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Google Video Ads

Drive leads and increase sales with Google video ads!
MyZone Marketing is a certified Google Partner and has helped hundreds of small business owners get the most value from their media spending since 2002!

Are you thinking about getting started with Google video ads? Or maybe you have tried them in the past and need some help making them more profitable? Here we’ll share a little bit more about how we typically approach Google videos ads on behalf of our clients.

Let’s Get Started

Creative

Once both client and agency have signed off on the strategic plan, it’s time to get started on creatives (i.e. the actual videos themselves). Many of our clients will already have in-house video assets which we can chop up and reformat for the various different ad requirements, OR we can start from scratch and produce fresh new content on your behalf.

If you are working on the video ads yourself, be sure you have read Google’s tips for creating effective video ads article here.

A few additional rules we like to follow:

First 5 seconds
Marketing funnel

First 5 seconds

Most Youtube ads are non-skippable for the first 5 seconds,
so capturing and sustaining people’s attention fast and
early is important. We’ve seen video ads where the first 15
seconds of a longer video tells you absolutely nothing
about the brand, and that is a huge missed opportunity.

Marketing funnel

Be sure to adjust your creative based on where your prospective customer is in the marketing funnel.

Funnel Stages:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversion / Purchase

PRO TIP

Want to save 60%+ on your video ad remarketing budgets without impacting your conversions?

Be sure to create an audience of customers who have bounced from your site and exclude them!

AWARENESS

Generate interest in the brand

These are customers that have never heard of your brand before. Creatives should focus on the big picture–who you are, what you are selling, what your brand promise is, etc. These videos tend to be more comprehensive than those further down the funnel, and really need to drive an impressive first impression.

CONSIDERATION

Get people to think about you over the competition

This refers to customers who have visited your site for >15 seconds, but haven’t shown their commitment to buy. They know who you are already, and require more information to support their decision-making. Video ad creative that often works well at this stage can be more detailed product descriptions (related to the actual products they visited on our site), or videos that help to build trust (customer testimonials, guarantees, shipping policies etc.).

AWARENESS

Encourage action

These are people that have almost bought and just need a little push over the finish line. Encourage them to take action by focusing on video creative that offers discounts, promotions, or create urgency with limited time specials or low inventory warnings. Using dynamic advertising based on products left in their shopping cart can be super impactful at this stage.

Targeting Strategies

Next, it is important to separate your campaigns into clear targets to help align the correct creatives, and test out which targets are working best.

With Google video ads, the two types targeting are by audience, and by content:

Audience Targeting
Content Targeting

Audience Targeting

Similar to how we develop different ad creatives based on where your customers are in the marketing funnel, we can using pixels, email lists and build in targeting tools to reach different customer audiences.

Demographics
We can target based on age, sex, household income, parental status, and more.

Interests
There are thousands of different ways you can target customers by interest, including:

  • Affinity segments
  • Custom affinity segments
  • In-market segments
  • Custom segments
Affinity segments
Raise brand awareness and drive consideration with your video ads by reaching people who already have a strong interest in relevant topics.
Custom affinity segments
With custom affinity segments, you can create audiences that are more tailored to your brands, compared to our broad, TV-like affinity segments. For example, rather than reaching "Sports Fans," a running shoe company may want to reach "Avid Marathon Runners" instead.
Life events
Reach potential customers on YouTube and Gmail when purchase behavior shifts and brand preferences change during life milestones like moving, graduating from college, or getting married.
In-market segments
Select from these audiences to find customers who are researching products and actively considering buying a service or product like those you offer.
Custom Segments
Built with performance advertisers in mind, custom segments allow you to reach viewers as they’re making a purchase decision based on the keywords they’ve recently searched on Google.com

Your Data

You can use audiences that you have created from within Google Analytics as people interact with specific URLs on your site. You can also market to people that have watched previous videos, read specific blog articles, or even clicked on your email newsletters. With customer match, you can upload lists and work with your first-party customer data to create lookalike audiences.

Source: Google Ads support

Content Targeting

As if audience targeting wasn’t enough, you can (and should) also engage in content targeting strategies and think about where you want your ads to show up.

  • Placements
  • Topics
  • Keywords
  • Devices
Placements
Target channels, videos, apps, websites, or placements within websites. For example, you can target an entire high-traffic blog or just the homepage of a popular news site. Placements can include: YouTube channels, YouTube videos, websites and apps on the Google Display Network
Topics
Target your video ads to specific topics on YouTube and the Google Display Network. Topic targeting lets you reach a broad range of videos, channels, and websites related to the topics you select. For example, if you target the "Automotive" topic, then your ad will show on YouTube to people watching videos about cars.
Keywords
Depending on your video ad format, you can show your video ads based on words or phrases (keywords) related to a YouTube video, YouTube channel, or type of website that your audience is interested in.
Devices
Target users using computers, smartphones, mobile devices, and TV screen devices like Chromecast.

Testing

Here is where we pair up the awesome video ads (creatives), with a wide range of targeting strategies to test out which creatives are working best with which audiences. This step is often overlooked when people run out of time or budget, and is usually the place where we can help people dramatically reduce their cost per conversions. Here is a little example of how it can work.

  • Disclaimer
  • Testing creatives
  • Testing targets
  • Testing landing pages
  • Putting it all together
Disclaimer
Testing complexity needs to be aligned with your budget so as to not waste money!
Testing creatives
Here we would create edited versions of your different videos, and test them out to the appropriate audiences to see which ones are getting the most value. Assuming your goal is leads or conversions, we can see which ones get the highest click-through rates, the longest view times, and most importantly, which ones result in the lowest cost per acquisition (CPA). Running proper ad creative experiments should be an ongoing process, and can often result in 100%+ improvements.
Testing targets
Similar to the creative testing strategies, you want to set up your account in a way where you’re testing out a wide variety of different targeting strategies and seeing which ones are getting the best results.
Putting it all together
When you combine creative testing, target testing, and landing page variants, that is when the magic appears. We’ve seen campaigns with $300 CPA’s drop to $30 when all the testing comes together…
Testing landing pages
Another often overlooked step, we like to use custom landing pages from Unbounce to ensure that the ad creative and targeting align almost perfectly with the landing page. Testing out different variations of the landing page (promotions, imagery, call to action, etc.) can also have a profound impact on your conversion rates.

PRO TIP

Automatically place people into specific audiences

Did you know that you can use UTM parameters to automatically place people into specific audiences? You can then remarket to them with video ads, based on the original search terms they were looking for.

Ready to take your business to the next level? Our Google Ads agency can help!

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