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Video Discovery Ads: Intro
Justin Sardi (00:02):
Hey, what’s up everybody? Justin Sardi with TubeSift here, and today we’re going to be talking all about video discovery ads. We’re going to be covering best practices, how they function, how you’re charged, and everything you need to know about those types of ads and exactly when to use them, so let’s go ahead and dive in.
A video discovery ad is essentially a way to promote videos on YouTube and get very engaged viewers to watch your content. I like to think of it as getting a video ranked on the very first page and the very first spot, but you don’t have to do any of the hard SEO work. Let’s take a look over here, and as you can see, I did a search for “How to make pasta,” right? Over here you can see at the very top it says “Ad,” and it’s basically a pasta recipe, this is a three minute and 21 second video right here, and underneath it are all of the search results that are ranking on YouTube.
Multiple Targeting Options
Justin Sardi (00:58):
These ads can be targeted a number of different ways, and we’ll talk about that in a second, but obviously this one, because I searched for “How to make pasta,” was targeted by keywords. Now, these are a great way to basically get your video shown and have users elect to watch it, without having to do any of the hard SEO work. This is showing up in YouTube search right here, these are the YouTube search results, and the other way it shows up is right over here, you can see my buddy John Crestani over here, saying “The seven best affiliate marketing programs for beginners in 2020.” He’s promoting this, and this shows up in the suggested videos right here.
The way that video discovery ads work is if a user… Or the way that people are charged, sorry, is if a user does a search and this ad shows up, and like I said, you can target these a number of different ways, but basically when a video ad… A video discovery ad shows up, a user can choose to click on this ad. Now, what we’re looking at right here is an impression, right? Until I actually click on this ad, it does not count as a view, so the advertiser is not charged until somebody elects to watch the video, which is why these are called TrueView ads, because you’re actually getting these views.
How Are Video Ads Charged?
Justin Sardi (02:14):
If I come over here and I click on this chestnut pasta recipe, they are then charged. It doesn’t matter how much I watch of this video, it doesn’t matter if I watch one second and leave, it doesn’t matter if I watch the entire thing. The way the advertisers are charged is when somebody actually clicks on the video, and if you think about it, that makes sense, they’re not like in-stream ads where you’re charged after X number of seconds, they are actively electing to watch this video. In-stream ads, somebody’s shown a little bit of the video and they can choose to skip it or not. You are shown the thumbnail, and basically if somebody elects to watch this, you’re charged, and if you think about it, it makes total sense because nobody’s going to click on a video they don’t want to watch.
If we go over here, basically this is a Make it Kitchen video and they’re showing this chestnut pasta, cool, so now you can see we’re watching this video. These video discovery ads are a great way to promote your content and grow your channel if you are putting out regular content. They can also be used for video sales letters, things like that, so there’s a number of ways you can use these. Something that I recommend doing with these is putting a call to action in the description, right? And you can see right here, they’re asking for Patreon donations. In the description, I always like to put the call to action that you want, like if you have a landing page or something along those lines, provide some valuable content, and then just be like, “Hey, click the link below to check it out,” right, or whatever you’re promoting there, you can do that. That’s a great way to do that.
Recently, or not recently, a little while ago, YouTube got rid of annotations, which you could actually use to drive traffic outside of YouTube. Now they’ve switched to cards, and this right here is a card. You click that little “I” up in the top, you can actually time these cards, and you can see they’ve got a few other videos they’re promoting. Anybody can promote videos with cards, but there’s a certain set of requirements you have to meet by YouTube to use cards to push to external websites.
I’ve tested a lot of those cards going to external websites, and honestly, they don’t work that well going to external websites, you get very low click-through rate, so I recommend if you want to drive traffic away from YouTube using these, drop a link in the description, and then throw that website URL up over the video with some text and be like, “Go here to get this,” right? That’s exactly what you’re going to want to do there.
Just kind of keep that in mind, cards work okay, but honestly, video discovery ads are not the best for driving traffic, unless you have a very strong reason for them to leave YouTube. From what we’ve seen, they’re a little bit better used to promote content on YouTube, and build up that subscriber base and those views, right?
Retargeting and Discovery Ads
Justin Sardi (05:06):
Another thing these can be used for is retargeting, so there’s a great use. You can actually target these a number of ways, and I’ll just cover that right now. You can actually target these by keyword, you can target them by interests, you can target them by audiences, which is like retargeting, all that good stuff, you can target them by keywords, pretty much any of the targeting options, you can use to target these video discovery ads. I prefer using them for keywords for YouTube search, and then placements for related videos, right?
And you can check out related videos over here, if somebody’s watching a video on ClickBank for beginners, John did a very good job using placement targeting right here, placing this as a suggested video on a related video, right? And you can use TubeSift to find all of those monetized placements, and the cool thing about video discovery ads is the video doesn’t even have to be monetized, because you’re not placing the ad on the video, you’re placing the ad on YouTube itself, right? So, very cool stuff, very powerful way to get your video in front of people who are watching content about what your video’s about.
The way that a video discovery ad on a video watch page works, and that’s what we’re looking at right here, is somebody sees it in the related videos over to the side, we click on it, and exactly the same thing happens. This pops up, and you can see John does a great job of placing his calls to action right here, so he says, “Attend a free live training with me,” boom, you click this, it takes you to his landing page, right? That’s exactly how these work, so he did a great job of doing that, and you can see right here, he’s actually using a video discovery ad on the video watch page on his own video. Very cool stuff, that’s exactly how these can be used to drive traffic and build up channels.
Discovery Ads Best Practices
Justin Sardi (06:55):
Some of the key components and best practices for video discovery ads are as follows. The number one thing that you need to have for a video discovery ad to be effective is a very compelling thumbnail. TubeSift has the Banner Studio, and you can actually use that to create compelling thumbnails, but basically what you’re going to want to do, and this is some best practices, is do a search for the keyword, and look at all of the rest of the videos that are ranking, right?
The reason that these are ranking is because they’re getting a lot of views and engagement, and the number one thing that gets people to watch a video is the thumbnail. So for instance, “How to make pasta,” what I’m going to do is I’m just going to scroll down and look at all of the different thumbnails. You can see all of these, it’s like “Five rookie mistakes,” whatever. The one thing all of these have in common, guess what it is? They all show pasta, right? Just kind of look at what’s working here, and try and model something.
You can see white text, darker backgrounds for most of them, and this Make it Kitchen, they actually did a really good job of modeling these thumbnails, picture of the pasta, little bit of flare on that, and then black border up top with white text. Very clear what they have, you can see the dish, cool. That is the number one thing, so you’re going to want to use a custom thumbnail with these video discovery ads, and that is a very important component of these. The number one thing that’ll make them fail is having a crappy thumbnail.
When you’re setting these video discovery ads up, you’re allowed to put a title and two lines of description, right? So what we’re looking at right here, their title is “Autumnal…” Can’t even say that right. “Fusilli recipe,” right? They have a title right there. You can change that, doesn’t matter what the title of your video is, you can put whatever title you want on these video discovery ads, which is really cool. From there, you have a description, and it looks like they just have one line, it’s like, “With chestnuts and red cabbage, 4K food video.” Okay, that’s all right, you can put a lot more in there, and you can make it a little more compelling, but you’re going to want to have a very compelling title and description in these video discovery ads to really hook your viewer and get them in there, right?
And same thing over here, you can see with the… That was in YouTube search. Right over here on the video watch page, you don’t actually get the description shown, so it’s just the title, and John’s is “How to promote ClickBank products,” right? So if we click on this, you can actually see that is actually the title of his video as well, and then he has a description down here.
Conclusion
Justin Sardi (09:41):
That’s just kind of something to think about when you’re running these ads, and yeah, that’s all I’ve got for this one, so thanks so much for watching. Again, if you liked this video, please give us that thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, check out our blog, and as always, you can use TubeSift to create all your custom thumbnails, find all the keywords to target your videos, as well as all of your monetized videos to put your ads on. That’s it for me, thanks so much for watching, bye for now.
Membership TodaySign Up NowResources:
- TrueView Video Discovery Ads on Google Support
- Drive Higher Engagement Rates on YouTube with TrueView Video Discovery Ads from Metric Theory
- Are TrueView Video Discovery Ads the Better Option for Your Brand? From Search Engine Land
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