If there’s an online platform that marked the past decade, it would be Youtube. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter had their rises and falls in popularity, but no platform had a rise as steady as Youtube. With an insanely wide variety of content both in terms of quality and quantity, Youtube became the perfect place for social media influencers to start their career. This is applied both in terms of actually starting content production and in content monetization. Other platforms simply had no system to monetize individual content, except for occasional sponsorships.
What Made Youtube Profitable
In retrospect, Youtube became a profitable breeding ground for content creation because of a very simple and intuitive business model. If you had long-form videos, then you could monetize them. This came at a stark difference from other social media platforms that relied on written posts, images, or some short-form videos. This means that advertisers had the time and options in creating various advertisements. Other platforms were too restrictive in their formats to facilitate a big marketing investment.
What Type of Ads Should You Use
Youtube has a plethora of ad options and they can be separated into these categories
In-stream Ads
These ads are fully shot video ads that can roll before or during a video. Furthermore, they can be subdivided into skippable and unskippable ads. This is a fairly intuitive division, some ads have the skip button and others don’t. But it’s important to remember that these ads cannot under any circumstance be used interchangeably. They have their unique lights, and if they were switched it could lead to viewer frustration and a loss of profits. This primarily concerts unskippable ads, which due to advertisers’ mistakes, last longer than the original video while being unskippable. So if you want to use these ads make sure not to make such a mistake or your reputation could plummet.
In-feed Ads
Simply put these are youtube videos that appear as promoted material in a user’s search bar. So if someone searches for a certain topic, you could promote a related ad inside their search results.
Overlay Ads
These ads appear during the Youtube video and are usually just an image or a short video at the bottom of the screen. At the beginning of Youtube these ads were the most common ones, but today they take the backseat to other types.
Bumper Ads
These ads are short video advertisements that last no longer than a few seconds and are meant to garner initial interest. Unlike other ads, these can’t inform the viewer about everything, but rather just spark interest for further research.
How to Start a Youtube Ad Campaign
If you want to start a youtube Ad campaign you’ll need several basics. Of course, you’ll need a Google Ads Account. That’s your primary base o operation. You’ll also need your materials. These are all the videos, graphics, and images you’ll be using in your campaign. These follow the standard rules of video marketing so if you follow those you’ll see good results.
After you’ve uploaded the materials onto your Youtube account you’ll be able to create new ad campaigns. This is done through the Google Ads dashboard where you’ll set up all the necessary parameters for your campaign. These include your strategies, advertisement types, and goals. During this setup, it’s important to note the content exclusion. After all, you don’t want your content to be associated with some questionable content. Next, you need to set up your preferred demographics so that your content is marketed to an appropriate age group. In the end, all you need to do is add the necessary keywords to help the algorithm better target your audience.
When you’ve finished setting up your ad campaign all that’s left to do is to begin bidding on your project. This determines how much each view will cost you. Throughout the bidding process, you’ll be adjusting the price to further increase your CPM.
Conclusion
No matter what type of ads you want to use on Youtube, the most important takeaway is that they need to be fully thought through. Banner ads have to be properly designed, video ads need proper timing, and all the settings need a thorough comb-over before publishing. If you do so your campaign is sure to flourish.