The world’s largest video discovery platform is on a roll! Today, Youtube announced it was finally serving CPC sponsored video ads alongside their video search results. I think quite a lot of blogs have covered the news, but all failed to show readers how to buy ads on Youtube (except the Google Blog where the news has been announced).
First, go on https://ads.youtube.com. Once you hit get started, you have two choices: Promote your channel, or promote your videos.
Once you have made this selection, you create your little ad, Adwords-style.
Select targeted keywords. Just like Adwords, the system provides suggested keywords to help you out.
Set up your daily budget and highest CPC on an item.
Enter your billing info and press confirm.
After approval, your ad will be released in the wild. There is a fundamental difference between Adwords and Sponsored videos in the underlying business model of the ad buyer: A click only transforms into one video view. This means that if you invest $500 in 1,000 clicks, you will get 1,000 views. But how does 1,000 views can translate into ROI?
To bring someone from a Youtube SERP to a landing page where a lead could buy something, it takes 2 clicks minimum if you promote your channel, and 3 clicks if you promote a video (plus whatever the length of your video is). Obviously, the mindset of the advertiser on Youtube should be different than the one of the advertiser on Adwords. You can’t offer a payment form right after a paid click. You pay to show videos. What should you show that’s worth paying for people to see? There is no doubt that large companies will piss away their marketing budget on Youtube the way they do it on other ad networks. On the other end, small online merchants looking for a direct ROI should think their strategy through before buying ad space on Youtube.
Hopefully, we are going to experience a growing demand for small video producers to create compelling video content to all those small merchants who can now video advertise their products on the largest video platform. The quality of the video is crucial for leads to go from the video to the site where conversion happens, so the video ad cannot afford to be the crap we usually find.