Google search ads tend to be the number one place everyone’s mind goes when it comes to advertising online. The reasoning behind that would be correct for the most part, due to the massive search volume produced by the search engine, as well as the ability to target specific keywords that users are actively searching for. After you think of ads on google, the next thoughts tend to be Bing, Display, and then social.
However, millions of people visit YouTube every day, but not everyone immediately thinks about advertising on it. According to Search Engine Land, “YouTube is arguably the second largest search engine on the Web. It is the third most visited site on the Web, according to Alexa and SimilarWeb.” This means that by leaving this one advertising avenue out of your marketing strategy, you could be missing out on some real potential. Within a 30 second window, you could have a great opportunity to show users why your product or service is amazing and why they should choose you over a competitor. You would never get someone to stare at your search or display ads for that amount of time. Even after someone clicks on your ad and comes to your website, you only have a few seconds to grab their attention long enough to convince them to stick around.
The ability to show your video advertisement prior to the user being able to see the video they originally clicked on is very powerful. This means that you will have their attention more than you normally would with your banner ads just being on the right side of a page. Also on YouTube, users are able to search for videos that they are interested in watching. Similarly to results on Google.com, the first couple of search results are advertisements on YouTube.com. That gives you the opportunity to have your video ads shown at the top of the search results for the keywords that you have preselected.
It doesn’t take a fancy video to make a big impact, you just need something that can tell the story you want heard. YouTube ads can be setup inside of the Google Adwords platform. So if you already have paid search ads running, it is easy to add-on YouTube ads from within the same platform.