Everything You Need to Know About YouTube’s Promoted Videos

Image via Wikipedia

This is a great post about Everything You Need to Know About YouTube’s Promoted Videos by my buddy Merle from MerlesWorld.com.

We’ve looked into using this platform ourselves and will be doing a follow up to this post to let you in on any secrets we run across.

That said, here is the post and what I feel is enough information to get you up and running with your own Youtube ads.

Way back in 2006, Google purchased YouTube.com for an alleged reported figure of 1.65 billíon dollars. And, like with everything Google does, they’ve added their own special “Google Touches” over the last several years, turning it into one of the most popular video destination websites online today.

Need proof? According to Comscore.com’s December 2009 “Videos Viewed Report”, YouTube was ranked as the top U.S. video site serving up 13.2 billion of the total 33.2 billion videos that were viewed online in the U.S. for that month alone. That’s a lot of people watching mega videos. For more stats see tinyurl.com/y8jbnqh.

Furthermore, according to Google, YouTube has twenty hours of new video uploaded every minute and 420 million unique visitors per month. Watching online videos and sharing them with others has become an Internet obsession. People really love watching videos. Remember the old song “Video Killed the Radio Star”? In today’s marketplace, it should be called “Video Killed the Television Set”.

What if I told you there’s a way to harness that huge audience in your onlíne marketing campaign? Now you can with YouTube’s new advertising program called “Promoted Videos”. YouTube and its other site, Google Adwords, have partnered together in this latest ad serving project. When promoting your videos on YouTube, they’ll also be shown across Google’s Content Network, aka sites running Google Adsense on them.

The purpose of “Promoted Videos” is to help your videos stand out from the millions of others on the site. At the time of this writing, they’re available in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

The first step is to sign up at ads.youtube.com, or if you’re already a user of Google Adwords you can access “Promoted Videos” from your control panel. You must have a YouTube and an Adwords account which will be linked together as the video ads are served up by Adwords. To find them in Adwords, log into your account, select the “Ads Tab”, then the “Display Ad Builder”, and finally select “Video” from the category menu and you’ll see “promoted videos”. Once your accounts are linked, you can manage your Promoted Videos campaign from the Adwords Console, or YouTube directly.

So where do Promoted Videos appear? By default, they run on YouTube’s site and those sites that run Google Adsense ads. On YouTube, the video ads are shown below and to the right of search results pages and on some of YouTube’s Watch pages in the “related video section”, if related to the content of the page. Watch pages are like the home page of a video that displays all of its public information. Advertisers can option in or out of the “Content Network”, which gives some control over where the video ads may be shown. The videos are clearly marked as “promoted videos”, but it seems Youtube has moved back and forth between labeling them “promoted or sponsored videos”.

Like other forms of pay-per-click advertising, it’s an auction like setting where advertisers bid on selected keywords, set a maximum cost per clíck, and a daily budget to spend. The Promoted Videos program uses the “Adwords Discounter” to help keep costs down. No matter your maximum cost per click, advertisers only pay one cent more than the other video ads shown on the same page. When selecting keywords make sure to choose the ones you would want to appear when a search is done on a particular subject. YouTube’s Insight is helpful when choosing keywords. For more on this, see searchenginewatch.com/3640113.

The videos created can include a clickable link to any site you choose. On sites running Adsense ads that haven’t elected to block YouTube’s Promoted Videos from within their competitive ad filter, the videos appear as a thumbnail with three lines of text. Adsense content partners must also be running ad formats in one of these sizes for video ads to appear. They are: 300X230, 336X280, 728X90, 250X250, 200X200. They must also be opted in to show text and image ads on their sites.

The Promoted Videos are different from Adsense video ads. Promoted Videos will always take the viewer to YouTube’s site to be played, whereas Adsense video ads are played right on the website it’s being viewed on.

When creating videos make sure they’re fun and entertaining; something people will really enjoy to watch and will want to pass on to their friends and family. The sharing of popular videos on social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, will help it to go viral. Generally speaking, funny always translates well. The less it looks like a commercial, the better the odds of people liking and sharing it.

If you’ve been wanting to try your hand at video marketing and reach millions of potential customers, Google’s Promoted Videos may be for you. For further information see:

Promoted Videos Help Center

Promoted Videos Optimization Guide

YouTube Ad Keyword Tool

Show & Tell with YouTube – Showcases the best examples of marketing on YouTube

Hope this helps in getting you started in promoting your own infomercials and video advertising.

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The Facebook Advertising Miracle

Gone are the day of spending countless, exhausting hours setting up carefully constructed pay per click marketing only to discover that all of your ads were pulled without notice, and apparently without reason.

PPC (pay per click) marketing is a high speed strategy for getting your advertisements in front of your targeted market quickly, however with the risks involved with Google pulling the rug out from under countless marketers by pausing their ads or worse, BANNING their accounts without notice, it’s become evident that anyone serious about maximizing exposure for their advertisements while retaining FULL control over your promotions needs to look for an alternative provider.

Enter Facebook.

Facebook is currently used by millions of users who log into their accounts every day to communicate with friends and family, to network with businesses and to post updates on their personal and business lives.

It’s one of the fastest growing sites online, with over 400 million user-created accounts and receives a greater number of page views every month then even Google!

With this mass exposure and incredible outreach, Facebook has quickly become the leading contender in the paid advertising scene, giving anyone serious about marketing their business the opportunity to tap into their target audience quickly, easily and most impressively – CHEAP.

In comparison with traditional pay per click marketing, the actual costs to advertise on Facebook are well below industry standard, PLUS even more importantly perhaps, Facebook actually has fewer advertisers then Adwords or other PPC marketplaces.

That means that you are have less competition to worry about and will be able to reach your target customers faster, easier and at a lower cost than with any other advertising network.

How Facebook Advertising Works
With Facebook, their advertising channels are based on DISPLAY rather than per SEARCH .
What this means is that instead of users having to enter in specific search terms or keywords, your advertisements will be trigger to appear based on the page content that the user is reading.

Another factor that plays a part in the advertisements that are shown to Facebook users is based on whether they “vote” for current advertisements. You see, with every advertisement featured within the Facebook network, there is a ‘thumbs up’ icon that appears below the advertisement that allows someone viewing the ad to ‘vote’ for it.

If someone votes for an advertisement, it indicates to Facebook that they should display additional advertisements of the SAME kind (based on category, keywords and overall relevancy), ensuring the best experience possible for Facebook members.

As a Facebook advertiser, you will also be able to promote your products and services using images, a feature that is not usually available within traditional PPC marketing. Images are an incredible asset in maximizing conversion rates because you can tailor the images used in your ads to push the “right buttons” or pull at emotional triggers that you know will have an impact on your average customer.

For example, if you were placing an advertisement that offered a teeth whitening kit, you could place a simple image of a “before” and “after” that offers the reader with a visual aid that leaves an incredible impression. Images can ultimately be one of the LEADING motivators in getting targeted customers to click through your advertisements and explore your offer.

So, how can you start exploiting the popularity and massive outreach of the Facebook network to gain maximum exposure for your business?

Here are a few tips to help you get started:

Target Your Advertisements
You want your entire advertisement to be heavily targeted towards your average customer.
This includes any images that are featured within your ads as well as the advertising text that is featured below the image.

With Facebook, you are able to set up a very targeted advertisement, including targeting specific age groups, locations, education levels, what people have indicated that they are interested in based on their profile summary, and can even target primarily men or women.

The more carefully you create highly targeted advertisements, the better your ads will perform, so make sure you spend a bit of time crafting your ads so that they effectively target your customer base.

Create Facebook Compliant Advertisements
Facebook wants to maintain a user-friendly community and in order to do this they are very strict with the types of advertisements that are allowed to be circulated throughout their network. This means that you cannot use slang; improper grammar and you must refrain from using any images or text that could be considered offensive.

Don’t look at these guidelines as a downside to using Facebook but instead, consider how this quality control will HELP you create higher converting advertisements that are genuinely targeted to your customer base.

Keep An Eye On Your CTR

CTR which stands for Click Through Rate and you want to keep an eye on how well your advertisements are performing. Your ads should never go below 2%, and if you notice that an advertisement is starting to fall below that level, you will want to tweak your advertisement and reconsider who your advertisement is targeted to.

Are you asking the right questions in your advertisement? Using the right image?
Make sure that you spend time evaluating the effectiveness of your advertisement to generate maximum conversion rates and avoid having your advertisements paused or removed.

Choose The Appropriate Time To Run Your Ads
You can choose to run your advertisements continuously throughout the day or based on specific start and end dates. You will want to run your advertisements throughout the day continuously, unless you need to pause it for a specific reason such as if you are going away on holiday, or you find that specific times of the day are converting better (based on the locations you are interested in targeting).

Set A Reasonable Maximum Bid
You will want to set a maximum daily bid that you are comfortable with and fits within your budget.
Facebook will provide a suggested maximum bid based on the content of your advertisement and your targeting configuration. Consider setting your maximum bid slightly lower than Facebook’s recommended minimum and adjust it as you need to based on your advertisements conversion rates and overall exposure.

Choose CPC Over Impressions
You can also choose to pay for impressions or per click. It’s always best to choose CPC (cost per click) for the most part, especially during your testing phase. You can always change this later on if you need to.

Highly Recommended Resource
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http://www.QuickStartExpert.com

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