There’s no way you can ignore the might of YouTube. With over 4.5 million unique visitors a month worldwide, YouTube is now the fourth largest property on the web.

Users are physically and emotionally involved n the video content they are watching and sharing, which makes the level of engagement between the audience and the content high, to say the least. Do you get that level of engagement from any other media channel?

This is a really quick guide to advertising on YouTube through your AdWords account.

Targeting Your Ads
You don’t have to have your own videos to advertise on YouTube. You can get started with a simple text ad. YouTube is part of the Google Display Network and, using your AdWords account, you can target your ads to multiple placements, although there are some placements, including the YouTube homepage, run-of-site placements and Partner Watch pages, that you can only target by buying inventory direct from YouTube, on a Reserved Media Buy basis.

As an advertiser, you can place your ads using familiar targeting options, such as Keyword and Contextual targeting. However, you can also target your ads based on audience demographics such as:
• age,
• gender,
• location, and
• language.

Your ads will then show on Search and Browse pages, by placing ads that target certain categories, such as sports or animals. Ads are also eligible to appear on Watch pages, where they will show on content partner sites.

Ad Formats
Ad formats available through your AdWords accounts include:
• Text Ads
• Display Ads
• InVideo Overlay Ads
• Promoted Videos
• In-Stream Ads
• Click-to-play Video Ads
• Mobile Ads (text and display)

The standard text ad, for example, overlays your text over the bottom 20% of the video being played on a Browse Page.

If you have a display ad then it is is also eligible to be shown:
• to the right of a video on the Watch Page,
• as an InVideo overlay at the bottom 20% of the video being played,
• on a Browse Page, and
• on the Search Results Page.

Planning Your YouTube Campaign

Targeting
If you target YouTube through your AdWords account, you have access to the same targeting options that are available for targeting the Google Display Network, including contextual targeting or managed placements.

To target YouTube through a contextually targeted campaign, simply ensure that you’re opted in to the Google Display Network so that your ads are eligible to appear on YouTube.

To target YouTube through managed placements you can use two tools:

• Placement Tool: Select Describe Topics and search for “video” to see a broad list of video-based sites in the network. From there, you can refine your search based on the sites shown that are relevant to your business.

• Ad Planner: When searching by audience in Google Ad Planner, there are several filters that allow you to access video based sites in the Display Network. Try doing a search for “video” in the Category filter. You can then select which video category is most relevant to your business. Additionally, try choosing Video in the Ad Specs filter to see where your video-based ads could show on your audience selection

Language and Location
Location based targeting, also known as geo-targeting, works exactly the same way for YouTube as it does with your normal AdWords campaign. You can select the countries or regions for your campaign in the campaign Settings tab and your ads will appear only to users located in those areas.

Don’t forget that the language preference set on the YouTube homepage determines which language a user wants to view YouTube in. When the user sets the language preference, YouTube only displays ads that are targeted to the chosen language. If the user doesn’t specify a language preference, the user’s location determines the default language preference.

Language targeting lets you reach an audience that speaks one or more languages, allowing you to reach your users even if they’re physically located in a non-native area. You should really target the language that your ad is written in and tailor your keywords accordingly.

Bidding
Just like you would with your AdWords campaigns, choose CPM (cost per thousand) or CPC (cost per click), according to your objectives. If you’re looking for greater reach and visibility, go for CPM. If you’re more concerned with driving quality traffic and your ROI (return on investment), CPC is the one for you.

Reporting
Just like you would with your other campaigns, you can access your YouTube campaign performance from the AdWords interface, view all the performance metrics that are important to you and make decisions on how to optimise and fine-tune your campaign.

Optimising Your Campaign
Because YouTube is a key site in the Google Display Network, the optimising techniques you use on your Display campaigns will also apply to your YouTube campaigns. They include:

• Deleting poorly-performing placements. Placements that are not performing well for you might need to be deleted. That will eliminate irrelevant impressions on your ads and improve your Quality Score. Also, use the Placement Tool to find placement ideas that are relevant to your campaign.
• Using the most effective bidding strategy. Make sure you’re using the right bidding strategy for your campaigns – CPM for reach and branding, CPC for ROI and driving quality traffic.
• Experimenting with different bids. To improve the position of your ads, you can try increasing the maximum CPM or CPC bid for individual placements that perform well for you. Along with your ad’s quality, a higher maximum bid can help your ads appear more often on your selected placements.
• Assigning destination URLs. Placement-level destination URLs send users to a specific landing page. This can help make sure that potential customers are taken to the exact page within your website that’s most relevant to the content on that placement.
• Using keywords. Mixing placements with keywords in the same ad group can be a good way to refine your targeting. Your keywords determine whether or not your ads can appear on a placement you’ve chosen. Therefore, make sure that your keywords are relevant.

And there you have it – a whirlwind tour of advertising on YouTube. It’s easier than you might think so give it a go and come and share your findings with us.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is different to any other form of online or CPM (Cost per Thousand) advertising. Your ad could be seen thousands of times, by thousands of different people, but unless someone actually clicks on it you won’t pay a penny for the privilege.

However, many advertisers are only using the Search part of Pay Per Click, believing that Search is good for direct response and Display & Video are good for branding.

Here are our top five reasons why we think there is more to Pay Per Click:

1. Google Display Network
Formerly known as the Content Network, the Google Display Network is available from Google AdWords, reaches more than 80% of worldwide Internet users and serves more than 6 billion ad impressions every day across high-quality websites, news pages and blogs. Unlike many other online advertising display networks, there is no minimum spend.

Google has been building tools to make the Display Network more of a direct response platform. Advertisers can run placement reports to find out the sites and pages that produce the best results, then target specific sites in response.

At the other end of the scale, Google’s Display Network can also lead to more searches for your specific brand terms – people have seen your Display ads as they browse different sites on the Display Network, that can lead to them searching directly for your brand when they want to find out more.

American Laser Centers, an aesthetic services provider, used the Google Display Network to start a chain reaction of leads and conversions. Using the Google Display Network text and image ads, they increased conversion by 365% while cutting impressions in half.

2. Mobile Search
With Google AdWords, you can specifically target smart phones and other mobile devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry. Google handles over 98% of mobile search queries, and the fact that a lot of AdWords campaigns don’t target mobile search means that it’s a lot cheaper than desktop search. Mobile search queries tend to be only one or two words long, and it’s common for people to miss-spell words, meaning that there is a wide range of possible search terms.

3. Facebook
Facebook is now the world’s most popular website, with 540 million unique visitors last month alone. Facebook now has its own PPC platform, which allows you to target users by location, interest, age and other demographic information. This type of advertising works best when running highly targeted ads made up of an image and text. Since users prefer to stay within the Facebook site, ads need to be highly compelling in order to entice viewers to click. Some of the most successful Facebook campaigns so far have been for food (Gonuts for Donuts), travel (Visit Britain) and mobile phones (Nokia).

4. YouTube
In a relatively short period of time, YouTube has quickly become the second most visited site in the world after Facebook, with 490 million unique visitors last month. It is also the Internet’s second biggest search engine in its own right, and allows advertisers to target and engage with huge numbers of people who already interacting with the content. YouTube allows advertisers to target specific videos, channels and verticals, run overlay ads on videos, and even run ads within videos.

5. Sitelinks
Ad Sitelinks is a feature for search-based ads that lets you include up to 10 additional links to deeper content on your site beyond the main landing page. They are strictly speaking just another aspect of search however, they involve thinking about the search process in a different way. They enable smart companies to maximise their brand presence on Google, and to maximise the amount of valuable screen real-estate taken up by a particular brand. Used together with SEO, well designed Sitelinks can fill the whole top half of the results page with your brand!
Over the last year, some search costs and CPCs have been rising, while the costs of other forms of Pay Per Click advertising, like mobile and Facebook, have stayed low. Can you afford not to explore the other features that PPC advertising offers?

I will be speaking on this subject at the Affiliates4U Expo in London, on the 12th–13thOctober 2010.

You can also download our Case Study, which describes how we use Google’s Content Network to increase conversions.