YouTube is a massive conglomerate. People love watching videos and their users number in the billions. The YouTube audience grows larger every day. The platform relies completely on video format, so that gives some semblance of how popular video content is. This entire platform and the audience it caters to represent a huge opportunity for business owners. It’s a chance to really get in front of the audience.

With the incredible amount of information available on the internet, you must be proactive, ensuring that your content is found. You’ve spent a good deal of time, money and effort into creating and posting this video content and you need to ensure its exposure. YouTube ads are a fantastic way to do this. The YouTube platform offers a ton of options, and it can be a little daunting. Getting a little base knowledge of the platform and its ads are the best ways to get started.

Targeting

Advertisers on YouTube can now target users based on their Google browsing history. This means that the video ads a user will be served on the platform will be closely related to a product or service they last searched for on Google. This makes the ads more effective because there is a higher likelihood of the user either watching the entire video ad or clicking through to the website. It is a very effective form of new age marketing and it helps funnel users into consumers with targeted action.

Non-Skippable Ads

Non-skippable ads are limited to between 15 and 20 seconds long and must be viewed before the desired content will appear. They sometimes get a bad rap because they force people to watch. However, if the content is awesome and you have targeted the audience correctly, this shouldn’t be an issue. These types of ads most often get a lot more engagement, but they do have higher abandonment rates.

True View In-Stream Ads

True view in-stream ads are ads that the audience can skip after a certain amount of time, usually about five seconds. They also run before the requested content can be viewed. The ads themselves are recommended to be capped at three minutes in length. However, most of these ads run in 15 to 30 seconds.

True View In-Display Ads

These ads typically consist of a thumbnail image from the ad itself along with some text, typically up to three lines. These ads can be any length so if you have great long-form video content, this may be the way to go. These ads are promoted in places of discovery, such as in a YouTube search result or next to related video content.

If you are using these ads to send visitors back to a website, you need to make sure that site is optimized to handle the incoming traffic these ads will generate. This means making sure that it is user friendly across the board in terms of devices and including a clear call-to-action. Many users do decide to act based on these ads and you don’t want them to be confused. Even if you are just using a landing page instead of a full-blown website, it still needs to be optimized for conversions.

YouTube ads hold a lot of promise in terms of funneling convertible traffic. If you are new to advertising with YouTube ads, then True View in-stream ads are probably the easiest to work with and the return on investment is amazing. It takes time and effort to funnel traffic with YouTube ads, but it is well worth it in the end.