One of the most underutilized and Cost-effective branding strategy is about to get unveiled, If you are currently using Adwords and are mostly dependent upon Search Marketing ads. You have never tried Display marketing and are reluctant to use it, or maybe you have tried it for a while but it never gave any foreboding results. Then maybe you can try this unfertilized cost-effective medium of Branding,
How can you use YouTube as powerful branding tool via Adwords Video Advertising Tool
A couple of months ago, I created a video tutorial for my company which is currently doing good. Consistently ranking its targeted keyword scoring more than 20k views, doing its job in branding the company as one of the top leaders in PSD to Html conversion industry.
A little more research brought to my cognizance that hell lot of authentic traffic is been drawn by tutorials on YouTube in the same optimized Industry which can be exploited and can give better conversion. I had previously tried upon display marketing with little success on these videos placing banner ads on YouTube, but never tried YouTube in-stream Video Marketing.
Well I gave it a try and to my astonishment I discovered that it is a quite cost-effective method as compared to other modes and you actually pay for a view when somebody watches it for at least 30 seconds, this is termed as “Trueview Ads” by Google, In this arrangement viewer has a choice to view or skip a video ad after 5 seconds. If a user chooses to watch the ad for at least 30 sec, A view is registered and you are charged and if skipped, your 5 Second Branding is free “How cool is that”.
I ran a short campaign to test this. In this post, I will analyze if this particular campaign was beneficial for me or not, I would like to make it clear from beforehand that my video Ad was not Optimized, it was just a small introduction of the Company website I created few months back using trial version of “Videoscribe”
Broadly there are in all three categories in Adwords Video Campaigns: In-stream, In-search, In-display. I will be discussing about In-stream video ads in this post. I wont be dilating upon, How to create ads and its intricacies, I mean that part is well handled by Google itself in its help center and I will provide links to the required Questions., My main objective here is to make you understand that this particular zone of advertising is still not exploited, its cheap and can be exponentially profitable if executed correctly.
Video Ad Creation:
Video Ad campaign is created separately in Adwords. Prerequisites are, You should have a video ad ready & uploaded to your YouTube channel ,linked to your Adwords account and rest process can be followed via Adwords help.
I created and ran an in-stream advertisement for about a week and statistics are as under:
In 8 Days I received approx 303 view/2959 impressions, Avg CPV (Cost per View): $0.13 , Total Cost : $40.41 (This was very passive campaign and I targeted my ad in-stream on just 48 YouTube Videos extremely related to my industry).
Defining Targeting Group
This is very crucial for any video ad campaign. I have targeted demographics as USA, Placement as Youtube.com and selected all the video placements i.e. YouTube Urls on which I want my streaming ads to run, Detailed process as of how to customize targeting while creating a group can be understood here.
Now the hard part is to do the analysis and reporting, whether my Video campaign was beneficial in any sense, it should either justify itself sending more traffic to the website or should generate enough conversions for the company. When the budget of advertising per day is approx $300/Day, nobody cares shelling out 5$/day but if your 5$ experiment is doing enough magic to justify itself, You can compel the management to allocate a bigger chunk on to Video marketing.
Paid Marketing analysis and Adwords reporting nos were not promising, there were views/Impressions but neither a genuine amount of direct traffic nor enough conversions were reported. I was not ready to console upon that 230 unique visitors who saw the video for more that 30 seconds and are accountable for 303 views in a span of 8 days wont visit the website or give me a single conversion.
So I decided to do a comparative analysis of Goal Conversion i.e. Time when this video campaign was executed vs same no of previous days. See below
Woo ho! I could see some staggering nos, Total Goal conversion has increased exponentially by 33.85% in which Order placed has increased by 26.27% , Order page visited by 36.25% and Contact form visits by 50%. So there is something which actually did the magic and I being the Marketing Manager know that during this period no technique or campaign other than video marketing was been exercised upon.
But for a better understanding lets analyse Source/Medium to get a good perspective of whether Video ads were actually responsible for this change or some ambiguous forces were in action.
As you can see that direct Goal completion rate has exponentially increased. What possibly could define that amount of exponential rise? well according to me, users after watching the video are not following the link route i.e. through the video, rather they are directly visiting the website itself. (and that could possibly be the reason why an adwords cookie is not registered within the browser and conversions are showing up)
And second Medium is YouTube showing up 8 goal conversions, “COINCIDENCE … I think Not.”
Many factors can predict whether this strategy would be beneficial for your or not, in my case i.e. the company am working with is a B2B company with a limited target clientele so creating a brand is not our cup of tea. 2nd factor is, targeted video ad is not optimized for user intent i.e. this was just a raw experimentation. Am sure if a professional ad is created with user intent in mind it can increase the conversion rate up to 20-30%
Point is that if your target audience is wide, company is B2C and you take Video Marketing seriously then YouTube Advertising via Adwords can do wonders for you, provided you are testing and optimizing the campaign at regular intervals.
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