YouTube ads or YouTube advertising essentially means using YouTube as a marketing platform and putting out ads on the popular video streaming platform. Since Google owns the video sharing platform, advertising on YouTube can only be done through Google Ads. Since YouTube has a wide reach and audience – owing to the 2 billion monthly users and approximately 500 hours of video content – marketers can truly do wonders by gauging the potential of YouTube marketing.
Benefits of YouTube advertising
YouTube advertising has a number of benefits that include:
1. YouTube advertising is cost effective
Keeping in mind the reach of the platform, YouTube advertising is extremely cost effective, and the money you spend is likely to be worth your while. Depending upon your marketing goals, you can use the platform from different extents in order to reach your required audience within your required budget. YouTube also allows marketers to use bidding strategies to stay within their marketing budget, and allows them to choose from any of the following bidding strategies which include cost per mile or CPM, cost per view or CPV, and cost per acquisition or CPA.
2. YouTube advertising has a lot of reach
As described above, YouTube has a growing audience with its reach and influence only increasing day by day. Whether you wish to target a specific niche or a general audience, the platform allows you to do that accordingly. Whether you are looking to reach more people organically or inorganically can be achieved through the same platform.
3. YouTube advertising helps you analyze marketing data
YouTube also allows marketers to analyze their marketing efforts by providing them with campaign results, which helps marketers understand and improve their conversion. In order to make use of these analytics, marketers should be familiar with the use of Google Analytics and understand Google’s advertising metrics.
4. YouTube advertising allows you to target ads
YouTube allows marketers to target their ads to audiences on the basis of age, gender, interests, income, previous searches and according to the devices they use. Marketers should target their ads to audiences after conducting a marketing research and determine who is their product most relevant to. If marketers aren’t too sure about how targeting works, they should first test the waters to see their ad performance, and then later on change preferences if required.
5. YouTube advertising has multiple formats
Marketers can choose from either video ads or display ads for the purpose of advertising on YouTube. For the platform’s desktop version, marketers can bid for the display and video ads both. However, display ads are not yet available for the app’s mobile version and those aren’t available for marketers accordingly. YouTube also allows marketers to choose from either skippable or non-skippable video ads. Bumper ads, overlay ads, and sponsored cards are also options that marketers can explore on the said platform.
6. YouTube advertising allows influencer marketing
A great thing about advertising on YouTube is that it allows marketers to involve influencers in their marketing campaigns. This form of direct advertising leads to an increase in engagement and allows marketers to hyper-target their audiences. Marketers may form agreements with influencers on the basis of sponsored content, affiliate programs, or advertising arrangements.