Chapter 4
IN THIS CHAPTER
Exploring ad format options
Going beyond YouTube with your video ads
Familiarizing yourself with the ad policy
In this chapter, you explore a variety of YouTube ad formats. You find out the benefits of each format and the reasons to use them in a campaign. You also discover the ad policy that governs what you can and, most importantly, cannot advertise.
YouTube has pioneered different ad formats and is constantly experimenting with new and compelling ways to deliver a marketer’s message to the audience. YouTube always keeps in mind these two goals:
Those goals are in order of priority. YouTube, and Google in general, will always put the user first.
When I worked at Google and YouTube, the company deprecated (meaning it stopped offering) a particular ad format that a lot of advertisers used. Why? It was simple: The ad format was too interruptive, too long, and too high a price for viewers of YouTube videos to pay (in terms of time, it took 30 seconds to watch). The ad format was no longer a good experience for the end user, and so it had to go.
YouTube’s ad formats do change often, so for the latest ad format offerings, visit the official site at https://ads.google.com
.
At the time of writing, YouTube has a simple yet comprehensive offering of ad formats that come in a variety of lengths, types, and abilities:
You can run good old traditional display ads on YouTube. Display ads, sometimes known as banner ads, are ads that are static or animated image-based ads. Display ads appear on most websites next to a video that’s playing on desktop and laptop computers, but not on mobile phones. On YouTube, display ads are 300 x 250 pixels or 300 x 60 pixels.
You can create your display ads in any graphics software program, such as Adobe Photoshop, and export them in formats like GIF, JPG, PNG, or HTML5.
Some marketers make use of display ads on YouTube to drive clicks to their landing pages, although display ads aren’t always the best type of media to deliver clicks. When was the last time you clicked on a display ad?
Think of display ads much like an outdoor billboard. Similar to someone walking by and taking in a message on a billboard, someone watching a video will likely also see the display ad and your message.
You can even run display ads in concert with your video ads, described later in this chapter, which means you have two chances on the page to communicate and reinforce your message.
Remember that display ads on YouTube are in competition with the video that’s playing and all the thumbnails for other videos. Display ads, videos, and video thumbnails need to work hard to grab attention, so use animation and choose bold contrasting colors with limited text. If you’re including a call to action to have people click, use something truly compelling. For example, instead of “Click here for more,” you could try actions like “Sign up now” or “Donate today.” The clearer and more compelling the benefit, the higher the chance for a click.
Image ads appear across the bottom 20 percent of the video that’s being played. You’ll see these ads only on desktop and laptop computers. The viewer can dismiss the ad by clicking the X in the ad’s upper right-hand corner. Image ads are 468 x 60 and 728 x 90 pixels and can be in JPEG, JPG, PNG, or GIF formats.
Marketers can use image ads in combination with other ads shown to the viewer in the same session. For example, a video ad may appear with a display ad to the right of the video you’re watching, and an image ad may appear over the video (see Figure 4-1). Together, these ads work in concert.
You may like this ad format because image ads
Possibly the ad format that makes YouTube the most incredible of platforms is the skippable video ad. Skippable video ads allow you to skip the ad after just five seconds of viewing.
Skippable video ads appear before, during, or after a video. The advertiser only pays when the viewer watches 30seconds or the end of the video ad, whichever comes first.
At the time of writing, Google TrueView is the name most commonly used to refer to skippable video ads on YouTube. TrueView was developed to provide a great viewing experience for the end user and to allow the advertiser to pay only for the views people watch. After all, why force someone to watch your ad when they may not be interested? Instead, TrueView encourages advertisers to make ads that people want to see. Even further, TrueView doesn’t limit the length of your video ad, so you can make a 30-second ad or a 30-minute ad!
TrueView can come in two flavors:
The added bonus of TrueView is that the view count of your video will be incremented each time a viewer watches 30 seconds or the full video ad, whichever comes first, or interacts with your video — for example, by clicking on the ad to visit your website. (Note that YouTube Analytics won’t track video views of TrueView videos less than 10 seconds in length.)
You may like this ad format because skippable video ads
Nonskippable video ads work the same way as skippable video ads (see preceding section), except viewers do not have the option of skipping them.
YouTube is always evaluating whether nonskippable video ads provide a negative experience for the end user and will often experiment with the options available for this kind of ad format. In fact, YouTube uses a range of signals, such as how the user discovered the video, to determine when it may be okay to serve up a forced video ad.
Nonskippable video ads appear before, during, or after a video and force viewers to watch the entire ad, which are typically 15 to 20 seconds long.
Many traditional marketers like to use a nonskippable forced-view ad because that’s how other media works. For example, TV commercials are forced because you can’t skip ahead of them (unless you’re using TiVo!) You can, of course, deliver a high-quality video ad that someone wants to watch and run it in a nonskippable ad format, but why force someone to watch your message even if they don’t want to see it? Instead, make ad creative that people want to watch, run it in skippable ad formats like TrueView, and only show your ad to people who wanted to watch? (For more on skippable video ads, see the preceding section.)
You may like this ad format because nonskippable video ads
Keep in mind that you may be forcing people to watch an ad they just don’t want to see, which may mean it’s not effective.
Check Google Ads (https://ads.google.com
) for the latest options for nonskippable video ads.
Midroll ads are is not so much a type of ad format, but rather a way in which your video ads may be served up. If you’re watching a video that’s more than 10 minutes long, a midroll ad may appear. Midrolls ads interrupt the video you’re viewing, forcing you watch them before continuing with the video. YouTube inserts midroll ads only into longer videos, where it’s not unreasonable for a viewer to complete the ad and carry on watching their video.
When popular YouTubers are uploading their longer videos, they have the option of manually inserting ad break spaces where their content natural pauses. They can also choose to have YouTube find the natural breaks in their video and insert midroll ad spaces automatically. For example, YouTube’s machine learning is able to differentiate between moments in a video where a natural pause makes sense versus interrupting an important conversation taking place in the video.
Partly thanks to the rise (and for some, fall) of platforms like SnapChat, Vine, and Instagram, shorter videos and ad formats are commonplace. A few years ago, YouTube created bumpers, a new ad format that is sometimes referred to as six-second ads (see Figure 4-3).
Bumper ads were developed to work especially well on mobile devices, where people don’t want a long video ad to interrupt their viewing experience. The idea is that despite being a forced ad, a six-second format fits nicely with human’s attention span and isn’t too interruptive an experience, particularly when you’re just hopping onto YouTube briefly.
You may be surprised at just how much you can communicate in a six-second ad and how useful they can be as part of your media mix. Six-second ads are great to
You may like this ad format because bumper ads
I can’t think of any reasons why you wouldn’t choose this ad format. I think bumper ads are great.
If you visit the YouTube home page (see Figure 4-4), you’ll see the Masthead, a large display ad that spans across the page above the video thumbnails. The Masthead is the mother of all display ads, allowing advertisers to purchase a takeover of the YouTube home page for a full 24 hours. It’s a huge canvas that you can customize by using images, text, video, and rich media.
Large-scale marketers with big budgets may buy this ad unit for a big awareness campaign because it reaches millions of people in just one day. The Masthead costs a lot of money, in the hundreds of thousands for just one day, with the price varying by country. Each time you visit the YouTube home page, see who has bought the Masthead slot that day, and think about what is being advertised and why the Masthead may be a good vehicle for it.
The Masthead
Of course, if you don’t have a few hundred thousand dollars to blow in one day, this ad format may not be for you. The Masthead is really only for the biggest of advertisers.
Google Preferred isn’t an ad format but rather a way to buy media. It’s predominantly for the biggest of advertisers, who spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars per year.
YouTube has curated a collection of its top content from the most popular YouTube channels and crafted it into packages, also known as lineups, across a variety of categories — for example, a Beauty & Fashion package contains the top YouTubers in these categories. The top 5 percent or so of videos across all of YouTube based on quality metrics as well as popularity are ring-fenced (separated from the rest of YouTube’s ad space inventory) into these packages, so only the advertisers with the biggest budgets can place their ads against them.
This approach is similar to how media buying occurs in the TV world, where advertisers pay larger sums upfront to buy the ad slots that run in the most popular primetime TV shows. Big advertisers are often keen to ensure that their ads run against only the best content and want to make more specific selections rather than just letting their ads run anywhere on YouTube. I suppose the idea is that ads that run against better quality content are somehow better, but that’s debatable.
Google Preferred may be right for you if you’re an advertiser who values the placement of your ad creative alongside premium content and don’t like the idea that your ad may run against a cat video.
If you’re not as concerned with which videos your ads run against or you’re more interested in the most cost-effective media rather than paying a slight premium for specific placement, then Google Preferred probably isn’t for you.
If you’re creating display and video ads to run on YouTube, you can use the Google Display Network (GDN), the largest advertising network in the world. All advertisers can run their ads on this ad network.
GDN reaches more than 92 percent of the Internet through a network of millions of websites that offer advertising space. Sites of any size across any topic can join the network. You can tap into these websites through a variety of targeting methods with lots of different ad formats.
GDN allows you to reach a bigger audience and test whether different placement across the Internet can give you a more effective media buy and better results. It also lets you experiment with other ad formats not available on YouTube, such as text ads.
If you initially want to focus just on ad campaigns on YouTube, then you don’t need to extend to the GDN. However, you should consider it because it may be a way to reach more people more efficiently.
Unlike YouTube, which predominantly focuses on video ads, you can run other kinds of ads on the GDN:
GDN offers many powerful options to target people, which makes it a great complement to a YouTube-focused effort for any kind of campaign type. Targeting methods include
Google and YouTube are successful due in large part to their ability to create a high-quality experience across all of their products, services, apps, and sites. Delivering a high-quality experience requires having various policies in place so that their sites don’t become the Wild West of the Internet, where anything goes. Imagine if you visited YouTube to search for a how-to video, and offensive adult-themed videos were served up? You may stop using YouTube altogether if it isn’t a platform you can trust.
YouTube is always reviewing and improving its policies and procedures as it has the mammoth task of straddling the line between a platform for all yet needing to police content that isn’t appropriate. The same is true of advertising on YouTube, in that all advertising must follow certain rules and regulations. You need to be aware of some key guidelines before you start to create your advertising creative and run your first campaign on the platform.
Some of the categories listed as prohibited content may seem obvious, but people will try anything! Here are some categories that you are not allowed to advertise on Google or YouTube:
Beyond specific prohibited content, Google and YouTube want you to be aware of the way in which they’d like advertisers to behave across their ad platforms.
Restricted content is the grey-area of the ad policy because it deals with content that may be legally or culturally sensitive. Google and YouTube have different policies in place depending on the country where you’re advertising, and sometimes it requires advertisers promoting restricted content to complete some additional steps in order for their ads to be eligible to run. Here are some examples of what restricted content includes:
Overall, Google and YouTube continuously review the policy in place that governs what is acceptable. They tend to take a more conservative position because they operate in so many countries, must please so many people, and ultimately are accountable to shareholders who tend not to like controversy. As long as you are an honest advertiser who is aware of the basics of the ad policy, you’ll find success in using their ad platforms. If you’re a nefarious marketer looking to game the system, you’d be better off going somewhere else as you’ll get cracked down on pretty quickly.
Google and YouTube’s ad policy has one more component piece, which covers editorial and technical requirements. Google and YouTube want to ensure that