Basically, AdWords for Video is Google’s attempt to capture the video advertising world by taking advantage of the 800 million monthly visitors to YouTube. The company maintains that YouTube video ads can drive a 20 percent increase in traffic to an advertisers website and a five percent increase in searches. And with Google’s $100 million assurance to transform YouTube into a place for premium, long-form video content, the new service could really take off.
Image via Google
Video advertising just picking the sheen for small business with Google’s launch of AdWords for Video, which adds YouTube advertising to the AdWords dashboard, enabling businesses to manage search, display and video campaigns from one place. With local being a major criterion for many of these businesses, advertisers will be happy to know that this includes geotargeting.
“We have geotargeting facility in AdWords for video so yes, local businesses can focus their advertising on specific geographies,” A Google spokesperson assures us.
Besides, the program was soft launched last September for a chosen few, but now Google AdWords for Video is available to all and it basically follows the same logic as Google’s text-based AdWords.
“You can promote your video by keyword to appear in YouTube search results, or you can select to display your ad against content your customers are most interested in–such as sports or music,” said Baljeet Singh, YouTube group product manager. “On average, we have found that YouTube video ads drive a 20 percent increase in traffic to your website and a 5 percent increase in searches for your business.”
In order to motivate those new to video advertising to dive in, Google has appointed nine business ambassadors willing to go public with their stories of how video ads have worked for them. The personal video testimonials offer a closer look at how this new advertising platform is being harnessed by its initial user group. So without much ado take a look at another video from Google describing the video ad service from Google.
Google compares YouTube advertising to other media:
Still, it will take a while for SMB’s to grasp on en masse since many of them still do not quite get the importance of video for their business. In the end what actually matters, though, as with any business it is about conversions and if this program proves to generate business enough of the millions of small businesses will catch on to make it very lucrative for Google.
As for the service itself, it is pretty much identical to the search ads, where you pay for clicks and allocate budgets with bids, but advertisers only pay for video ads when users choose to watch it. Campaigns will be accessible through the same panel used for search and display ad campaigns, which is nice for both ROI and promotion coordination purposes.
Advertisers only pay when users watch their ads (not when they skip them).
“With TrueView video ads you only pay when viewers choose to watch your ad so you are not charged when viewers skip your ad if they are not interested or have already seen your video,” explains Singh. “This means your ad budget is pinned on viewers interested in your video. By displaying a call-to-action overlay on your video you can talk about a sale or specific offer to your viewers, share more information about your business, or drive traffic to your website.”
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To help get the new service off to a good start, Google is also coughing up $50 million in free Google AdWords advertising, or a $75 video ad campaign credit in an attempt to encourage around 500,000 new businesses to try video advertising.
The company has released a short primer video about the Google Adwords for video service below, which has been launched in a number of different languages for global users, and a more in-depth video (below) covers the specifics of how the program works.
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The video below is to help get SMB’s charged up about the possibilities of video advertising.
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