Optimising Budgets and Costs For Your YouTube Ads
YouTube Advertising is not something to shy away from for your business. Advertising on YouTube can help you get your brand in front of a much larger scale audience for your business, on a premium and highly trusted platform, and can increase your online presence significantly. Let’s take a deep dive into how you can work with a budget and cost that works for you.
Get The Most Out Of Your YouTube Ads Budget
Your budget is one of the most important thing for your business, you need to have a clear idea of how much you are willing to put forward to promote your business. A great feature for smaller and larger businesses alike, is that you can control the costs and the daily spends, that way there are no nasty surprises.
Budgeting Tips For Your YouTube Ads
Set yourself a respectable marketing budget for the year
This will help you regulate spending for your campaigns. Typically you would take your annual budget and divide by 12 in order to find a monthly budget. From this you can split that across any amount of campaigns you want, not forgetting to take into account any important seasonal factors.
Assign a small % of that budget to test different ad formats
Don’t be scared to invest some of your budget for a/b testing. You can set a reasonably small budget and just pay per view (CPV) at 1p/2p for that impression. £50 budget you could get a high amount of impressions, 2500-5000 with a 1p-2p CPV.
What’s the Purpose of your YouTube Ad? Brand Awareness? Conversions?
YouTube advertising works best for reaching a broader audience with interests in line with what you have to show the viewer/potential customers. YouTube has always been a great channel for driving upper funnel campaigns such as brand awareness, consideration etc. That being said, the YouTube Ads platform has evolved in more recent times to include ad/campaign types to drive action also. E-commerce options in particular can be very valuable when products that appear in a video can be linked to ads. Sign-ups using data capture forms embedded in YouTube are also another way to target mid to lower funnel users who may be in a position to take action after viewing an ad. Conversions are typically more challenging on YouTube ads as they don’t really want to leave the site but who doesn’t love a challenge?
Do Your Research on What Kind of Targeting You Want To Use
There are many different ways to target your YouTube Ads. You can target individual videos, channels, demographics and many more. Taking an example for a mobile phone case company, you would target the affinity/in-market audience segments that were similar to smart phone, technology etc. We suggest you look at 1 key area per ad group such as, affinity, topic, in-market & keywords. With the secondary being demographic or geographic.
Check out this article about audience options targeting on YouTube
Make your different ads separate campaigns i.e In-Stream as one and Discovery as another.
There are a wide range of video ads to use such as; custom, non-skippable in stream, out stream, shopping and more. Custom gives you the freedom to do as you wish and not be bound to a template structure by google for the specific goal in mind. Custom is also what gives you even more flexibility to be more creative with your ads.
Check out this article about the different ad types available on YouTube
What If My YouTube Ads Budget Is Small?
Typically a good starting point for a smaller budget is to go local (if you have a physical location) If you are a digital business stick with the nationwide targeting, but maybe narrow down your audience targeting instead. Remember the larger the audience the more money is likely to be spent due to the reach and more competitors potentially bidding on the same audiences.
If you can do this, you are able to refine your campaigns to see what works and what doesn’t. That way, you can market with a clearer view of success. Aim to start with a minimum of £10 per day for local campaigns, but this of course can be significantly campaigns with a wider reach.
Alternatively, if you have a set marketing budget for the year you can divide the budget into 12 and run a select few campaigns each month with a monthly budget. These campaigns will run on a shorter time scale which means you can easily put, for example: £100 running for 7 days, this gives you £14.28 a day. This may not sound like a significant amount but we will talk about costs shortly.
So, we have covered, how to calculate your budget, targeting options, YouTube Advertising goals etc……..
But How Much Do YouTube Ads Actually Cost?
The best thing about advertising on YouTube is that you are in charge of your cost per view (CPV) and can cost you as little as 1p per view. It will depend on a number of factors such as, how competitive the market is for the targeting you choose, the campaign goal, the ad type etc. You only pay when a user views your ad. You set the target audience of whoever you choose to see your ad. You get to see the results to the penny, about how your ad has performed.
The CPV can be changed at any time you want, which is fantastic, but be sure not to change it too frequently as the campaign needs some time to be able to bid efficiently and run before you make too many changes. Depending on the time span of the ad will determine when you can make these customisations.
Campaigns can run continually, have start and finish dates and can also be paused and started manually too if you prefer. You can also set schedules so that your ads only run on days of the week or times of the day that you choose.
As with any investment in marketing, having clear and defined goals is paramount. Check out this article about How To Achieve Your Marketing Goals With YouTube Ads for more insights and we wish you the best of luck with your YouTube advertising!
Not sure how to get the most out of your YouTube Advertising budget? Feel free to get in touch with us to discuss your options.
