YouTube advertising for publishers

Video Transcript

Hello. My name is Matthew Read. I am a Senior Account Strategist for Jellyfish Publishing, and today I'd like to talk to you about YouTube advertising. So YouTube is massive, we all know this, and it's impossible to ignore the enormity of it and how much it's grown over the last few years, just in the way you Googled it beforehand. However, what most people think about when they think of YouTube is dogs on skateboards and the Harlem Shake and things like that. But actually, with over three billion searches per month, it is the second largest search engine in the world after Google and, therefore, is a great way to reach your customers and advertise to them.

So, in order to setup YouTube advertising, it's very simple, and you only need two things. The first is a video on YouTube. Now this can be anything you like. It can be an advert, it can be a promotion, it can be a blog, it can just be some information or review, anything at all. The second thing is an AdWords account. Most marketing managers will have this set up already, but if not, it is free and very easy to set up a Google AdWords account

Once you have these two things in place, you can start advertising on YouTube, and this is done in two main ways. The first is in-search and in-display, and this is where people go to YouTube, they search for a video, and when they get their list, you can have promote your videos at the top, which would be your advert, or alternatively when they're watching a video, watching their content, you could have your promote your video on the right-hand side.

The other way of advertising on YouTube is what we call in-stream, and this is where the video is a pre-roll over the content that someone's already watching, so basically, the little video that comes up that everyone's seen, where you can skip it after five seconds if you don't like it.

Now, with in-search and in-display you're paying for the click-through to watch your video on YouTube. What this means is you're not actually paying for anyone to go through to your site, you're paying for them to then watch your video on YouTube, which is great from a brand awareness point of view and directing loads of traffic to your new video, but not great in terms of getting traffic to your site.

With the in-stream, you're not actually paying for clicks at all. What you're paying for is when someone views the whole video. So, if they skip it after five seconds - a lot of us do -- you won't pay anything at all. You'll only pay if someone gets to the end of the video or reaches 30 seconds, whichever happens first. However, the great thing with this is if someone clicks on the video, they'll be directed straight through to your website, and that click is completely free. So, with in-stream, it's actually really great in terms of directing traffic to your site really cheaply and can be more of a conversion task rather than with the in-search and in-display, which is heavy on branding.

Now in terms of targeting people on YouTube, as I said, there's over three billion searches per month, so you could cast a net out very far and wide and end up paying quite a lot of money for not very relevant traffic. However, AdWords have made it really straightforward to refine the people that you want to target and make it really granular.

The first way of doing this is with keywords. So you can choose to bid on certain keywords that people are searching in YouTube. This could be something like car magazine videos or car review videos, anything like that. Secondly, you can target people based on their interests and topics that they like. So this will group people together based on videos they've watched before, blogs they've read, what pages they visited, and you can target them.

You can also target people who have been on your site before or watched some of your other videos. This is what we call remarketing. So, if they're interacted with you before in any way and you want to keep targeting them, you can do this as well. What's really great about this is that you can combine all of these targeting methods together to make it really granular. If we take an example, something like a men's fitness magazine, what they could do is target people who are searching fitness keywords, have obviously shown an interest in fitness in the past, and are watching videos on fitness.

You can take it even further as Google also allows you to bid based on age and gender. So then, the magazine publisher could refine that down to men between the age of 18 and 35, and with all these different targeting methods, just make it really granular so that they're only reaching people on YouTube who are most likely to be interested in their product.

And that's it really. So you've got your video hosted on YouTube and your AdWords account, your different targeting methods, and, like I say, you get a lot of free clicks and a lot of free brand awareness if you play it right.

That's everything. I hope you've really enjoyed it. Don't forget to check out our other Insights blogs on our website. Thanks.