What Is Youtube Advertising?

Youtube advertising means advertising on Youtube, the online video-sharing platform, promoting video content, or in relevant search terms in Youtube Search. As Google owns Youtube, Youtube advertising is possible only through Google Ads.

In Youtube advertising, companies can utilize its many video ad formats or use it in part with display campaigns.

Youtube itself has over two billion monthly logged-in users, with 500 hours of video content uploaded every minute to the platform. Each visitor, on average, spends 11 minutes and 24 seconds on Youtube every day, and every visit to Youtube on average leads to 6.5 pageviews.

Advertising on Youtube, therefore, produces many opportunities for companies to expand their online marketing strategy.

Companies are going to spend over 5.5 billion on advertising on Youtube in 2020.

The importance of video in online marketing has been increasing all the time, and investing in quality video ads online will bring more results for any advertising campaign online.

Combining video in your content marketing, and using Youtube ads in your content distribution strategies, is an essential step in a modern online marketing strategy.

If you want to grow your YouTube channel organically, read our guide on how to rank videos with YouTube SEO.

Companies can utilize Youtube ads to increase their brand awareness, grow sales, interact with target audiences, promote events, or share helpful product and service-related content.

This article will cover the elements and benefits of youtube advertising in your digital marketing strategy.

Youtube advertising benefits include increased:

• Reach and visibility
• Varied targeting opportunities
• Data and analytics
• Ad Campaign optimization 
• A profitable marketing and sales channel

Increase Visibility With Youtube Ads

Youtube is the world’s second-largest search engine and the largest video-based social platform.

Every business with different marketing goals can utilize Youtube to a variety of extents to receive a broader audience to their marketing efforts.

Youtube advertising offers a cost-effective way to reach a large user-base with different interests, and every business can find its target audiences within Youtube’s user base.

Whether you’re targeting a niche or trying to reach millions upon millions of users, You’re able to do it with Youtube ads.

Increasing brand awareness through the usage of videos in your marketing strategy improves your campaign results overall.

Businesses can leverage the many ad types that Youtube Ads offer, and businesses can further promote their messaging to their future customer in their brand style.

As a social media platform, video ads can receive organic growth too. Organic growth for videos might be harder to attain for most campaigns. Still, when organic interactions for your videos have gained, it will broaden your advertisements reach, thus lowering the cost per action.

Youtube Advertising Benefits To An Online Marketing Strategy

The increased brand awareness gathered with the use of Youtube ads is beneficial for your other marketing channels in your strategy.

For example, increasing your brand awareness will increase organic results for your website, as users start to research more about your brand after seeing the brand on ads. To maximize the effect of organic growth is to optimize your website with search engine optimization correctly.

Video content produced for Youtube advertising can be recycled or optimized for other ad platforms such as Facebook or Linkedin.

The created video content should be utilized on your landing pages when possible, especially when targeting similar audiences, which the Youtube ads campaigns were targeting.

Therefore Youtube ads are a great way to expand your online marketing reach and expand the size of your target audiences that will boost your sales, brand, and engagement when combined with other online marketing channels.

Youtube Influencer Advertising

An essential part of the Youtube advertising ecosystem is influencer marketing. Directly advertising through influencers on Youtube can lead to more engagement, more thorough advertisement spots, and access to hyper-targeted audiences that each Youtuber might have available for advertisers.

While this article is about Youtube advertising through Google Ads, it’s essential to understand what other kinds of opportunities in Youtube marketing and its channels can offer your company.

Influencers on the platform make their agreements upon advertisement, affiliates, and sponsorships and require direct contact with them.

Youtube Advertising: Targeting

Youtube offers many targeting options for their campaigns, and you can select a variety of options to test with to find the best audience for your ads.

For achieving high performing campaigns, you have the following targeting options to choose from:

• Age
• Gender
• Individual interests
  
  
  • Personal interests
  • Search history
• Household income
• Channels
• Keywords
• Topics
• Device
• Retargeting

The large user base and growing unique visitors every month that Youtube amasses give many opportunities for companies to test different audiences for increased results.

It’s crucial to not include too many targeting options per campaign as directly understanding what works will become harder. Testing a few targeting options at a time will display the best results for later optimization. A too-small audience might as well impact your ad performance, and in that case, a more varied targeting will be necessary.

Think about how to target your audience and then build content that converts to your goal the best.

When planning the targeting of the campaigns, it’s crucial to exclude some audiences; you’re sure your ads won’t serve too well. For example, providing a service in a specific area and eliminating areas you won’t be providing for and or targeting differently for sales-based campaigns and brand awareness campaigns.

Youtube Advertising Cost And Budgeting

Youtube advertising, and Google Ads in general, won’t require big budgets to start. The benefit of starting low with Youtube ads will help you carve out the perfect audience that resonates the best with your current offering.

As you learn more about your audience and the best content for them, you can start scaling the campaign budgets profitably as you see fit. As large as Youtube’s reach is, you can begin to scale as much as possible when you’ve found what works first.

An essential part of Youtube advertising is the cost of creating the content itself and managing set campaigns.

When measuring the profitability of campaigns, remember to consider the cost of content. For example, include the price of a high-quality video in your campaign profitability calculations.

Remember to combine the cost of managing campaigns, whether done internally or outsourced from an agency; Include the price in the overall budget of the campaign.

Targeting keywords with Youtube ads can be less expensive than their counterparts in Google Search and might be an opportunity to tackle if your industry has a high cost per click overall.

Learn more about search engine marketing.

The ability to utilize search history targeting enables more comprehensive retargeting options, which can lower the cost of conversions and other results in the long-term.

Youtube Bidding Strategies And Budgets

To advertise on Youtube, you have to bid for your ads to appear on the platform.

Using bidding strategies within Google Ads, you can manage the Youtube ad costs. Currently, there are four bidding strategies to choose from that define the spending and cost for Youtube ads.

• CPM (Cost-Per-Mille): 
  • You pay for every thousand impressions your ads receive
• Viewable CPM (vCPM)
  • You pay for impressions that are measured viewable. A counted viewable impression is when your ad has shown for more than one second in display ads and two seconds or longer for video ads.
  • Ads optimized for the ad slots that have high potential to become viewable. For better results, vCPM bids should be higher than CPM bids
• CPV (Cost-per-view)
  • The number of interactions and views bases the costs.
  • Cost-per-view lets you set a predetermined cost per view you are willing to spend per view. A setting a too low CPV can hinder your campaign performance.
• Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)
  • Specific user actions such as clicks or conversions bases the costs.
  • You set a target cost for acquisition(conversion), and Google will try to achieve as many conversions as possible for the given target CPA.

With daily budgets, you can control the spending of a campaign, which means Google will spend the amount given to the campaign.

You are also able to customize specific bids per format, utilizing the feature to optimize winning formats within the campaign brings in more results.

When setting up daily budgets and bidding options, you will receive an estimation of how many views and other actions you might receive. Use the prediction as a benchmark of results and costs for the future.

Youtube Advertising Types and Formats

The two format options for Youtube advertising are video ads and display ads. For the desktop version of Youtube, you can bid on display and video ads. Display ad placements on Youtube are not available for mobile. To expand your reach, use video ads to serve mobile users and other Youtube Apps (For example, TV or game consoles)

When producing video content for Youtube ads, remember to deliver high-quality and relevant content that your audience might react to and enjoy.

Finding the perfect mix of audiences and type of content can be hard, but through data, you can learn more about what works for your audience the best.

It’s essential to build Youtube-first content and understand that not every produced advertisement video will work as well on Youtube.

Balancing with high and low production costs and finding the right type of video content might be hard, but through testing, you can find the highest performing combination.

Skippable Video Ads

Viewers can skip a video ad after five seconds of watch time. These skippable video ads can appear before, during, and after the video, the user is watching.

Utilizing the format will enable the combination of skippable ads and bumper ads to be played back-to-back.

Mobile, desktop, tv, and game console ad placements are available for skippable video ads.

While using skippable ads, it’s essential to spark interest immediately in the ad to keep the viewer watching the ads, or else they will skip when possible.

Looking through crucial metrics and optimizing your audience, you will enhance your view rates for your skippable ads. If viewers are skipping your ads continuously, you might want to modify your ads or the targeting for better results.

Skippable Instream Ads can be used to achieve the following goals:

• Sales
• Leads
• Website traffic
• Brand awareness and reach
• Product and brand consideration

Non-Skippable Video Ads

Compared to skippable ads, the non-skippable ads can’t be skipped, and are only 15 to 20 seconds in length.

Non-skippable ads can appear as well, during, after, or during the main video.

The length of non-skippable ads can vary depending on the region targeted with the ads.

Non-Skippable Instream Ads can be used to achieve the following goal:

• Brand awareness and reach

Bumper Ads

Bumper ads are also non-skippable but are only six seconds in length. Having bumper ads available can trigger them to be seen with your skippable ads.

Bumper ads are available for mobile and desktop.

Bumper ads are great for retargeting with strong call-to-actions and for recycling longer ads.

The six seconds that bumper ads offer should be used precisely and have a clear message to its delivery.

Bumper Ads can be used to achieve the following goal:

• Brand awareness and reach

Sponsored Cards

Sponsored card ads show content that is relevant to your video. The cards could show products, events, or other promotions that appear in the video.

The user will see a teaser for the sponsored cards and, when clicked, will receive additional information about the cards.

Sponsored cards come in many sizes and are available both in desktop and mobile devices.

Display Ads

Display ads appear above or below video suggestions and on the right side of the featured video. Display ads on Youtube are only available for desktop.

Video Discovery Ads can be used to achieve the following goal:

• Product and Brand consideration

Overlay Ads

Only the Desktop user sees the overlay ads, and the ads are either an image, text, or a combination of both.

Overlay ads appear during a video as a popup that can be removed by the users; if not removed, the ad will stay in place for a while until going away.

5. Outstream Ads

Outstream Ads don’t appear on YouTube but appear on websites and many mobile placements. This refers to the ads that play on mobile with the audio off and the viewers can tap on the ad to unmute the video. These ads can be used to expand the reach of your video ads on mobile, helping you reach more customers. These ads appear on the search result page, YouTube homepage, video watch page to increase visibility.

Outstream Ads can be used to achieve the following goal:

• Brand awareness and reach

True view and mathstead ads

True view ads give viewers the flexibility to either view or skip the ad, but will never be impelled to see.

Masthead ads show up in YouTube Home feed both over the mobile and desktop and play without song for upto 30 seconds.

Skippable and non-skippable in-stream video ads on YouTube must first be uploaded as regular YouTube videos. So, your video ad’s technical specs (file size, ad dimensions, ad image sizes, et cetera) will be the same as for any YouTube video. Once it’s uploaded to your channel, you’re ready to go.

The exception here is Discovery ads, which must conform to the following:

YouTube Ad Specs (For Discovery Ads)

• File format: AVI, ASF, QuickTime, Windows Media, MP4 or MPEG
• Video Codec: H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4
• Audio Codec: AAC-LC or MP3
• Aspect ratio: 16:9 or 4:3 is recommended, but YouTube will automatically adapt the file depending on the aspect ratio and device
• Frame rate: 30 FPS
• Maximum file size: 1 GB for Discovery ads

YouTube Video Ad Length Guidelines

Minimum Length

• Skippable ads: 12 seconds

Maximum Length

• Skippable ads: 3 minutes
• Skippable ads on YouTube Kids: 60 seconds
• Non-skippable ads: 15 seconds
• Non-skippable ads in EMEA, Mexico, India, Malaysia and Singapore: 20 seconds
• Bumper ads: 6 seconds

YouTube Video Formatting Guidelines

The following guidelines describe the formatting specifications that yield the highest quality for playing videos on YouTube. 

YouTube encourages partners to upload videos that are as close to the original, high quality source format as possible to increase the likelihood that your videos will play in higher quality (HQ). 

Note that YouTube always re-encodes videos to optimize their playback quality.

File Format

YouTube prefers the original, 1080p HD broadcast format that you have in your digital content library, as well as DVD-compliant MPEG-2 program streams saved with a .MPG extension.

If you cannot submit videos in MPEG-2 format, then MPEG-4 is the preferred format. The following specifications provide optimal playback of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 videos:

• MPEG-2
• Audio codec: MPEG Layer II or Dolby AC-3
• Audio bitrate: 128 kbps or better
• MPEG-4
• ·Video codec: H.264
• Audio codec: AAC
• Audio bitrate: 128 kbps or better

Minimum Audio-Visual Duration

33 seconds (excluding black and static images in the video channel as well as silence and background noise in the audio channel)

Frame Rate

Videos should be in their native frame rates without resampling. For film sources, a 24fps or 25fps progressive master yields the best results. 

Typically, frame rates are set at 24, 25 or 30 frames per second.

Please do not use resampling techniques since they can cause images to shudder and often result in lower quality video. 

Examples of undesirable techniques include upsampling and transfer processes such as Telecine pulldown.

Aspect Ratio

Videos should be in their native aspect ratios, and uploaded videos should never include letterboxing or pillarboxing bars. 

The YouTube player automatically frames videos to ensure that they are displayed correctly, without cropping or stretching, regardless of the size of the video or player. 

For example, the player frames 4:3 videos with vertical bars (pillarboxing) when those videos are played in a widescreen (16:9) player. 

Similarly, the player frames 16:9 videos with horizontal bars (letterboxing) if those videos are played in a standard (4:3) player. See Advanced Encoding for visual examples.

• If the video’s native aspect ratio is 1.77:1 and the total frame size also has a 1.77:1 aspect ratio, use 16:9 matting with square pixels and no border.
• If the video’s native aspect ratio is 1.77:1 and the total frame size does not have a 1.77:1 aspect ratio, use 16:9 matting with square pixels and a single-color border with no variations over time.
• If the video’s native aspect ratio is 1.33:1 and the total frame size also has a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, use 4:3 matting with square pixels and no border.
• If the video’s native aspect ratio is 1.33:1 and the total frame size does not have a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, use 4:3 matting with square pixels and a single-color border with no variations over time.
• If theatrical releases have a “pan-and-scan” version as well as the original 16:9 version, upload both versions separately.

Video Resolution

YouTube prefers high-definition videos and, in general, you should provide videos in the highest resolution available to provide the maximum degree of flexibility in the encoding and playback processes. 

For videos intended for sale or rental, you should provide a minimum resolution of 1920×1080 with a 16:9 aspect ratio. For either free or ad-supported content, YouTube does not set a minimum resolution but recommends a resolution of at least 1280×720 for video that has a 16:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of at least 640×480 for video that has a 4:3 aspect ratio.

You may consider providing reduced quality videos if those videos will not be publicly visible on YouTube and are only being uploaded to serve as Content ID references. 

These videos can be a typical “one quarter” resolution – i.e. 320×240. However, the videos must be greater than 200 lines to yield effective references.

Video bitrate: Since bitrate is highly dependent on codec, there is no recommended minimum value. Videos should be optimized for frame rate, aspect ratio and resolution rather than bitrate. Bitrates of 50 or 80Mbps are common for videos intended for sale or rental.

If you are unable to encode your videos using the preferred specifications, you can still submit your video in .WMV, .AVI, .MOV and .FLV formats. In this case, we recommend that you upload the highest quality video possible. 

YouTube will still accept your video content and then re-encode your video files as necessary. However, the quality of your videos may not be optimal and could make your videos ineligible for HQ encoding. 

If you are not able to encode your videos using the preferred specifications, we recommend that you upload a few test videos online to ensure that you are satisfied with the playback quality on YouTube.

Youtube Advertising Analytics

Before starting to analyze your campaign results with analytics, you have to have a clear set of goals for the campaign. Only by having clear goals, whether it would be conversions or reach, you can truly optimize your Youtube ads campaigns for the better.

Youtube advertising analytics offers in-depth information about your advertising campaign results, which are crucial for improving your outcomes overall.

The in-depth data gathered with Youtube Ads will improve your other marketing channels as well. For example, learning what audiences react the best for created content or vice versa, helps businesses to create more effective campaigns over time.

If you measure traffic or conversion on your website, the need for web analytics can’t be understated. You will need to track the end-user behavior to improve your complete conversion funnels.

Utilizing Google Analytics and other web analytics tools on your website will make the performance of your campaigns better.

To enable the use of retargeting in your Youtube ads campaign, have Google Analytics installed on your website and connected to your Google Ads account.

Learn more web analytics.

Youtube Advertising Metrics

In Google Ads, you can track different metrics to improve your Youtube campaigns. Utilizing these metrics can help you discover what ads are working and which are not. Keeping a close eye out for these metrics can drastically make your campaigns more profitable.

It’s essential to understand your advertising goals before optimization. Optimizing for goals that are not essential for your business, will not bring better results in the long-term.

Youtube Advertising Metrics:

• Views
• View Rate
• Avg. CPV (Cost Per View)
• Cost
• Earned Views
• Conversions
  • Conversion rate
  • Cost of Conversion
• Clicks
• Click-through rate
• Impressions
• Avg. CPM
• Engagements

You can extend these metrics with tinkering with ‘modify columns’- options that display more relevant data for you to improve your campaign performance.

Optimizing a Youtube Ads Campaign

Depending on your goals, use different metrics to optimize your performance.

For starters, concentrating on improving view rates and clickthrough-rates is beneficial for any ad campaign despite the goals.

View Rates

Firmly keeping tabs on view rates indicates if your ad and campaign targeting is a functioning match.

View rates tell you directly how many users have watched your ad for over 30 seconds or more in relation to how many users glimpsed the ad.

A high view rate percentage implies your chosen targeting is fruitful for your ads. A low view rate might mean that targeting is not appropriately optimized or that content isn’t sufficient for the audience.

CTR (Clickthrough rates)

Measuring and optimizing clickthrough rates are essential metrics for improving your ads performance.

A low CTR across your campaign implies that your audience isn’t interested in the content you’re serving them. Either changing targeting or improving content can improve your CTR rates for the better.

Testing different call-to-actions can improve your CTR and view rates. When possible, try different call-to-actions against each other to find the best combinations.

Conversion Rates

Optimizing conversion rates comes to play when you’re actively trying to reach more conversions from your campaigns.

Usually, you want to prioritize perfecting the content and the targeting before actively optimizing for conversions, as conversions are hard to get if your ads are not reaching enough viewers in the first place.

Look for best performing content and audiences when improving conversion rates.

When optimizing for conversions in Youtube Ads, it’s crucial to understand, when it comes to conversions on a website or a landing page, it’s best to include end-user behavior metrics in the overall analysis.

Building effective campaigns without optimizing landing pages and websites might lower your Youtube campaign performance even if the Youtube campaign would have everything going for it performance-wise.

Youtube Analytics

Youtube Analytics displays and collects user data from your Youtube channel, and the provided data can be useful for building current and future campaigns.

For accessing Youtube analytics, find the Creator studio on Youtube.

Utilizing data from Youtube analytics can tell you more about your channels current:

• Audience Retention
• Watch time
• Demographics
• Playback Locations
• Traffic sources
• Devices
• And more.

Conclusion

Advertising on Youtube gives you a chance to access the world’s second-largest search engine and largest video-sharing platform out there to improve and diversify your online marketing strategy.

Ignoring the potential which Youtube and video content marketing have for every business shouldn’t be overlooked. Utilizing the power of Youtube to reach new audiences, and audiences that are likely to convert can bring new avenues and increased results for your business.

With growing video content consumption online, investing in high-quality video content and advertising with it on Youtube is a method to include in your growth marketing strategy.

Like in other forms of online advertising and online marketing strategies, getting started with Youtube advertising can be overwhelming, but starting with lower budgets and through data and optimization, you can begin to build a new profitable marketing channel for your company.