If you consider YouTube a search engine it would be larger than Yahoo or Bing (according to the February numbers from comScore). BILLIONS of videos are viewed every month. However, most PPC advertisers haven’t been tapping this resource because of the resources required to create overlays for YouTube videos. Google saw a huge revenue opportunity felt their pain and enhanced the Display Ad Builder to create InVideo ads.
Advertise on YouTube
Just bring up the Display Ad Builder, pick a template and turn your current image ads into overlay ads. You can still choose either CPC or CPM while targeting all the way down to a video by video level. However, I would recommend you ask yourself a few questions before taking the plunge:
- Is your product/service relative to the videos on which it’s being overlayed?
- Are you okay with potentially being perceived as an annoying advertiser messing up someone’s YouTube creation?
- Why should someone leave their video by clicking your ad?
If you don’t answer Yes, Yes and have a dang good reason on the last question, this probably isn’t for you. But Google isn’t stupid and I see some opportunities here. With the video by video targeting you could place your ads on a handful of extremely relevant videos where your ad presents a complementary product/service or you could “hijack” a video as it goes viral to get a ton of exposure. However, the best opportunity I can think of would be to serve your own ads on your own videos. The link in the video’s description is great, but now you could have a clickable call-to-action (CTA) right on the video itself.
How do you see this working?
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