YouTube is the biggest online video platform in the world. The platform was founded in 2005, and even in its first year, some saw its potential immediately. This is why Google decided to buy the platform in 2006 for almost $2bn, which was unheard of back then! In just a few short years, YouTube grew into the biggest video platform on the web, and it has stayed in the leading position for all that time.
The sheer stats behind the platform are incredible. It is estimated that YouTube has over 122 million active daily users. Which is more than most countries. And it is estimated that over 1 billion hours of content are watched every single day.
This huge userbase is what makes YouTube so profitable and successful. As you know, Google is a tech giant that makes most of its money through ads, and YouTube is one of the biggest providers of said ads around the world.
Advertisers spend millions daily on all sorts of targeted ads across the platform. Most affiliates realized just how massive YouTube’s reach is, so there are a lot of ads being pushed by them as well. But getting high engagement rates for these ads is easier said than done.
Most YouTube advertising campaigns don't bring in the results that the advertisers might expect. Most of them lose a bit of money and give up on trying to advertise this way, but this is a mistake. With proper guidance and a few tips, every affiliate can increase their engagement rate and make their campaigns profitable! If you want to learn more about how to do this yourself, keep on reading this article!
Is YouTube Even Worth The Trouble?
YouTube is the leading video platform on the internet. The amount of users that watch content on it every day is just staggering, and all of them are potential customers if you know what you are doing.
Advertising on YouTube is simple since it uses Google's tried and tested AdSense platform. And we all know how lucrative it can be. By some research, YouTube is one of the most affordable social networks to advertise on. So this means that yes, YT is well worth the trouble of running ads on it!
How To Increase Your Engagement Rate?
There are a lot of different ways for increasing your engagement rate. If you have your channel with an active following you might not use the same tactics as someone running simple ads, but some things can be used by both types of affiliates without problems. However, we are focusing on YouTube Ads this time, so all of those tips will mostly apply to that instead!
1. Keep Your Ads Short and Impactful
Length is something that most advertisers just can't get right. The problem with ad length is that the longer it is, the less likely your audience will stay engaged. This is why ads that have videos lasting for upwards of a minute often have less than desirable effects.
It is important to note that YouTube allows users to skip ads after around 5 seconds of playback. This can be mitigated by making your adverts short enough for this rule to not apply. But having an impactful ad in such a short time can be incredibly hard.
This is why it is recommended for advertisers to utilize the help of advertising and video editing professionals. With some help, you can create effective, short, and impactful ads that will help skyrocket your engagement rates immediately!
2. Do Your Research
As with any sort of marketing campaign, doing your research first will save you time, money, and give you better results. The same goes for YouTube ads. To make the most out of them you need to research your audience, what they like, proper targeting methods, keywords, and much more.
First of all, you need to know what your ideal audience is. This is something that affiliates need to do with all of their advertising campaigns no matter the platform. Depending on what you sell, you can quickly make a custom audience that fits your ideal audience. First of all, you need to target a vast audience that certainly has at least some users that would be interested in what you have to offer.
For this part, you can use common sense. As you start running things you will get some better data that can help you adjust your targeting for efficiency. This might be age, device type, GEOs, interests, and much more.
After you have done this it is time to do some research on keywords and how to optimize your SEO. This is something that affiliates with regular channels need to pay more attention to. However, if you only run ads, this is something you should learn about no matter what. When showing ads, there will always be a title shown as well as maybe some short text snippet. It is important to ensure that those titles and descriptions contain some valuable keywords that fit your audience.
3. Cross-Promote Your Content
Cross-promotion is something most affiliates often forget for one reason or another. But this is something you should try to utilize to your advantage all the time. Promoting your channel on other channels or sponsoring ads on specific videos can give you a massive advantage over the competition.
Try getting as much attention as you can across all social media sites. Your Instagram can promote your Youtube channel and vice versa. The more people see your brand and ads on various platforms, the more likely they will interact with them.
4. Make Sure Your Brand Is Known
A common thing most marketers forget about is to advertise your brand. Brand recognition is a powerful tool that is not often utilized enough by affiliates. Sometimes people simply won't be interested in what you have to offer. But if you show your brand and logo a couple of times to the same people, they will slowly get to know your brand and warm up to your marketing attempts.
This can help you get more clicks, views, and conversions in the future. If you start looking at some of the most successful YT ads, you will quickly notice that promoting your brand for the whole video is a common tactic. And there is a good reason for it. Not only is brand awareness helpful, but it can also be completely free!
YouTube has a unique way of calculating how much advertisers need to pay for results. Usually, advertisers only pay when users watch the whole ad, or at least 30 seconds if it's longer than that, or if they click on any of the CTA-s. This means that people looking at your ads for a few seconds and then skipping you arent lowering your CR that much.
This is why having your logo and brand plastered everywhere can help. Even if they only see 3 seconds of your ad, with a lot of repetition, they will sooner or later become more engaged.
Bonus Tip
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Try Different Approaches
Using the same recycled content for a long can only give you bad results after a while This is why you should always aim to hook your audience with some new and exciting features instead of sheer numbers.
This is why you always need to test all sorts of hooks for your campaigns. It is important to note that your first few campaigns will probably be failures no matter how hard you try. But if you learn from them and utilize that knowledge properly, they can be a valuable learning experience.
Conclusion
Increasing your engagement rate on YouTube ads can be a difficult task, but it's far from impossible. Your ads need to be carefully researched, properly targeted, concise, and direct. If you manage to combine these traits, your ads are certain to have at least some success.
It's important to note that not all ads will work out. Even if you set everything up correctly and follow all the rules, some ads will inevitably underperform. This is why it's important to not give up and try different approaches to your ads. With enough effort, you will create the perfect advertisement campaign with incredible engagement rates sooner or later!
Do you run YouTube Ads? What are your biggest tips on increasing engagement rates? Share your knowledge with us in the comments below!