Tips to Help Your Business Monetize YouTube Advertising
Test out promoted videos. Called the “AdWords for YouTube,” by Matthew Liu, product manager for YouTube, these videos appear in the right-hand column of search results pages on YouTube. You only pay for this service when people click on your video. But there are a couple of factors that you should keep in mind when deciding what keywords to “bid” for, Jarboe said:
- Google AdWords aren't necessarily going to be the most searched terms on YouTube;
- use YouTube's Keyword Tool to get search term suggestions; and
- remember that people search differently on Google than they do on YouTube.
Your video is your creative, so you won't need to create an ad. What your promoted video will need is a 25-character headline, roughly two lines of text that should each be 35 characters and two links — one to watch the video and one to your YouTube channel, Jarboe advised. ReelSEO notes that views of promoted videos helps a brand's organic search rankings on Google. “Spend a little money to promote your videos,” Jarboe said.
Even a modest investment in promoted videos can produce significant results. Jarboe cited a 2010 test of YouTube’s promoted videos that yielded the following data:
- Promotion at 3 cents increased views per day by 30 times when compared to two weeks prior to promotion.
- Partners in the test got 46,000 subscriptions that were directly attributed to sessions with a promoted video click. The cost per subscriber averaged out to be between $4 and $6.
- Users were twice as likely to watch a second video by the partner when driven to the channel page rather than the watch page.
Hosting videos on your own website as well as on YouTube is a waste, said Jarboe. Just cut and paste YouTube’s video code onto your own site, Jarboe advised. It’s cheaper and more effective to do it that way. YouTube will track views on your own site — helping your organic search rankings — if you use its code; it won’t if you don’t use its code.
But at the end of the day, you need to have interesting content that people will watch past the 10-second threshold, Jarboe said. When just starting to post videos on YouTube, keep them to two minutes to three minutes in length. When you get more familiar with video, you can extend those videos to five minutes to 10 minutes. The most shared videos on YouTube are humorous in nature, followed by news-type videos and how-to videos.
