Why Advertise on YouTube?
August 9, 2010 • Article by Nettie Wells
Advertising on YouTube is hot on the agenda this week at Search Star. To back this up we’re taking an in depth look at how you can advertise on YouTube, what the benefits are and why advertisers have been surprisingly slow on exploiting it.
It’s not hard to see why Advertisers should be interested in YouTube. It is the number 1 entertainment site on the web, the 4th largest internet destination and averages 90 Million unique monthly users. But it can be difficult to get to grips with the sheer variety of ad formats available and as a result of this many advertisers seem to have shied away.
However, whilst YouTube can offer several high cost services directly, you’ll find that the majority of ad formats are more comfortably managed via an existing AdWords account. Where people often get confused is in the assumption that YouTube is a content website and therefore ads need to be in video format. What these people forget is that YouTube is actually the webs 2nd largest search engine behind Google itself and that you can purchase both text and image ads on a CPC and CPM basis.
However, while you can’t target text ads on YouTube search results pages in the same way you can with Google search results, the fact that most advertisers are currently missing out on this adspace gives you an opportunity to hit the market early. To optimise ROI advertisers should remember that YouTube adspace is fantastic for two things – branding power and content hosting. To maximise Branding you should consider opting an AdWords campaign into the display network, this will give you less targeted traffic but a much wider audience.
If, on the other hand, you happen to have video content you are looking to promote then you should come back to the blog tomorrow as we explore how to target YouTube search results with Promoted Videos…