Many of the targeting options are the same as Adwords, but there are some differences. You can target specific videos, specific channels, or specific topics. Remarketing videos are also really effective.
A few tools you can use to create your video ads…
- Shakr — A video ad builder with over 1,000 templates.
- YouTube Director App — Created by Google and also uses video templates to help you build video ads.
- YouTube Director Onsite — This is only available in 7 cities, but Google will straight up send a director to your business to film your ad. Best part: it’s free, as long as you agree to advertise on YouTube.
Whoa, that was a lot, but there’s still way more that we didn’t cover.
