With over 2 billion users, YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms globally. Every day, people use YouTube to find information or to entertain themselves. This means there is an enormous potential for e-commerce businesses to run YouTube Ads to attract the target audience. This popular social media marketing platform gives opportunities to e-commerce businesses to build brand awareness, generate leads, and engage with potential customers to increase conversion rates. Let’s delve deep into understanding what YouTube Ads are and how to launch them to improve the effectiveness of advertising spent for e-commerce businesses.
What is YouTube?
YouTube is a video-sharing social media platform owned by its parent company, Google. It allows users to upload, share, and watch videos. YouTube has become a hub for content creators and businesses to promote their products, services, and content. By creating engaging content in the form of video, businesses and influencers can interact with the audience through likes, comments, and subscriptions. With its user-friendly interface, it has become a vital platform for e-commerce brands to promote products & services and boost brand recognition.
What are YouTube Ads?
YouTube Ads allows businesses to run video advertising on the YouTube platform. E-commerce businesses can promote their products and services through different video ad formats on the YouTube apps, websites, and partner sites known as Google Display Network(GDN). It is an effective strategy to reach your target audience and optimize YouTube Ad campaigns according to the objective of e-commerce business.
Different YouTube As format
There are different YouTube Ad formats that an e-commerce company can use based on their objectives. These are:-
1. Skippable in-stream ads
As the name suggests, skippable in-stream ads allow users to skip the ad after five seconds. This ad can be played before, during or after the other video content on the YouTube app or website. These ads help businesses to drive conversion and reach new audiences. If you are an e-commerce company whose objective is to boost sales & brand awareness, get leads and increase website traffic, then it is a suitable ad which you can run on YouTube. To encourage people to interact with your e-commerce brand, you can also use CTA buttons and sitelinks assets and drive people to your e-commerce website’s landing page. For an e-commerce business, designing an attractive landing page is important to persuade users to navigate websites and convert them into customers. You can get in touch with web development experts who will create customized websites and compelling landing pages to help your e-commerce business convert leads into customers.
2. Non-skippable in-stream ads
In this ad format, viewers don’t have the option to skip it, and they have to watch the whole video ad. The major requirement is that the video ad should be 15 to 30 seconds long. These ads appear on mobile, desktop, and TV screens. With the reduced attention span of people, an e-commerce brand can leverage non-skippable ads to increase brand awareness and encourage the target audience to buy their products and services.
3. In-feed video ads
In-feed video ads appear on the YouTube homepage and searches. These ads place your brand, product, and service alongside YouTube content that is likely to be viewed by your target audience. These ads don’t have any maximum length and are excellent ad formats to deliver similar information your viewer may be consuming.
4. Masthead ads
Masthead ads appear on devices like mobile, desktop, TV screens, and tablets. These ads use responsive ad formatting to show the most optimal ads across different devices and are reserved through Google sales representatives. Masthead ads are suitable for those e-commerce websites whose objective is to increase mass reach or awareness and show off their products/ services in prominent spaces on YouTube platforms.
5. Outstream ads
Outstream ads appear on websites and apps running on Google partner videos. These ads are not displayed on YouTube. It is used to expand the reach of your video ads on mobile to attract more customers for your business and appears on banners, in-feed, and interstitials in mobile banners. If you want to promote your e-commerce business on mobile, you can leverage these ads. Also, you can outsource mobile ads to promote your products and services on mobile devices.
6. Bumper ads
Bumper ads are short video ads that feature memorable messages. These ads can be 6 seconds and are a very effective method of promoting awareness of your products and services.
How do you set up a YouTube Ads campaign for e-commerce?
The steps to set up a YouTube Ads campaign for e-commerce are as follows:-
Step 1- Click the campaign icon in the Google Ads account
Step 2- In the section menu, click on the campaign drop-down
Step 3- Click campaign, click the plus icon (+), and select the new campaign
Step 4- Choose campaign goals based on your objective
Step 5- Select video in select a campaign type
Step 6- Select the campaign subtype in the campaign subtype section according to your goals, such as drive conversion, custom video campaigns, video reach campaigns, etc.
Step 7- Click Continue to launch your campaign.
How to create YouTube Ads for e-commerce
1. Understand your objective
Every business is seeking ways to optimize its marketing efforts to increase brand visibility. For an e-commerce business, online advertising becomes crucial due to the lack of physical existence. YouTube provides tremendous opportunities for e-commerce businesses to promote their products and services to the target audience. However, prior to creating ads, it is important to understand your business objective. Whether you want to generate quality leads, increase brand awareness, or boost sales, you need to have clarity to usher your advertising efforts in that direction. After setting goals, e-commerce businesses should conduct market research to understand consumer behavior, competitor presence, and the possibility of the company to flourish in that industry and create a go-to-market strategy to bring fruitful results.
For example:- you are an e-commerce clothing company that wants to promote fast fashion with sustainability, but there is little awareness about your brand. Now you have clarity about how you want to increase brand awareness about your products. By setting a clear goal, you can create an effective YouTube Ad campaign to make people aware of what material you use in making clothes, how they are eco-friendly, and how to promote sustainability.
2. Know the platform
YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. Like the Facebook platform and Instagram platforms, YouTube offers diverse opportunities for e-commerce businesses to advertise their products/services and drive traffic to websites. 68% of YouTube users watch YouTube videos before making a purchase decision. This means YouTube acts as a negotiator to persuade audiences to purchase products and services from your e-commerce website. As you might know, Google is the parent company of YouTube; advertising on YouTube has become more efficacious because YouTube gathers viewers' data from Google searches and YouTube video history to effectively promote ads to the target audience.
3. Target your audience
Before launching a YouTube Ads campaign, e-commerce businesses should know who their target audience is. Creating a buyer person will help e-commerce businesses to know more about the target audience's taste and preference for higher conversion. There are certain parameters that can help e-commerce companies to find their target audience. These are:-
a. Demographics- Targeting customers based on age, gender, location, household income, etc., allows you to customize your ads and improve conversion rate.
b. Past interaction- Target customers who have interacted with you in the past through video or YouTube Ads.
c. Remarketing- Video remarketing allows you to target customers on your best-performing video ads.
d. Topic of interest- Target customers by creating content and video ads based on their topic of interest. Content specialists can create compelling content to attract traffic and build your brand authority.
e. Affinity marketing- You can also target customers who have similar preferences to those your e-commerce business provides through products or services.
4. Create compelling ads
Do you know that 500 hours of videos are uploaded every minute? With this much competition and the abundance of videos on YouTube, creating compelling ads becomes crucial rather than optional. Before creating engaging YouTube video ads, it is wise to choose the correct video ad format. We have discussed the different video ad formats an e-commerce business can use based on their objective. After choosing the ad format, use the targeting option to target the right customer. From humor to sadness, an e-commerce business can use different emotions to attract and make potential customers aware of their products or services. Since the YouTube platform is used to create video ads and promote them to the target audience, it is essential to create visual ads in the form of images or films. If you have difficulty creating compelling ads, you can outsource video ads, display ads, search ads, and remarketing ads from a digital marketing agency to attract targeted audiences to your website.
5. Monitor campaign performance
Monitoring YouTube Ads performance is as crucial as creating ads. For an e-commerce company, constantly monitoring campaign performance is important to redirect marketing efforts in the right direction. Monitoring ad performance by tracking metrics such as clicks, watch time, and views will help you analyze if your marketing is reaping fruitful results. Tracking YouTube campaign performance is necessary to make adjustments in YouTube campaigns by testing different ad formats, content types, etc., to ensure that your advertising efforts are fulfilling your business goals. You can also reach out to a digital marketing agency to find out which ads are not performing well and how you can optimize them to achieve a high conversion rate from your YouTube Ad campaign.
Why should e-commerce businesses leverage YouTube Ads?
1. To reach a broad audience
YouTube is one of the largest platforms where users engage most for entertainment and information. It provides immense opportunities for e-commerce businesses to advertise their products and services to broad audiences since YouTube is available in more than 100 countries. Although incorporating search engine optimization practices increases brand awareness and website ranking on search engines, YouTube provides an excellent opportunity for reaching the target audience and lead generation.
2. To reduce the cost of marketing
When compared to traditional marketing, YouTube Ads are highly cost-effective. You can set a budget for your advertisement, and your money is only deducted when somebody clicks on your ads. This platform allows you to target audiences based on demographics, behavior, interests, etc. YouTube Ads provide a variety of ad formats based on your budget and e-commerce business goals.
3. To track your ad campaign
YouTube provides an opportunity to track the result of your ad campaign. By clicking on the Analytics tab in your YouTube accounts, track the campaign performance by analyzing metrics. In the tab, you can track your ads views, conversion rate, and other data that can be used to optimize campaign performance. In a Google Ads account, you can track the budget and view related details. For an e-commerce company, regularly monitoring ad campaign performance is vital to find out if your marketing efforts are going in the right direction. If you are facing difficulty, consider outsourcing PPC campaign analysis services to track and monitor YouTube Ad performance to achieve the desired goal.
4. To improve the engagement rate
According to YouTube, 70% of viewers are more aware of a new brand. This means there is a great opportunity for new e-commerce companies to increase brand awareness and engagement rates by crafting compelling ads. E-commerce companies can become a little bit more creative when crafting ads. They can use various emotions or messages to create eye-catching ads and increase brand recall among potential customers.
5. To have flexibility and control
YouTube Ads allow you to have control of your ads and give flexibility to time and budget. This means if you want to run YouTube Ads on a specific date and time within a particular budget, You can run a campaign by making changes and setting a specific date and time. Suppose your business location is the US, and you want to run your ads on a specific time and date in India; in such a case, you can craft ads based on the tastes and preferences of people residing in India and your YouTube Ads on a specific time zone and date in India.
Conclusion
YouTube has gained prominence in recent years and has become a hub for watching and uploading video content. Almost every business is running YouTube Ads to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to their website. E-commerce businesses should leverage YouTube Ads by crafting compelling video content that tells about their offerings and benefits. We understand that it could be a challenging task, especially for a new e-commerce company, to craft video content, upload it on YouTube, and monitor your ad performance to achieve the desired goals. In such a scenario, you can reach out to a digital marketing company and avail of e-commerce PPC services. They will conduct market research, craft unique video content as per your business requirements, and also manage your e-commerce company’s online reputation. You can also outsource PPC and avail of white label PPC services to enhance the conversion rate of your e-commerce PPC ads. Also, to enhance the performance of local PPC ads you can avail of PPC services for your local ads such as painting PPC, plumbing PPC, electrician PPC, construction PPC, appliance repair PPC, etc. to maximize the advertising ROI.
References:
- YouTube Ads ecommerce guide: When, how and why
- YouTube Ads for e-commerce: 5 key marketing strategies