How to Use and Set Up a YouTube Campaign

When you first hear the term ‘YouTube Ad’, the first thing you think of is probably those annoying unskippable adverts that play before your YouTube video starts.

There’s actually so many more types of advertisement that YouTube supports, and we’re sure that advertising on the video platform is a solid investment for most, if not all, businesses.

Carry on reading to find out how you can set up your own YouTube campaign and the various types of ads that you can use to do so.

How to advertise on YouTube

Advertising on YouTube is really easy if you’re already used to using Google Ads. Because Google own YouTube, once you’ve linked your YouTube account to your Google Ads account you can pretty much follow the same process – just specified for videos.

Your campaign begins by identifying your campaign goals. These are what you want to drive with your campaign and includes marketing objectives like sales, leads, clicks, brand awareness, and more.

Depending on your choice of campaign goal, you will then have a choice of advert format you can use. For example, you can use skippable instream video ads (otherwise known as TrueView ads) for the following campaign goals:

• Brand awareness and reach
• Product consideration
• Driving leads

Whereas 6 second non-skippable bumper ads can only be used for the brand awareness and reach campaign goal.

Once you have selected what goals and formats you want to use, it’s time to set your ad budget and create ad groups. This process is very similar to running a PPC campaign on Google Ads.

Campaigns and groups are how you divide your products up that you want to advertise. It enables you to group your products into relevant categories so that users view adverts featuring products that are targeted for them.

Different types of YouTube Ads

There are a variety of different ad types that you can use in your YouTube advertising campaign. The five most effective ad types that you should consider using are as follows:

• Non-skippable instream ads
• Bumper instream ads
• Skippable instream/TrueView ads
• Overlay ads
• Display ads

Non-skippable instream ads and bumper ads are like the ones that we touched on at the beginning of this post. You know, the ones that you’re forced to sit through before you can watch your video.

Bumper ads are really short and can be up to six seconds long. This means you really need to refine your creativity to create a compelling short form advertisement.

Whereas non-skippable instream ads are between 15-20 seconds long and so therefore you have a bit more room to express more information about your products and your brand. These types of adverts used to be 30 seconds long but really weren’t popular with YouTube users, thankfully they’ve since been shortened down!

TrueView ads are probably the best form of video advertisement on YouTube. These ads are similar to non-skippable instream ads in that they play before your chosen video, but with these the viewer can opt to skip them after watching for five seconds. We’ll talk more about these adverts later.

Overlay ads and display ads aren’t like typical YouTube ads in the sense that they aren’t videos. These are either still images or small blocks of copy. These are much less obtrusive than any form of video ad and can be easy enough to create so you can dip your toes into YouTube advertising.

Should I advertise on YouTube?

In short, yes! There are 2 billion monthly users on YouTube, and only 50 million of these are YouTube Premium members who don’t see adverts. So you can be confident that your content will be seen by plenty of eyeballs.

If you want to invest in your YouTube advertising then we recommend that you create some TrueView ads. These represent a fantastic return on ad spend (ROAS) because you will only pay when a user watches at least 30 seconds of your advert or interacts with it. And because the user can skip the advert after only five seconds of watching it, you’re essentially confirming that you’re paying money for strong leads who like the look of what you have to offer.

On top of this, because YouTube is owned by Google, all of Google’s tracking data is stored and on record so your adverts are already being shown to people who fit your target audience!

Complete digital advertising agency

At Blaze Media, we’re proud to be a certified Google Partner. This means that we’re proven performers when it comes to running paid ad campaigns.

If you want to grow your business then contact us today and we can get the ball rolling on running effective and beneficial paid advertising campaigns for you.