YouTube Advertising, Without Videos
YouTube is second to Google when it comes to websites most viewed on the Internet. So if you haven’t considered YouTube advertising yet, it’s about time you started. The best thing about YouTube is that you don’t even need to have videos to advertise! This article is going to show you how to get your ads appearing in YouTube videos and around the website next to YouTube’s Partner Content.
Step 1: Create an AdWords Account
YouTube is part of Google’s Ad Network which means that you must have an AdWords account to get started and create your ads. AdWords will be your central management system for creating and monitoring any ads that you decide to create for Google’s Ad Network.
You can create an AdWords account by clicking on this link and following the prompts.
Step 2: Get Started on Google’s Video Ad Program
Get started on Google’s Video Ad Program by clicking here. This will then prompt you to sign in with your existing AdWords account. If you haven’t already done so, your account may ask you to set the right time zone and currency for your account and verify your email address before proceeding to Google AdWords to create your ad campaign.
Step 3: Set-up Your Ad Campaign
To set-up your ad campaign you are required to determine the following:
Your Campaign Settings
You will be asked to name your campaign and choose the network, device and locations you would like your ad to appear. It is recommended that you focus on creating your campaign for just one product or service that you are trying to promote. However, any time you would like to change these settings you’ll be able to edit them in your AdWords account.
Your budget
When an ad space is available on YouTube, AdWords runs an auction to decide what ad will show at that moment in time for the website visitors which is why you mustdecide your bid in order to place your ad in the auction.
There are a few ways you can bid for your ads depending on your main focus. Firstly consider what is more important to your business:
- Clicks: Bidding on clicks is ideal for you if your main goal is to bring the YouTube traffic to your website. Using cost-per-click (CPC) bidding will mean that you’ll only pay one somebody clicks on your ad which will redirect them to your website. To use CPC you have the following two choices:
- Automatic bidding: Is the simpler form of bidding which involves determining the daily budget you’re willing to spend for your campaign.
- Manual bidding: Gives you full control over the bid amounts for particular ad groups, keywords or ad placement which you can vary according to your areas of focus. For example, if you were advertising for a company that sells yellow socks you might place a higher bid for keywords such as “yellow socks” than you would for just “socks”.
- Impressions: This is ideal for businesses that are trying to get more people to notice their brand because you pay by the number of times your ad is shown to YouTube users. Bidding for impressions is called cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) which involves bidding for the amount you’re willing to pay for every 1,000 times your ad gets viewed.
- Conversions: This is ideal for businesses that are focused on increasing their conversion rate such as an online sale or a website subscription. In order to use cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding to pay for every conversion your website makes you must first implement conversion tracking to your website. Your AdWords account will generate a code which you must implement in the HTML of your website to activate your conversion tracking.
Once you have completed all the steps and entered your billing information you’ll be good to go!
