Today, the popularity meter of YouTube video marketing does not require a cross-verification. The entire digital marketing industry is after it and will remain hooked to it at least for the next decade or so.
If ‘Content’ is said to be the ‘King’, ‘Video marketing’ is definitely the ‘New Content Marketing King’.
If you are in a concept-selling business and your audience demands engaging videos of your product or service on YouTube, you can’t help but look into effective use of YouTube as a video marketing platform.
One must understand that uploading a video file to a YouTube channel with relevant tags, description and the keyword-rich title is not sufficient to get a decent viewership for it. You may create excellent animated videos in minutes using video creation tools or hire professionals to do the job for you, but without proper marketing and positioning, the end objective may not get fulfilled.
Maximizing your brand reach through a YouTube channel requires additional research work and extensive ROI analysis of the platform.
For a video marketer, here is the summary of actionable YouTube video advertising research points:
- First, find the best resource for creating appealing videos in quick intervals. For example, if you are using cloud based video creation tools like GoAnimate, read reviews and compare it with similar other tools in the market for the best pick.
- Use YouTube keyword tools for free to generate a list of relevant tags and potential keywords.
- Apply YouTube suggested features and available options to their best including channel optimization.
- Learn optimizing YouTube video campaigns to improve cost-per-view (CPV), CTR, audience targeting, and bidding.
- Follow video marketing etiquettes and expert advice religiously.
- Use video advertising research tools like SEMRush, Quintly and Track rankings of videos for making better and informed decisions.
Considering there are enough online resources available on YouTube video marketing strategies and marketing etiquettes, we will concentrate on using video ad research tools in this article.
YouTube Video Advertising Research
Running video ad campaigns on YouTube is not a simple game plan. Despite the potential of YouTube, video marketing is not making it big to some advertisers.
There are thousands of leading YouTube channels and videos where you can place advertisements. But without proper insights into the suitable ad placements and competitive analysis of successful ad campaigns, it is difficult to maximize the video ad benefits. In order to ensure higher page views, shares and comments for your video ads, you need to:
- Identify the top advertisers running successful video ads on YouTube.
- Collect a handful of information about leading YouTube channels and video ads.
- Search for popular in-stream video ads displayed on those videos.
- Unleash competitors’ video ad strategies, the landing pages and video ad placements they use.
- Research video ad markets to know competitive ad costs.
- Find the best placement for your video ads.
- Analyze YouTube channel performance for different advertising options.
- Learn what kind of ad contents produce more views and user interactions.
- Track rankings of videos on search engines via keywords and monitor organic traffic.
Performing the entire exercise manually is not a viable option, either in terms of time or cost. The research work involves an extensive amount of data to be captured, analyzed properly and presented in a suitable business format. Data reliability and analytical precision are the prerequisites to discover the full potential of video ad market.
Without the help from a competent video advertising research tool, it is difficult to make a well-informed marketing decision.
YouTube Analytics is Not Enough
Most advertisers primarily depend on built-in YouTube analytics-based data for research work which is freely accessible. The viewership statistics derived from YouTube is also quite extensive and helpful for marketers, but not enough for optimizing the ROI of a video advertising campaign.
Fig: YouTube Analytics Report Showing Key Performance Metrics
The built-in YouTube video advertising analytics reports show performance record of existing video campaigns with time, against metrics like demographics, traffic sources, engagement, subscribers, likes, dislikes and comments. YouTube also suggests a variety of targeting options including audience profile based on age, gender, location, interests and an estimated cost to aid in ad performance. However, all these available features do not really help in understanding competitors’ activities and current video advertising market.
If you are new to the YouTube ad program, following the advertising basics may help you get started on your own. But, making it a continued success in the long run and beating competition in an advanced level need additional tool based help.
How a Video Ad Research Tool Helps
Today, video advertising is more about gathering and analyzing data on YouTube ad properties and investigating competitors’ ad activities than they were before. A video advertising research tool like SEMrush can help advertisers perform all the market research jobs in a centralized platform. SEMrush, being a popular tool in domain analytics, competitor research, keyword analytics and SEO audit has also extended to the video advertising domain.
Here are some illustrations to help you navigate through SEMrush video advertising properties and their use.
Video Ads – This analytical section shows a comprehensive list of video ads running on YouTube including the recently uploaded ones.
Fig: Composite List of Video Ads on YouTube
Clicking any of the video ads will take you to the video ad overview report which includes key data like advertiser details, channel name, ad publishing date, number of ad views, targeted landing pages, YouTube channels displaying the ad and frequency of ads appearing for a specific time period. Such insights tell you what channels have higher subscriber base; which landing pages yield the maximum return; how many times a video ad is shown on YouTube in a week, month or year etc.
Fig: Video Ad Overview Showing Relevant Statistics for Research
Advertisers – This section enlists all the prospective advertisers, the number of videos each of them has on YouTube, and related information. Such competitive data is useful for analyzing the benchmark of your ad campaign against that of competitors’. The detailed statistics gives a fair idea about what new strategies to adopt from competitors and what strategies not to adopt.
Fig: List of YouTube Advertisers and Related Statistics
Channels – It is better to learn from others’ success than your own mistakes. When you have an easy access to thousands of channels and the drill-down data for each channel, like number of video ads placed per channel, channel’s coverage by videos and views, and total subscriber base per channel, you can make better decisions about choosing the suitable channels for your ad campaign. The higher the coverage by videos, coverage by views and subscriber base a channel has, the better the reach for an ad campaign.
Once you select preferred YouTube channels based on their performance record and start running your video ads on them, the next step is to track your ads in those channels against others. Continuing this exercise for a couple of months will help you understand what works and what doesn’t for your video ad campaign. You may consider revising ad placements based on the derivations.
Fig: List of YouTube Channels and Related Statistics
The whole idea of doing tool based research is that you spend less time in excavating needful information from a variety of data and take actionable decisions from the very beginning.
If you have used any YouTube video advertising research tool for your video campaign and have found it worth trying, please mention it in the comments section below. We appreciate your thoughts and contributions.
YouTube Photo via Shutterstock
This article, "How YouTube Video Advertising Research Helps Run Effective Campaigns" was first published on Small Business Trends
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