Explore how in-stream and in-feed ads work, targeting strategies, and cost-saving tips with Justin Sardi.
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Video Transcript

In-stream ads

Justin Sardi: Have you ever wondered what the best type of YouTube ad you should be running is? Well, there are a bunch of different formats and today I’m going to break down the top two types of ads that you should be running. Explain how you pay for them and how you can take advantage of the way that you do pay for these ads to get yourself additional branding, do retargeting, and a ton of extra stuff. So, that being said, let’s go ahead and dive right in.

All right, so obviously the top type of ad that everybody thinks about when they’re thinking about YouTube ads is called an in-stream ad, right? This is one right here, this is from Shopify. Obviously you have to watch this for five seconds before you are able to do anything, right? Before you’re able to skip it. And the cool thing about these ads, and you can see this one’s actually 22 seconds, but with an in-stream ad, the way that you pay is you pay if somebody watches 30 seconds of your ad or the entire thing, whichever comes first. So, the Shopify ad it’s 22 seconds, they’re going to pay when somebody watches 22 seconds. But if somebody watches 21 seconds and skips, Shopify is not paying a penny for these ads. So, the cool thing about these in-stream ads, obviously you’re going to want to use that first five to 15 seconds to really hook the right audience. But in doing that, you can also push the wrong audience away, saving you money.

So, if your targeting’s not quite dialed in, which I’ll actually have another video on targeting as well, you can check our channel for that. But if your targeting’s not quite dialed in, it’s not a big deal because the wrong people are going to skip it anyway. The right people are going to get hooked, and you’re all good to go, right? So, the cool thing about these is you do get a lot of branding. So, I would encourage you, obviously you get these calls to action right here. You get this companion banner up top here. All of that has your logo and everything. And even if I skip this, that stays up there. But also somebody, if they click this sign-up button, that counts as a view. So, you’re paying per view on these things, and a view is basically when somebody watches 30 seconds or the entire video. So, that’s an in-stream ad. These things work extremely well when you are targeting people who are in the market for specific things, which is one of the things you can target.

These work great with placements, keywords, pretty much any targeting works extremely well with these types of ads. Retargeting is great as well. But yeah, in-stream ads work extremely well. If you want to take traffic, get it off of YouTube, and push it to a landing page, right? So, for instance right here, boom, they’re pushing it to sign up for Shopify, right? So, that’s a really cool thing. By the way, if you ever want to know what exactly is working on YouTube with YouTube ads, check out videoadvault.com. We have over 1.6 now we million unique YouTube ads and counting. We’ll get into that later in another video though. So, that’s the very first type of ad that I want to talk about, which is basically the in-stream ad. 

In-feed ads

That’s the one everybody’s familiar with, but there’s a second type of ad that most people don’t really think about and these types of ads work extremely well and they’re called in-feed ads. Now this is my YouTube home screen, the same kind of thing if I were to do it on my mobile device and you open up the YouTube app.

You scroll through the different channels that you’re subscribed to and things like that. And it’s going to look essentially the same as this, except for it’s going to be a scrolling format, right? Well, the cool thing is you can see right here, here’s a video right here. This is called an in-feed video. This is all about the Shen Yun, whatever. It’s coming to Denver. So, they’re running this to me because I live in Colorado. So, these are really cool ads. These sort of act like banner ads because you get a custom thumbnail on your YouTube video. So, when you’re in YouTube, you can basically upload a custom thumbnail, that’s like a banner ad that just sits there. And the really cool thing about these ads is you only pay when somebody actually clicks on this video. Also, if you hover over it for like 10 seconds and you watch 10 seconds of this, then that counts as a view as well.

But most people aren’t doing that unless they’re going to actually want to watch it, right? The cool thing about these is you can actually have a call to action underneath them as well, and that will allow you to click and go buy tickets for this thing, right? So, you can go directly to the landing page without actually having to watch the video itself, which is really cool. So, these ads are awesome. If you are going to use these types of ads and again, these are pay-per-view ads also, so you don’t pay for impressions. So, if you’re going to use this ad, definitely use a custom thumbnail. And then the other thing I would encourage you to do is if you hover over this, make sure you have captions if you are going to be using this, because as you can see, there’s no sound here, right?

Same thing on mobile. It’ll kind of start to autoplay a little bit and you can see those captions. You are going to want to have captions. Trust me. Now these ads, they work in-feed ads work right here in my YouTube feed. They also work right here. If I do a search, you can see there’s my buddy Igor right here. This is an in-feed ad. This is a video ad. You can see right here, I can actually just go directly to sign up for his webinar if I want, or I can watch the video explaining what it is, right? So, this is an in-feed ad also, and again, you don’t pay if somebody doesn’t click on this. So, you are literally getting free branding by putting these ads up. You’re getting free impressions and that’s awesome. The other way that these work, here’s like a Shopify one as well. You can see, you kind of hover it does the things, whatever, start now, right?

So, the other way that these work is right here, this is an in-feed ad as well. So, free complete whatever, KDP and ACX tutorial for beginners, right? They can also show up in the recommended videos as to, Hey, watch what’s next. So, these ads are awesome, these work great. You don’t have to trigger them by keywords or anything like that. You can actually have these be retargeting ads as well. So, something we do if somebody goes and visits videoadvault.com, we actually have a quick video tutorial, which is basically this video right here that we run on YouTube as an in-feed ad, and we just re-target people with our logo and stuff like that, right? So, we get all that extra branding, we’re staying in front of people and we’re only paying if somebody actually wants to watch this video. 

In-feed and in-stream ads have their differences in targeting strategies and cost-saving; choose the best for your business. Image by Brooke Cagle, Unsplash license.
In-feed and in-stream ads have their differences in targeting strategies and cost-saving; choose the best for your business. Image by Brooke Cagle, Unsplash license.

Choose the best fit for your business

So, those are my favorite two types of ads, and that’s exactly how you’re charged. Obviously somebody clicks on it, clicks your link, that counts as a view. And with that in-stream ad you are charged if somebody watches 30 seconds or the entire thing, whichever comes first. So, if you are just getting started, I would recommend running some of these in-feed ads. If you already have traffic going to your website, just start to build a retargeting list in Google Ads. And I actually have videos on that on the YouTube channel as well. You can check those out. But yeah, basically build up a retargeting list and just start running in-feed ads to those people and follow them around. These act like banner ads and again, you don’t pay unless somebody actually clicks on your video to watch. Really cool stuff. And you can also see if somebody clicks on this, it acts like an in-stream ad because I have these calls to action here.

One thing I will say, if you are running an in-feed ad, make sure that you always have your link and they actually did a great job here. Make sure you have your link in the description. And then I also like to pin one of my comments as the top comment being like, Hey, go here for the link as well, because you never know, right? It’s just always good if you’re setting it up with no goal or something like that to have your links in your comments, in your description. So, that is it for me on this video. Thanks so much for watching. If you did like it, please smash that like and subscribe to the channel. I’ve got a bunch more awesome content regarding YouTube ads coming your way, and I look forward to helping you get the most out of these YouTube ad campaigns and helping you generate more leads and sales in your business. Bye for now.

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