Since its humble beginnings in San Mateo, California in 2005 and the first upload Me At The Zoo in November of that year YouTube has become a household name and part of our day-to-day vocabulary. The Googlezilla quickly caught on to the potential that this rapidly growing video sharing platform could bring to their already established search business and in the following November they acquired YouTube for US$1.65; a hefty price for a business that was not yet generating revenues.
Things have since changed for both Google and YouTube and the end user. There are now almost 8 years of content uploaded every day, the site generates 800 million unique visits every month and YouTube has monetized 3 billion videos every week. Oh and it is the world’s second largest search engine, second only to Google of course. Impressive stats, but what has this meant for advertisers and businesses?
There is a whole world of potential for targeting users thoroughly engaged and interacting with content relevant to your business. They are interacting with brands, building relationships, reviewing products and finding out the latest trends. Here are the different ways that you can use this to achieve your different advertising goals:
- Brand Awareness
Make use of the Full Monty of YouTube’s advertising solutions. Roadblock takeover on the homepage, reach 23 million unique users over the 24-hour period (N.B These don’t come cheap and need to be booked directly through a YouTube rep). Use In-stream and true- view video ads to reach a highly targeted audience that is interacting with relevant content and integrate this with promoted videos to capture those users in the SERP’s or watching similar videos. Manage these through the reliable Adwords interface on a cost per view (CPV) basis. Importantly it is key to drive subscriptions to your brand channel, which is constantly uploading informative and engaging content to keep your brand in the user’s radar. You can partner all of these solutions with a range of display banners linking to your external web property or to your brand channel, to further increase you coverage.
- Direct Response
In a more targeted way you can use the CPV based solutions to present your potential customers with the benefits of your products, new features and present them with powerful calls to action. Use the associated display advertising to drive traffic to your conversion page and drive sign-ups or e-Commerce transactions. You can effectively measure how the user is interacting with your content using YouTube Insight. Find out what is working and not working on a ROAS basis and focus optimisation on a conversion basis. As always make sure you work from statistically good data and be aware of over optimisation!
If you would like to know more about all of YouTube’s advertising solutions then this is a great resource. Alternatively please get in touch with the Minutesteak team who will be happy to advise, plan and manage your YouTube activity, as well as sharing our favourite videos!
