Setting Your Advertising Budget
YouTube advertising cost ranges (on average) from $0.10 to $0.30 per view or impression, however, the overall cost for each ad campaign can vary based on a variety of factors, such as:
• Your advertising goals.
• The type of YouTube ad you’re running.
• Advertising audience targeting preferences.
•.Your daily budget.
And of course, the cost to create the video itself.
As of 2021, the average business sets a $10 daily budget for its
YouTube advertising campaigns. The key is to set a reasonable
budget and be realistic about your advertising goals.
YouTube Advertising: Special Report 15
YouTube is a great way to maximize traffic and increase
awareness for your business, but you must set a
clear objective right from the start.
Also keep in mind that since YouTube requires that you pay only for the ads that are viewed, you’ll be able to effectively determine your overall advertising costs based on how many views you’re aiming to reach.
You’ll also want to closely monitor your results. You can easily gauge the effectiveness of your ads by tapping into the available metrics that will give you important engagement-based data, such as likes, shares, comments, watch time, and what Google calls “brand lift”.
Brand lift is “a measurement of the direct impact your YouTube
ads are having on perceptions and behaviors throughout the
consumer journey.”
So, begin by creating a cost outline that includes all your upfront costs, such as video creation, script writing, etc.
Then, choose the right type of ad for your business and set a reasonable campaign goal.
Tip: If you are looking to decrease advertising costs, you might
want to consider working with a YouTube advertising partner
who takes care of the video production process for you.
Resource: https://www.youtube.com/ads/resources/creativedirectory//
How to Define Your Target Audience
Reaching new audiences is easy with YouTube ads, but it all starts by defining your target audience. You’ll need to brainstorm and figure out which types of people would be interested in your product or service. That will be based on things like age, location, socio-economic status, educational level, interests, etc.
Don’t be vague, either. “Men” or “Women” just won’t work. Think
more along the lines of “30-something career women with 2
children who are interested in starting a home-based business.”
The key is to narrow down your search as far as possible. YouTube Advertising: Special Report 18 Market research, and being able to define your target audience in a nutshell is important in understanding the customer and how they are going to make purchase decisions.
Targeting a specific audience will also help your ad campaigns reach the right people—those who will relate to your company’s message and will be interested in your products or services.
Let’s say your company is marketing a new educational toy. Your target audiences might be children who are X years old, parents, grandparents, teachers, and maybe educational specialists.
Now you only need to target those people with your ads to find
some potential clients! You can insert your ad into anything from
a children’s video to an educational show for parents—whatever
you believe is not only relevant but likely to trigger a positive
response.
That way, you’d get exposure to different audiences for the same basic ad. Of course, you’d want to tweak the ad to appeal to different ages and demographics. Remember that your target audience isn’t the same as your target market. Both are centered around dividing customers into different groups to help you make informed business decisions.
A target market, however, is a specific group of consumers to whom your company’s products and services are aimed.
A target audience defines that group using demographics,
interests, and buying history.
To put it another way, you can define your target market by
finding your target audience.
For example, if your target market is “young men aged 20-35,” your target audience might be “young men aged 20-35 living in New York City.” You can then divide your audience into groups or further define them using categories like the following:
Purchase Intention: a group of people looking for a specific product or service who are looking for more information before they purchase. Examples would be consumers in the market for a laptop, automobile, television, or an item of clothing. This sort of information is important so you can see how to better direct your messages to your audience.
Interests: a group of people who are interested in the same thing,
like hiking or knitting, or basketball. Knowing this information helps you to connect with your
audience in a relatable way and figure out buyer behaviors and
motivation.
For example, customers interested in baseball memorabilia would
most likely be interested during baseball season, when they can
show off their purchases during the games.
Another example: if you discover that a large group of your audience is interested in eating out, you could figure out a way to work that into your ads and attract even more attention.
Subcultures: groups of people who identify with a shared experience, like a certain music scene or entertainment genre. People define themselves by these subcultures and you can use those to better understand who you’re reaching out to.
For example, if you think of how a certain subculture relates to your business—especially if you have a large potential audience— then you’re reaching your subculture. Think of how Netflix markets to its different subcultures (people who like comedy, science-fiction, horror, and anime) using social media accounts directed at those groups.
Defining your target audience involves a good bit of research. That goes into figuring out exactly who you want to reach and how you can reach them in a way that stands out from your competitors.
Here’s how to find your audience so you can adjust your targeting to reach those people:
1: Use Google Analytics to learn more about your customers. Google Analytics is great for finding demographic details about your audience and their interests. This is critical information that will help you locate a target audience.
With Google Analytics, you can see website insights and how
that’s broken into different sections, like age, gender, and
location.
These sections are clearly labeled on your dashboard and shown
in colorful graphs that are easy to interpret. This tool can be a
fantastic asset that will give you great insight into who’s visiting
your website and how your product or services fit into their lives.
2: Create a reader persona to target your blog content. The good thing about a reader persona is that it should be nearly identical to your buyer persona. You need to remember who you’re writing for and give them useful content to read. This will build your reputation among your consumers and make them trust you to recommend products and services to them. The main difference between a reader persona and a buyer persona is that the reader persona usually focuses on whatever problems that readers might have in their life. Figure out how to write content that solves their problems with one or more blog posts.
3: Check out social media analytics. You need to figure out when your audience is most engaged with your social media channels. Is it when you post funny photos or memes, or when you post a poll? The answers to your questions can give you clues into the content your audience is interested in. Every social media platform is different, with a different audience. So looking at the analytics across all your platforms is very important. For example, Facebook tends to attract an older audience than Twitter does, but Twitter uses short posts while Facebook allows longer posts and even videos. Instagram is visually based, so graphically interesting content would be great for that platform. If you keep those things in mind, you can plan your strategy better. Analytics can tell you who’s looking at your profile, what’s working, and what’s not working about your content. In order to gain followers from your target market, you must post content your audience is interested in.
4: Use Facebook insights. This is a great tool if you have a Facebook account. Facebook gives
every one of your Pages free insights like who your followers are
and where they’re from.
These insights work very similarly to Google Analytics, giving you the crucial information you’ll need to determine your target audience.
On your insights dashboard, access the People tab to see location
demographics like which city your followers live in. That can give
you some interest that might attract your followers.
Launching your First Campaign
You’ve put in the hours, done your homework, and planned everything out perfectly. You’ve perfected your script, storyboarded your ad, found the right talent, shot the ad, and edited it. The result can be a blockbuster video ad! But with all that time and effort invested, you can’t just embed your ad in a random video and hope it reaches the right audience. Great content is almost certain to become sticky sooner or later, but you need to be proactive about getting the attention of prospective clients and educating those unfamiliar with your brand.
YouTube Advertising: Special Report 29 Running a series of YouTube ads is one way to make sure more of your target audience is going to find that video you’ve worked so hard to produce. Advertising on YouTube is different from running a pay-per-click ad or a paid social campaign. YouTube has certain specific constraints, but it also has lots of options. You need some basic knowledge before you start your next video project so you can make the most of your ad possibilities.
A True View ad can include people, dialogue, and music that’s
been retrieved with permission (or is considered royalty-free).
You don’t want to run a standard promotional commercial
though. Since your ads can be skipped, you’ll want to give your
audience a real reason to keep watching. “Product plugs”
generally don’t grab the views that you’ll want.
Instead, tell some sort of story with your video ad. People love seeing case studies of others who’ve faced a struggle that they can empathize with. This sort of ad is harder to skip and it will make your brand more memorable. The True View ads also provide you with lots of information you can use to determine how they’re performing. You can see data on completed views, partial views, click-through rates on your calls-to-action, whether your video drives channel subscriptions, any views sourced from a user sharing your content, and views on the brand’s other content that can be connected to a user who’s viewed your ad.
These actions can help you understand the value of your video ad dollars—and where to focus your budget to increase your results.
Non-skippable pre-roll ads can give you some of the same
features as True View ads do. You can include people, dialogue,
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audio, and other elements that represent your brand—provided you can do it in 15 to 20 seconds.
Because these ads are non-skippable, your best option is to include a call-to-action so you can optimize the viewer’s attention. In other words, encourage your viewers to click on your ad and receive something useful in return. To set up your campaign, first go to your Google AdWords dashboard. The red “+ Campaign” button on the left-hand tab has a dropdown menu where you should choose “Video.” Enter a name for your campaign. Make sure you have also checked the “Video” type from that drop-down menu as well.
Then select “In-Stream or video discovery ads” to make sure your videos will be in True View format. Set your budget per day and your delivery style. The latter will be either standard, where your ads will show evenly over some time, or accelerated, which shows the ads as quickly as possible. Now, decide where you want your ads to appear.
With “YouTube Search,” your ads will appear in search results and on the YouTube home page, channel pages, and video pages. With “YouTube Videos,” your ads will appear as in-display or instream videos.
With this option, you can also choose to show your ads on Google partner sites, apps, and the Display Network. You should try some ads in both YouTube Search and YouTube Videos so you can see the difference each ad makes. YouTube Advertising: Special Report 33 Define the location where you want the ads shown. You can also exclude certain locations if you want. Your YouTube ad is now ready for publication—and ready to net you some potential clients! Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment with different ads to see what your particular audiences enjoy more, and remember to track your results whenever you test a new ad. To your success!
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