Advertising on Youtube

Video is a huge part of our daily lives. Think about the last time you let a day go by without watching some type of video — on television or the Internet.
People aren’t just watching funny cat videos, either. Many businesses are harnessing the power of video to drive awareness and sales.
Because Google owns YouTube, video ads on YouTube are handled through AdWords. And they’re surprisingly easy to use. Here’s how your business can get started with YouTube ads.

Decide On Your Campaign Goals

Don’t just jump on the video ad bandwagon because everyone else is doing it. Think about what you’d like to get out of it. Do you have a complicated product or service that’s more easily explained with video than with text? Are you launching a new product and want to generate awareness? Are you hoping to drive sales via video?
Video ads can work for all of the above scenarios, but as with any paid search campaign, a little advance planning will help make your campaign a success.

Learn the Basics

YouTube ads run on a cost-per-view basis, not cost-per-click. While you can and should drive traffic via YouTube ads, you’re charged every time someone watches your video for a minimum amount of time — usually 25 percent of the video length.
In many ways, therefore, YouTube is a branding or awareness exercise, rather than a direct-response medium. You can certainly drive leads or sales from YouTube, but you’ll pay whether or not the viewer ever reaches your website.
That’s not to say that YouTube won’t drive conversions, but your success metrics may be different than for regular PPC campaigns.

Targeting

One nice feature of YouTube ads is targeting options. Targeting for YouTube is similar to the Google Display Network. You can target by interest, topics, keywords, demographic characteristics like age and gender, or a combination of these. Remember, YouTube has a huge audience. You’ll want to narrow down your audience choices. Think about who you’d like to see your ad, and target accordingly. But be aware that keyword targeting can severely limit your ad’s reach.

Where the Ads Appear

YouTube ads appear on YouTube. But they also appear on sites in the Google Display Network. That’s because YouTube ads have three formats: in-stream, in-display, and in-search.
In-stream ads appear as a pre-roll prior to another video.

In-stream ads play before YouTube videos.

In-display ads serve on YouTube, as well as on other sites in the Google Display Network, where a user has embedded a YouTube video. In-display ads can have one of three formats.

1. In-display ads show on YouTube near similar videos.
   

   In-display ads show near similar videos.
2. In-display ads also appear as an overlay on YouTube videos embedded on Google Display Network websites.
   

   In-display ads appear as overlays on embedded YouTube videos within the Google Display Network.
3. Finally, in-display ads appear as video display ads on Google Display Network sites.
   

   In-display ads appear as video display ads on Google Display Network sites.

The third YouTube ad format is in-search. In-search ads appear in YouTube search results.

In-search ads appear in YouTube search results.

Ads appear in all three places. Keep that in mind as you craft your ad copy.

Set Up your Targets

A traditional pay-per-click campaign is organized by campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords. Ads are assigned to an ad group, and are triggered by any of the keywords in that group.
The YouTube campaign structure is a different. YouTube has campaigns, ads, videos, and targets. Campaigns are essentially the same as traditional PPC ads — this is where you’ll set geography, daily budgets, and such.
Videos are simply the videos you’re promoting. A single video can be assigned to multiple campaigns.
Ads couple your video with ad copy. Ad copy is basically the same as traditional PPC, with a headline, description, display URL, and destination URL.
Targets are the confusing part. You can target by interest, topics, keywords, demographic characteristics like age and gender, or a combination of any or all of these. Within a campaign, you’ll combine targets, ads, and videos to create what viewers will see.

Combine targets, ads, and videos to create what viewers will see.

You can trigger your ad via all targeting groups in a campaign, or only some of them. Experiment with different targeting options to see what works best.

Think About your Landing Page

With YouTube ads, you can send visitors to your YouTube channel page or to a landing page on your website. This is where your goals come into play. If you are trying to build awareness and grow your YouTube subscriber list, then sending visitors to your YouTube channel makes sense.
But if you’re going for lead generation, you’ll want to send visitors to an optimized page on your website, where they can complete a conversion.
The nice thing about YouTube ads is that while not everyone will click through or even watch the entire video, you’ve still gained exposure to your brand via the ads.

Link your YouTube and AdWords Accounts

Linking your YouTube and AdWords accounts enables you to see additional statistics that aren’t available if accounts aren’t linked.

Linking YouTube and AdWords accounts provides additional statistics.

If possible, you’ll want to link your accounts to take advantage of these powerful features.

Create a Video Overlay

Once you’ve added a video to an AdWords campaign, you have the option of creating a video overlay. This is a block of text that displays over your video every time someone views it. Clicks on video overlays are free.
Video overlays are created within YouTube, not AdWords. Log in to your YouTube account and navigate to your YouTube channel. Find the Video Manager in the dashboard.

Navigate to the YouTube Video Manager in your account.

You’ll see all of your uploaded videos on the Uploads page. Find the video for which you’d like to create an overlay, and click Edit.

Click “Edit” on the video you wish to create an overlay for.

From there, click “Call-to-Action Overlay,” and you’ll be able to edit your ad copy.

Select the “Call-to-Action Overlay” tab to create your ad copy.

YouTube video ads may seem confusing, but once you get the hang of them, they’re a great way to promote your business, generate awareness, and create leads.

How to Triple Your YouTube Video Views With Facebook

Do you want more people to watch your YouTube videos?
Are you looking for an easy way to improve the quality of the content you share on Facebook?
All you need is some great content and a cool Facebook technique that I recently discovered.

A Quick Overview

This technique lets you automatically attach your videos to the updates that appear on Facebook after someone likes content on your website.
By leveraging Facebook’s Open Graph and using this technique, I’ve seen phenomenal results!
I shared this tactic with a brand operating in the travel industry and they generated more than one million aggregated views of their product videos on YouTube (and significant website traffic) in a matter of weeks.

By integrating this Open Graph tactic, Marmara, a French travel company, generated 93K likes on its website, which in turn generated 13 million impressions of their videos in the Facebook newsfeed! Not to mention the 16K clicks they got back to their website. All in just 2 weeks and for free.

Using this technique, you can see in the image below that when you like an article on a blog, the story that’s automatically generated on Facebook for your friends to see already has a video embedded into it.

With this feature, each blog article that you write automatically shares a video of your choice.

This is a great way to boost the visibility of your YouTube channel! If you want to see this example live, you can click here.
And this video is ready to be clicked and played in the Facebook newsfeed, ticker or personal timeline of the person who liked your content.
This can be valuable to your business. It’s a very smooth way for you to combine useful and interesting content with a video showcasing your products or services!
Imagine how you can use this tactic to get your product videos shared automatically with useful content throughout the social web.
In this article you’ll learn how to use Facebook’s Open Graph to get more views of your videos on YouTube.
You’re also going to learn how to get everyone who likes your Facebook Page or one of your blog posts to automatically share one of your videos on Facebook.

Understanding the Open Graph

If you have a website or blog, you’ve probably already integrated social sharing buttons, and in particular the Facebook Like button on your site.
For this tactic, simply installing the Like button is only half of it; you must also insert Open Graph meta tags into the source code of your website or blog page to optimize the sharing of your content on Facebook.
These meta tags let you control the manner in which your web page is shared on Facebook when your visitor likes it, comments on it or sends it to friends via the Like, Comment and Send plugins provided by Facebook.
If you’re not familiar with Open Graph meta tags and their importance, I encourage you to watch Facebook’s video on the subject.
I also encourage you to consult the official Open Graph protocol page. There you’ll find out about all of the different meta tags, their uses, their functions and the advantages they give to your content.
Of course, if all that seems a bit too technical, don’t hesitate to hand over the reins to your agency or technical director.
But let’s continue so you can fully understand the role this tactic can play in your social media marketing and what it can mean for your business.
Here’s what you need to know.

#1: Understand the Anatomy of a Facebook Like Story

Once your Open Graph meta tags are integrated into your web page, you can control the way your content is displayed when it is shared using Facebook’s social plugins (Like, Comment, Send).
You need to think about the different sections of the post that automatically appear on Facebook when someone likes content on your website.
For example, here’s what the optimal sharing of a blog article would look like:

Here are the different sections of the update that appear on Facebook after someone likes your article.

By customizing each Open Graph meta tag in your content, you control the way it’s displayed on Facebook when someone likes it!
As you can see, the essential meta tags are the following:

• The title of a shared page (meta property=”og:title” content=”Your title”)
• Its description (meta property=”og:description” content=”Your description”)
• Its URL (meta property =”og:url” content=”Your URL”).
• The image illustrating this page (meta property =”og:image” content=”http://link_of_an_image.jpg”)

Below are the Open Graph meta tags for this article when I display the page’s HTML source code. To access the HTML source code of any web page, just right-click on it and select View Source. You’ll then have access to the HTML code of the page you are viewing.

Here are the Open Graph meta tags needed for this technique.

When the meta tags are entered correctly and a visitor clicks Like on your web page, the content is automatically and properly displayed on Facebook.
You’ll find out how to use this technique below.

#2: How It Works

If a photo is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand photos! This is especially true in the case of a Facebook newsfeed story generated by a Like of a web page.
Let’s compare the two Facebook Like Stories below:

The Facebook post on the top has a photo, and the post on the bottom has a video embedded in it that is ready to play.

Depending on how you use Facebook’s social share buttons and Open Graph meta tag code, the same Like can generate two different posts on Facebook: one with a single 200-pixel–wide picture, or one with the same picture but with an embedded video!
These two posts correspond to the same action: a click of the Like button on a web page for a product—in this example, a vacation resort. But in the first case, the action displays a 200-pixel–wide image. The second displays, within that same image, a Play button for a video. As you can guess, viewers are more inclined to click on that image if it displays a video Play button.
This is the primary difference between these two posts, but it doesn’t stop there.
You see, the simple act of clicking on the Play button immediately shows a video, without having to leave the post. As a savvy marketer, you’ll know how to use this to your advantage to market your business.
This technique makes it very easy for marketers to have a useful product video appear inside the Facebook update about liked content. With the right content mix, this can be a strong marketing strategy.

Click on the Play icon located on the picture and you will automatically watch a video showcasing the product that you liked: a vacation resort.

For a vacation resort, a one-minute video highlighting all of the destination’s attractions has a larger impact than a 200-pixel–wide image.
But a tactic like this is not just for vacation resorts. It can be very useful for a number of products.
In the case of a blog, you can use this tactic to enrich Facebook posts when a person likes one of your articles.
For example, if you have video tutorials introducing the functions of your products or showing them in action, you can use these videos to highlight products related to the content in your blog articles.

How this works.
Here’s an example of how I used this.

1. I wrote an article introducing the different page administrator roles created by Facebook, discussing their advantages and limitations.
2. I created a video tutorial demonstrating how AgoraPulse offers richer admin role management features than the ones offered by Facebook.

Then I set things up to automatically attach and display my video when my article is liked and therefore shared on Facebook.

This is how the update appears in Facebook when someone likes my article published on my website.

It’s easy to increase the value of a blog article by attaching a video. This makes your content much more attractive.
Each time a reader likes this blog article, it automatically shares a video tutorial explaining how to manage Facebook Page admin roles with the aid of a Facebook Page management software tool.
This way, you have the best of both worlds: interesting content + relevant product promotion.
What makes this tactic so effective is that the Like automatically shares the video in Facebook, not only in the newsfeed:

Newsfeed before the click.

But also the ticker:

The ticker view.

And even on the personal timeline of the author:

The profile view.

Do you want to see this in action for yourself? It’s easy. Simply go to this blog article, click Like and then go to your Facebook profile to see the result.

Are you interested in doing this on your website? Here’s how to set it up.

#3: Use a Plugin to Add the Meta Tags

It’s easy to get each click of the Like button on your website to automatically share and display a video on Facebook. You just need to add two additional Open Graph meta tags after the existing tags in the code of your page.
As you’ve seen above, the minimum necessary meta tags are the following:

meta property=”og:title” content=”Your title”
meta property=”og:description” content=”Your description”
meta property =”og:url” content=”Your URL”
meta property =”og:image” content=”http://link_of_an_image.jpg”

Simply add these two meta tags:

meta property=”og:video” content=”http://link_of_your_video” /
meta property=”og:video:type” content=”application/x-shockwave-flash” /

So, how do you do all this? It depends on your situation:

• If your site was created by an independent contractor and you don’t have access to the source code, you need to ask the contractor to integrate the meta tags.
• If you created your site with WordPress, you can customize the Open Graph meta tags of your pages (and of each blog article) yourself using specific plugins.

If your website was created with WordPress, you can use a plugin called Like-Button-Plugin-For-WordPress, which allows the customization of Open Graph data. However, I’ve seen two other plugins that provide the same result: Open Graph Protocol in Posts and Pages and Social Graph Protocol.
Each of these three plugins lets you easily add the meta tags you need to share your videos with each Like on the pages of your site or blog.

Specific WordPress plugins will allow you to personalize the Open Graph meta tags for each page or blog article.

The only field you really need to fill in is the video link. Facebook will take care of the size and video type.

#4: Where to Host Your Videos and How to Share YouTube Videos

To display a video on the web, it has to be hosted somewhere on the web. You’ll be in one of these two situations: either you host the video file on your own servers, or you use a self-service video hosting service such as YouTube.
1. If you host the video on your own servers, you must host the file in the .SWF format. Be careful not to host the file in .FLV or any other traditional video format, as the video player that works with Facebook will not read it.
Then you simply need to set the Open Graph meta tag value as the URL of the .SWF file that you previously put online.

Insert the link to your self-hosted .SWF video file here if you use the Like Button plugin for WordPress, for example.

2. If you prefer to use YouTube to host your videos, you’ll need to follow these steps:

• In a web browser, navigate to the YouTube page with your video.
• In the URL, identify the YouTube ID of your video. This is the series of letters and numbers found between the “=” and the “&” symbols of the URL. In the following case, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlQasgOjaxU&feature=plcp, the ID of the video is “dlQasgOjaxU“.
• Insert this ID into the following URL: http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/[yourID]
  Once you have your new URL format, insert it in your browser to test it out. If the URL is right, the video should be displayed full screen (and fit your entire browser window).

• Add this URL to your Open Graph meta tags and you’re all set!
  Insert the link to your YouTube-hosted video here if you use the Social Graph Protocol Plugin, for example.

#5: Track the Statistics of Your YouTube Videos

If you’ve opted for hosting your videos on YouTube (something I strongly recommend), you’ll also have a clear advantage with access to your YouTube statistics.
You’ll be able to see the number of views your video has on Facebook!
The good news is that YouTube offers an impressive amount of statistical data on your videos, including details about the sources for views when videos are embedded on third-party sites like Facebook. This is great to evaluate the effectiveness of one source versus another.
The bad news is that the source statistics of a view are complicated to find on YouTube. To make it easy for you to find, here’s a short screencast:
And there you have it! I hope you’re inspired to use this technique to come up with creative campaigns and make the most of the potential visibility offered by Facebook!

The No Hype Guide To Video Marketing on YouTube...Awesome Info!

Let’s get one thing straight, if you want to use video as a way to market your business, you’re going to have to learn about production.
This whole idea behind “all you need is a webcam” is pretty much garbage. Don’t believe me, when was the last time you watched someone’s webcam video for extended periods of time? To be fair, it’s sometimes true that a webcam is all you need, but only if you have an engaging video personality. And let’s face it, being good on video is not a skill that most people are born with.
I’d love to tell you otherwise, but one look at the YouTube Trends blog would suggest otherwise.
Big businesses are savvy now and they’re throwing more money into production. If you want to be competitive, you’ve got to have some skills. 

What Skills Do I Need?

In order to create videos that are going to be worth your audience’s time, you (or a team) are going to need to have a solid handle on at least these 5 areas:

• Storytelling/Writing
• Editing
• Composition
• Networking
• A Basic Understanding of SEO

These basic components are in the DNA of nearly every video that spreads online.

Storytelling/Writing

This is the foundation. Without a basic understanding of how to tell a story, there is no way you’re going to make a video that’s worth watching.
Being a good writer is not as essential to being a good storyteller, which is why some unscripted talking to the webcam videos can work, but it is certainly essential if your story isn’t compelling enough on it’s own.
Consider these two people talking about food:

(I dare you to watch for longer than a minute and a half)
and the now popular Dayum Drops:

In the Five Guys Review, even though the host is talking to the camera the entire time, his personality, and his ability to move through the story from start to finish keeps you watching the entire time.
In real life, you or I might just cram food into our faces without much thought for story (even if it’s tasty). His expression, however, makes you vicariously experience this moment of bliss when he bites into the burger. His ability to vividly tell the story of eating a Five Guys cheeseburger makes you want that experience, which is a ringing endorsement for the Five Guys brand.
Dayum Drops has such an engaging personality, he can take a mundane event and turn it into an experience with no script at all. On the other hand, the show “Tales of Mere Existence” tells the story of mundane events, but with clever writing and a dry voice over (if only to emphasize the mundaneness of it all):

At the end of the day, good storytelling is the foundational element that separates the competent videos from everything else. It is also often the missing element in most online videos. Without a good story, there is nothing to build on, so the video is destined to fail.
A few key resources on storytelling and writing:
Terrible Mind’s 25 Things You Should Know About Story Structure
Lew Hunter’s ScreenWriting 434
Stephen King’s On Writing

Editing

One thing I can say with the utmost sincerity is good video is more about what’s taken out than what’s left in.
If you want to make good videos, you’re going to cut the script. You’re going to move your story structure around. You’re going to shoot things that will never see the light of day.
Editing is the most frustrating, most time consuming, most rewarding experience.
It happens in two phases:
Pre-Production: This is where you’re plan your video. You write your script, figure out your locations, and plan your camera angles.
After you’ve planned your story and written the first draft of your script, it’s important to cut out all of the parts that are superfluous. Then, once you’ve written your script (even if it’s as something simple as a burger review) you need to read it aloud so you can rewrite and cut all all parts that do not move the story forward.
If you’re shooting “on location” it may become necessary to edit the script again. More often than not, you’ll find certain things don’t work as well in real life as they did when it was just you and your computer.
Your script may need to be edited frequently throughout the entire process. So long as your edits are ultimately serving the story, frequent editing is okay.
Post-production: After all of your footage is shot, it’s time to put it all together. This is the part where most people just aren’t willing to put in the time, probably because editing a video is very hard work.
It has been said that in the average 90 minute move there are over 5000 cuts. Editing is what makes the video. It controls the pace of the story.

“The choice and length of shots shape our response to everything we see on the screen… It’s the reason we like movies, because in the end, wouldn’t we like to edit our own lives?”
- The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing

See what James Cameron has to say about this build up in Terminator 2:
A major Hollywood production shoots nearly 200 hours of film, the editor may work for months, even years, turning those 200 hours into a 90 minute movie. Professional video bloggers do it too, just much quicker.
Try watching only the first 14 seconds of this video. You’ll see what I’m getting at:

Did you watch all 3 minutes? Me too.

Composition

You may have heard him mention the “Rule Of Thirds” at the 0:27 second mark in the video above.
This is what he was talking about:

The Rule of Thirds is the basic building block for video composition and is an even older component in that visual language we were talking about earlier.
If your video involves complex movement and editing, you need to storyboard to organize your thoughts. Yes, it takes more time, but it’s a lot less complicated than getting to your set and trying to figure everything out on the spot. One of the major signs of a rookie video maker is someone who is not able to visually communicate the story. Be sure to have an idea of how your story will flow before you start filming, otherwise you risk losing your audience.
Here’s a whole series of videos about storyboarding on Vimeo.

Networking

If nobody sees your videos, do they really exist?
The truth is, there are volumes upon volumes of content about how to effectively social network. Heck, I even made a video about it myself:
But in my experience, I’ve found that the best networking for showing off your videos happens in person.
If the thought of showing your videos to people in person freaks you out, there’s a simple solution: Make better videos.

A Basic Understanding of SEO

Basic SEO deals with the findability of your content, but I put this component last because assumptions are too often made that if your video is findable, then it’s going to convert.
This couldn’t be any further than the truth. If your video is good, it’s going to convert. If it’s findable, that’s just icing on the cake.
So what do we do to make it more findable?

• Keyword Research
• Title Tag Optimization
• Description Optimization
• Video Transcript

Keyword Research
Simply put, what phrases are people typing in if they wanted to find your video?
You probably already thought about these keywords while making your video, but what you probably didn’t realize is that in addition to using the Google Keyword tool,  you should also be looking at the YouTube Keyword Tool.
Don’t make the assumption that because 10,000 people are searching for a particular keyphrase through Google, that they’re going to be searching for it in YouTube as well. Remember, most people are going to YouTube for entertainment or very specific types of tutorials, whereas Google can be used to search for anything under the sun.
For example, Google’s keyword tool returns 49,500 global monthly searches for the phrase “landing pages”, while YouTube’s states “Not Enough Data”. The term “make money online”, however, returns 368,000 and 20,000 respectively. Therefore, look at both places and try to find the middle ground between them.
Title Tag Optimization
It’s important to use your Keyword phrase in the title, but be careful not to make it look spammy.
Here are the first 4 examples for for the phrase “KettleBell Workout”:

Notice how each one gives you a very specific idea of what the video is about. Each one offers something a little different, but gives the searcher the freedom to choose what is going to be best for them. For reference YouTube’s keyword tool shows 21,600 searches for the phrase, while Google says 49,500; that’s a perfect sweet spot for keyword optimization.
Description Optimization
Notice how the words “KettleBell” and “Workout” are bolded in the description area of the videos? That’s because the video producer remembered to add them throughout the description.
Include your Keywords, but don’t overdo it. Google loves going slaphappy on spammy content.
Also, don’t forget to include a link to your desired call to action as high up in the description. If you want people to share the video, use a service called ClicktoTweet.com. If you want people to opt into a mailing list, insert a link to the landing page you want them to go to. It’s as simple as that.
Video Transcript
This is a big one that many creators often skip, because it can be a bit of a tedious process.
If you were smart in your planning, you created a script of your dialog ahead of time. Open up that script in Notepad, remove everything except the dialog, and save as a .txt file.
Then, add your transcript to YouTube:
Aside from making your hearing-impaired and international viewers happy, this also gives additional content for the GoogleBot to index when they’re trying to determine which videos to rank into the searches.
See, GoogleBot can’t watch videos (poor guy) so he looks for as much relevant information on the page as possible in order to determine what he should put into Google’s main search.
This isn’t a fool-proof tactic by any means, but it certainly doesn’t hurt your chances.
Notice the top two video results in the Google Search for “KettleBell Workout”:
They’re the first and third results from the search we did on YouTube above. The #1 video result here does not have a transcript, but the #2 result does.
So again, it’s not an exact science, but even if you don’t end up ranking in Google, many of your viewers will still appreciate it because having text that coincides with your video often helps people retain the information better.

A Few More Notes

Play to Your Strengths
If you’re not funny, don’t try to ham it up. If you are don’t get too concerned about doing it right.
Even Hubspot has their own in-house SEO rapper:
Encourage Video Responses
On YouTube the hierarchy of social currency looks something like this:

1. View count (least important)
2. Like (slightly more important)
3. Comment (pretty important)
4. Video Response (most important)

These factors all play into how your videos rank for any given keyword on YouTube. Of these, the video response is the most important because it requires the most investment from your viewer.
“But how to I encourage video responses?” you ask.
Chances are, your customers are going to be pretty camera shy, which means you’re going to have to think outside of the box.
The most obvious thing you can do is network with fellow YouTubers since you already know they’re comfortable on camera. Because video comments and responses are so important, you may consider responding to one of their videos first before asking for the return favor.
Inbound Links
Just like other web content, links and embeds on relevant, high quality websites signal to YouTube and Google that your video is one of the good ones.
If you need places to scout for links, plug in a major competitor’s channel URL into opensiteexplorer.org:

If you’re not a paid member, you’ll only get 10 results, but this provides you with a starting place to give you an idea of where else you should look.
It may seem counterintuitive to encourage inbound links that point anywhere other than your website, but remember that YouTube and your website are two entirely different properties. Having different people link to each place means you have more chances of dominating the search rankings with your content on a given keyword.

Conclusion

Like I said in the beginning, if you want to use video marketing for your business your first concern should be creating high quality videos.
If your video isn’t funny, or shocking, or scary, or extremely informative and full of personality, the effort of marketing and promotion will be fruitless. Focus on marketing only after you’ve created something worth marketing, otherwise it’s just a ton of wasted effort.
Have you noticed the “recommended videos” that show up on the right sidebar when you’re watching a video on YouTube? Those are the videos that have the highest retention rates, so if people aren’t watching your videos all the way through, you’re not showing up as recommended. If you’re not showing up, you’re missing out on more potential viewers.