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An essential addition to any PPC agency or business’ online marketing strategy, YouTube Video Ads offer AI-powered targeting methods. You will also access ad formats that allow brands to achieve action-driven results and tracking capabilities to review your advertisements’ progress and feasibility. To make it better, Youtube Ads keep improving every month. Exponentially. 

If your marketing agency or your clients invest time and energy into creating video content, you can position it. The YouTube Advertising platform has a great potential of making it worth your while. 

Moreover, it’s easy! The ads are managed from your Google Ads account, so it’s a simple process to jumpstart. For marketers and advertisers already familiar with the platform, setting up a Youtube campaign will be intuitive. 

If you haven’t already leveraged YouTube ads, now is a great time to get them up. Just follow the following steps.

How to Set Up and Launch a YouTube Ads Campaign

The first thing you will need to do is create a Youtube channel to upload your video to the platform. Optimizing your video to capture organic views will go a long way. Read our step by step post on how to work on your videos SEO. This blog will provide a YouTube channel checklist for a swift set up.

Define your Goal

Similar to Google Ads; your campaign goal will go hand in hand with the type of video campaign format you will access.

Campaign Type

Select the video campaign type and a video campaign subtype that best defines how you would like to reach your target audience.

Bidding Strategy

Many of our clients see excellent results with machine learning. It’s a good practice to determine if this works the best with the brand you are managing PPC for. Check out a recent case study on how the automated bidding strategy “Target CPA” boosted one of our client campaigns.

Budget

Google recommends that local businesses start with a daily budget of $10 while running their YouTube Ads. However, our strategists recommend always adjusting your costs to your goals and needs while also staying competitive.

Location and Language

This section will allow you to add cities, zip codes, states, or countries. Our team recommends focusing on the areas that historically have brought more revenue to your business.

Content Exclusions

The content exclusions will set your YouTube Ads’ boundaries to avoid pairing them with content not aligned with your brand.

Additional Settings

This includes add-on filters that will help you cap frequency, focus on preferred devices, and select what conversion actions fit your YouTube ads goals.

Targeting

This step fine-tunes the audience you’d like to target by defining:

• Demographics: Use this to narrow down your audience.
• Audiences: We recommend using in-market audiences and your remarketing lists.
• Keywords: Target lower funnel keywords. For local campaigns, include geo modifiers such as “near me” or your city name. If you leverage in-market and related audiences, machine learning will determine the best keywords.
• Topics & Placements: Unless you choose automated audiences, you will need to define common interests and genres that are relatable with your brand as well as your ideal placements.

Best Practices to Optimize Your YouTube Campaign

As we’ve mentioned before, these marketing strategies aren’t meant to be set and forgotten about, which means that you will need to optimize your YouTube campaigns regularly. That said, before optimizing, it’s imperative to analyze the campaign metrics that will lead you to the adjustments you will want to make to reach your desired goal.

First comes first- metrics

Your campaign goals will indicate what data you should be studying the most. Here are some examples of how to focus on metrics by your goals:

A brand that is looking to grow their YouTube channel should focus on earned actions to start. If the main goal is brand awareness, viewability will be a priority. Evaluate View Rate and CTR to pause ads with low performance. On the other hand, if lead generation or purchases are the primary goals, we recommended focusing on Conversions and CPA.

Placements

Take note of where your video ads have run. You can break your placements list per network to visualize data better.

When running down this information, a shortlist of questions can help narrow down performance:

• Where are your ads being triggered?
• Are these placements relevant for the specific brand and industry?
• Are these placements bringing in relevant views?
• Are these placements helping fulfill your YouTube Ads goals?

If this is not the case, it’s important to pause ads that are not bringing yielding results. You also have the option of excluding irrelevant placements from the campaign.

A/B Test Your CTAs

A call to action indicates what you want viewers to do after watching your YouTube Ad. Because these CTAs are particular to the situation and users, many advertisers A/B test different terms to see which one drives more conversions, some include:

• Free Quote
• Ask Price
• Free Consultation

Our teams are continually testing and tweaking terms. Our White Label PPC strategists claim that switching around simple words can have a significant impact on results.

Content

Watching and reviewing content performance will be extremely beneficial to your YouTube ad strategy as you advance. Pausing or launching video ads will depend on your campaign performance. Watch your CTR, conversions, and your CPA. When you have determined your best performing YouTube Ads, create new variations similar to the best-performing videos.

Demographics Review

When you have set demographic parameters, evaluate if the audience is engaging. Observe the variations in engagement by age and gender.
Are users under 25 not engaging with your content compared to people over the age of 40?
Are users over the age of 35 converting at a lower cost-per-lead?

TIP: If you have Google Analytics with proper tracking, review historical data to identify which demographics engage and convert the most. Watch which ads drive higher profits vs. more product purchases.

Landing pages

We’ve often spoken to our partners and readers of the importance of landing pages. We recommend checking your landing page strategy continuously and measuring user engagement on your one-page website.

Staying aligned with these metrics will make it easier for you to determine when something has changed or if there is a particular component that needs to go. Focus on learning more about bounce rate, average pages per session, and so forth. If you’re eager to apply optimizations to your landing pages, read our blog post for recommended practices.

Locations, Ad Scheduling or Devices

When setting up your ads on Google, check your site, ad scheduling, and the devices you’ve selected. Tracking the performance on each will clue you on where to make bid adjustments as your campaign progresses.

Make Your YouTube Video Ads Stand Out in the Crowd

We are currently all overloaded with content, which is why it’s essential to create content that is helpful and genuine to your audience to stand out. Design elements aside, below are a few points to consider when creating your YouTube video:

Video Length

Test multiples lengths to see which one works best for your brand and message. We recommend starting with a minimum period of 10 seconds of video ads. You can learn more about each video ad type as we go through them on our blog.

Hooks

Review content to make sure that your message establishes a connection with the audience. An emotional hook can address a concern or the resolve of an issue.

CTAs

Add unique call-to-action to your video to get the viewer’s attention. Catchy or creative phrases can go a long way because sometimes all people need is a little push. Do your research first and then customize these phrases to match your customer’s mindset when searching for your problem.

Do YouTube Ads Work?

As we mentioned before, our digital advertising recommendations to our White Label PPC Partners and direct clients include YouTube ads. The amount of success stories we’ve seen turned around by YouTube advertising has made it an essential part of any digital marketing portfolio.

Read our latest case study to learn more about how a White Shark Media client increased sales by 500% with YouTube campaigns.

Conclusion

As businesses, we strive to be seen and connect with the audiences that require our products and services. We all understand that great content is essential to thriving with our ideal buyers, but some elements help make this possible.

Together, we have reviewed the setup, best practices, and benefits that can come to any marketer who chooses to employ YouTube advertising.
To learn more about other online marketing options and strategies available to you, subscribe to our blog!