Advertising on YouTube: A how to guide

I’ll start by stating the bleeding obvious. YouTube gets a lot of traffic.

I tend to take notice of websites which receive a lot of traffic, simply because I can plonk marketing messages in front of people on behalf of other people.

If you’re an advertising DIYer, YouTube offers quite a few ways for you to share your advertising messages with lots of people. You can display your static Google Text Ads and Image Ads (Banners) or recreate a TV advertising experience within YouTube by showing “in-stream” ads which appear before, during or after yours or someone else’s video.

If you’re a large company with lots of money to splash, you can even take over the home page hero banner position on YouTube. You see these “mastheads” a lot for upcoming movie promotions, car launches, etc. YouTube claims 50 million people will see these masthead promotions every 24 hours in the United States. In Australia, we have about 10% of the US population, so that’d mean about five million views over 24 hours.

Estimates on costs are hard to find, but I’ve read it costs anywhere from $100,000 to $175,000 per day, which comes in at a quite expensive $35 CPM (Cost Per Mille or 1,000 impressions).

There’s more information here.

One thing we’ll be trialling in the next few weeks is in-stream ads. We have a couple of customers with 30 second TV ads which we’re going to run on YouTube as a pre-roll in-stream ads.

Most people dislike them intensely! I’ll let you know how these campaigns go in the next few weeks.

On the next screenshot, you can see what they look like – this is one I saw recently for Seeklearning while I was trying to watch a movie trailer for the new Hangover movie…

You get about five seconds or so to skip the ad, and if you do, Seeklearning doesn’t pay a cent. It’s YouTube’s way of “guaranteeing” that when a video ad plays, the person watching it is actually interested. I think that’s fair enough. Plus the advertiser gets a free impression. Tip: “brand up” early if you’re showing Video Ads on YouTube!

The other thing you can do is select which channels you want your ads to appear on. YouTube reckons there are about 10,000 channel “partners”. This can be handy when you’re trying to match your message with relevant audiences. It’s a lot more targeted than TV.

Being a man in my 40’s, showing me a TV ad for Brut deodorant is okay, but hitting me with feminine hygiene product ads on TV probably isn’t going to work.

You can see many of the channels by category here.

If you have videos or ads you’d like people to see, sign into your Google Ads Account and create a new Ad through Google Display Ad Builder:

Then, like last week’s blog about Google Image Search Ads – select “video”:

Then you’ll see all the video advertising options available to you.

You can even make your own Video Ads online here.

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.