YouTube promoted videos

All You Need to Know About YouTube's Promoted Videos"

By Merle http://MerlesWorld.com

Way back in 2006, Google purchased YouTube.com for an alleged
reported figure of 1.65 billion dollars. And, like with
everything Google does, they've added their own special
"Google Touches" over the last several years, turning it
into one of the most popular video destination websites
online today.

Need proof? According to Comscore.com's December 2009
"Videos Viewed Report", YouTube was ranked as the top
U.S. video site serving up 13.2 billion of the total 33.2
billion videos that were viewed online in the U.S. for that
month alone. That's a lot of people watching mega videos.
For more stats see http://tinyurl.com/y8jbnqh

Furthermore, according to Google, YouTube has twenty hours
of new video uploaded every minute and 420 million unique
visitors per month. Watching online videos and sharing them
with others has become an Internet obsession. People really
love watching videos. Remember the old song "Video Killed
the Radio Star"? In today's marketplace, it should be called
"Video Killed the Television Set".

What if I told you there's a way to harness that huge audience
in your online marketing campaign? Now you can with YouTube's
new advertising program called "Promoted Videos". YouTube and
its other site, Google Adwords, have partnered together in this
latest ad serving project. When promoting your videos on YouTube,
they'll also be shown across Google's Content Network, aka sites
running Google Adsense on them.

The purpose of "Promoted Videos" is to help your videos stand
out from the millions of others on the site. At the time of
this writing, they're available in the U.S., Australia ,Brazil,
Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan,
Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

The first step is to sign up at http://ads.youtube.com, or if
you're already a user of Google Adwords you can access
"Promoted Videos" from your control panel.
http://www.google.com/ads/youtube/ . You must have a YouTube
and an Adwords account which will be linked together as the
video ads are served up by Adwords. To find them in Adwords,
log into your account, select the "Ads Tab", then the "Display
Ad Builder" and finally select "Video" from the category
menu and you'll see "promoted videos". Once your accounts
are linked, you can manage your Promoted Videos campaign
from the Adwords Console, or YouTube directly.

So where do Promoted Videos appear? By default, they run
on YouTube's site and those sites that run Google Adsense
ads. On YouTube, the video ads are shown below and to the
right of search results pages and on some of YouTube's
Watch pages in the "related video section", if related
to the content of the page. Watch pages are like the home
page of a video that displays all of its public information.
Advertisers can opt in or out of the "Content Network",
which gives some control over where the video ads may
be shown. The videos are clearly marked as "promoted
videos", but it seems Youtube has moved back and forth
between labelling them "promoted or sponsored videos".

Like other forms of pay-per-click advertising, it's an
auction like setting where advertisers bid on selected
keywords, set a maximum cost per click and a daily budget
to spend. The Promoted Videos program uses the "Adwords
Discounter" to help keep costs down. No matter your
maximum cost per click, advertisers only pay one cent
more than the other video ads shown on the same page.
When selecting keywords make sure to choose the ones
you would want to appear when a search is done
on a particular subject. YouTube's Insight is helpful
when choosing keywords. For more on this, see
http://searchenginewatch.com/3640113


The videos created can include a clickable link to any
site you choose. On sites running Adsense ads who
haven't elected to block YouTube's Promoted Videos
from within their competitive ad filter, the videos
appear as a thumbnail with three lines of text. Adsense
content partners must also be running ad formats in one
of these sizes for video ads to appear. They are: 300X230,
336X280, 728X90, 250X250, 200X200. They must also be opted
in to show text and image ads on their sites.

The Promoted Videos are different from Adsense video ads.
Promoted Videos will always take the viewer to YouTube's
site to be played, where as Adsense video ads are played
right on the website it's being viewed on.

When creating videos make sure they're fun and entertaining.
Something people really enjoy to watch and will want to pass
on to their friends and family. The sharing of popular videos
on social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, will
help it to go viral. Generally speaking, funny always translates
well. The less it looks like a commercial, the better the odds
of
people liking and sharing it.

If you've been wanting to try your hand at video marketing and
reach millions of potential customers, Google's Promoted Videos
may be for you. For further information see:

Promoted Videos Help Center
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/topic.py?topic=16019

Promoted Videos Optimization Guide
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=112946

YouTube Ad Keyword Tool
https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool

Show & Tell with YouTube-Showcases the best examples of
marketing on YouTube- http://www.youtube.com/user/YTShowandTell

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