7 Ways to Advertise on YouTube

Let's discuss the target methods you can use in your campaigns for Youtube advertising:

1. Placements
Placement targeting allows advertisers to pick specific videos they would like to appear on. The main advantage of placements targeting are:

You can pick highly relevant videos
You spend money only where you have a higher chance to convert
You will be able to control bids on the placements that are likely to make the difference for you
This method also holds many disadvantages:

Volume might be small
CPCs are higher due to a lower amount of available impressions
The campaign will be difficult to scale up

2. Topics
Each person has different topics of interest and being able to target those topics allows you to target a relevant audience while generating volume.

The main advantages of topics targeting are:

Large impression availability
Targeted, but not too narrow
Good CPC compared to placements targeting
The main disadvantages are:

Lower conversion rate than placements targeting
It doesn’t guarantee websites talking about your topics will be relevant to your business
It might be too broad for items targeting specific niches

3. Contextual
Contextual targeting works with keywords and helps identify pages whose context fits the context of your keywords. Picking the right keywords becomes key to the success of this campaign type.

The advantages of a keyword driven display campaign are:

It allows you to target contexts relevant to your business
It is a good way to scale up campaigns at a low CPC
The main disadvantages are:

It might not convert very well at first
It needs a lot of negative placements to make sure the campaign doesn’t invest money on bad websites.

4. Remarketing
This is one of the most effective ways to target people on YouTube since it is based on targeting people who have already visited your website without converting.

Remarketing is extremely powerful and its main advantages are:

High conversion rates
Extremely relevant to the users
It can be customized based on users’ behaviors on the site
Remarketing doesn’t have many disadvantages:

You need to make sure not to target irrelevant users, such as people who bounced right away from your site
It might become too invasive if it has no caps on impressions

5. Interests
Interests can be found in the same place where you add a remarketing list:

Interests include:

Affinity audiences: This option allows you to target large groups of people based on their long-term interests
In-market audiences: This option targets people who are actively shopping in the market for your products or services
The main advantages of interest targeting are:

Possibility to reach out to a large number of targeted users
Lower risk to target irrelevant users
It focuses on the user behavior and not only on page content
The main disadvantages are:

It might still target audiences that aren’t relevant enough

6. Demographics
This target option speaks for itself. It allows you to target users based on age and gender. Additionally, Google introduced an additional targeting layer which consists of targeting a parental status. Here is what the end result looks like:

Demographic targeting has a few powerful advantages:

It helps exclude people who aren’t relevant to a business
It allows you to customize bids by age, gender, and parental status
The main disadvantages are:

It general and targets too many irrelevant users for businesses that don’t aim to the masses
If you get a lot of traffic from “unknown” users, you won’t be able to optimize based on performance and you will be running blind

7. Combination of Targeting Methods
This is certainly one of the most interesting targeting options since it allows you to take the best of each targeting method and reduces targeting disadvantages, since different methods compensate for the flaws of others.

The best practice is to combine two to three targeting options, but no more, to avoid limiting your audience too much.

Conclusion
With the ever-increasing demand for video, you can never know too many ways to get your ads in front of the right audience. However, not every business has videos ready to go and banners are a great way to get started with YouTube. Get in touch with us at Entwined Media and we will help you in these tips to increase sales and brand awareness across Youtube.