Video advertising just got a lot better 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 element for many of these businesses, advertisers will be happy to know that this includes geotargeting.
“We have geotargeting capability in AdWords for video so yes, local businesses can focus their advertising on specific geographies,” A Google spokesperson assures us.
Google compares YouTube advertising to other media:
According to recently released data from comScore, video ad impressions reached record numbers in March. The firm says video ads accounted for 18.5% of all videos viewed and 1.5% of all minutes spent viewing video online.
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 aren’t charged when viewers skip your ad if they aren’t interested or have already seen your video,” explains Baljeet Singh, YouTube group product manager. “This means your ad budget is focused 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.”
There are four TrueView formats: in-stream, in-search, in-slate and in-display.
“On average, we’ve 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 (Google Campaign Insights, 2011),” says Singh. “With AdWords for video you can find out how viewers are engaging with your brand during and after they watch your ad. You can see how many viewers watched your entire video, visited your website, stayed on your channel to watch another video, or subscribed to your channel, after viewing your ad.”
Google bought YouTube back in 2006. For years after that, the deal and Google’s monetization fo the property were heavily criticized. While Google has certainly made YouTube more ad-saturated in recent years, this new offering could be the one that really pays off. Apparently, Google even thinks it can generate as much revenue as its search ads.
Are these ads part of Google’s master plan to boost CPCs? For the last two quarters, Google has revealed declines in CPCs, while Facebook – which is becoming more of a competitor to Google than ever – is apparently destroying Google on that front, though Facebook has yet to unleash its mobile ads, which could have a similar effect on the company’s revenue as Google’s mobile ads have had on its own. Mobile is widely accused of contributing greatly to Google’s CPC decreases.
During an earnings call earlier this month, Google CEO Larry Page talked about how bullish he is on mobile, and that CPCs will improve. Mobile is exploding in query growth, he said, adding that the formats are just adapting a lot from a “relatively crude base.”
“Right now, they don’t monetize well,” he said, comparing it to search in the early 2000s.
People always spend most of their efforts on the major source of traffic, which is desktop, he said. But over time, he said, that will reverse.
In the meantime, there are a whole lot of YouTube users, both desktop and mobile. There are over 800 million total. That’s a Facebook-like number on its own (well, almost). It will be quite interesting to see how the AdWords For Video element impacts CPCs.
And how long until AdWords ads creep their way into Google+?
Of course Google+ is just the social spine of Google anyway, right? And it’s another as of yet untapped batch of real estate.