With 122 million daily users, YouTube has steadily climbed towards being one of the most commonly used search engines in the world. People use the platform for different types of content, including DIY tutorials, tutoring, or entertainment. Therefore, it’s a great place to try to get your ads in front of various audiences.
What Types of Ads Can You Run on YouTube?
Since YouTube is a creative platform at heart, they give you various ad types to choose from. The different ad types for YouTube are skippable in-stream ads, non-skippable in-stream ads, video discovery ads, and display ads.
In-stream ads are essentially just commercials. They’re video ads you are served at the beginning of YouTube videos. They can be either skippable or non-skippable based on the type of strategy you want to run. By having skippable ads, you can help save money by only paying for views past 5 seconds or when someone clicks on your ad. With non-skippable ads, people are subjected to your ad for at least 15 seconds, and you’re charged per view or click.
The other types of ads are discovery and display ads. Discovery ads are similar to search ads on Google as they show up at the top of the results page on YouTube. They’re designed to show up when specific related keywords are included in a search query. Like discovery ads, display ads are designed to show up in the page’s sidebar or sometimes overlaid in the video you are watching. With these types of ads, you are charged each time someone interacts with it.
Where and How To Create a YouTube Campaign
The best way to get started with your YouTube advertising campaign is by uploading your video advertisement to your YouTube channel. If you don’t want it showing up in your library, you can mark it as ‘hidden.’ Once you’ve uploaded your video, you can start to promote it via Google Ads.
To get started, you’ll need to sign in or set up your Google Ads account. Once you’re at the Google Ads dashboard, you can begin to set up your ad campaign. You’ll need to select the correct campaign goal to match your business goals. For most YouTube ad campaigns, brand awareness and reach are the most common goals.
Once you’ve selected campaign goals, you’ll choose your campaign type as ‘video’ and choose the type of video ad you want to run (skippable, non-skippable, bumper, etc.).
After choosing your type of ad, you will need to define your budget and where your ad shows. You can set your ads to show only in videos, only in bumpers, or all of YouTube. Picking the broader will ultimately get you more impressions. Additionally, you have the option to narrow your targeting to a more specific audience by selecting different demographics and interests that associate with your target audience.
Once you’ve gone through and built the foundation of your campaign, you’ll then select the video you want from your YouTube library and publish it.
The Takeaway
Whether you’re looking to boost your brand awareness or promote a new product, video advertising on YouTube can be a great way to help you accomplish this. By giving you various ad types to choose from and using your creative content, you can begin to reach a wider audience and increase your brand awareness.