Youtube ad video ppc

[PaulDylan]

anyone has any experience with youtube for adwords and how its converting, etc? tips on how to really narrow it down to keyword level and making sure impressions are based on your preferences?

Thanks

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Dylan,

I'm afraid I don't know a great deal about this - so I've asked one of the PPC experts from Distilled to jump in too.

However .. one tip I would suggest is specifically choosing the channels and videos that you want your ads to appear on, if you can spend the time with this detail. Based on the kind of content you have and the audience it's likely to appear to - you should really consider what your target audience are likely to be searching for and watching on YouTube. Mimic their expected actions and then choose the videos you find to place your ads on.

Dependent on the keyword volume for the terms your targeting, you may not be able to get a great deal of impressions this way, but you can ensure that you're targeting the right users with excellent accuracy.

Cheers,

Phil.

[JasmineA]

Hello!

Phil just flagged this up to me. Great Question. The keyword level targeting for video is no where near as specific as Search advertising. I would say even Display Network keywords have more accuracy (which is saying quite a bit about how horrible the YouTube keyword lists are).

Phil's suggestion is excellent. I would do that in addition to taking these steps:

I would first start with a retargeting campaign with video. You can make the list in Analytics and bring it into AdWords.

Then I would make a target group based on Topic & Interest (topic being the content of the video, and interest being interest of the user). You can always go in and see where your ads are appearing and exclude, like the Display Network.

But, the first half of your question was referring to ROI and tracking. It's tricky. You have to override the system. Here's how:

Step 1. Create a mirrored landing page...a version of an existing page which you can direct all video traffic to with an unique URL. eg www.DOMAIN.com/NewLandingPageStep 2. Tweak the GA code (ONLY on the mirrored landing page) to something like this http://www.youtube.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=VideoAdsFull example below

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-123456789-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'Domain.com']);
_gaq.push(['_setReferrerOverride','http://www.youtube.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Video']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);

})();

(no matter how hard I try, this won't format the way I want it to. I'm sorry that looks so shitty)

Regular video traffic from the GDN should be tracked normally but if not then creating a second page and having a different dummy referrer should be easy enough.

This is the hack that one of our Google Reps provided us. I don't have much information on ROI. I haven't dedicated a great amount of time to it (which is something I need to do and figure out this month).

Hope this has helped!