June 4, 2019 – SEMpdx held its last educational event this week before breaking for summer. We welcomed Sean McEntee, Senior Director of Client Services at 3Q Digital, who gave an excellent presentation, “Make YouTube Your Newest Performance Channel”. Following are some of Sean’s tips and insights that stood out from the presentation:
- There are two main advertising formats: In-Stream and Video Discovery. It’s important to separate these formats by campaign.
- Prioritize TrueView for Action. Keep in mind this requires you to use Smart Bidding, so avoid the “Maximum Conversions” setting in most cases.
- A companion banner is a 300 x 60 opportunity to message your value proposition. It displays prominently on both desktop and mobile.
- When building your campaign structure, assign one video ad per ad group. Google favors high view-through rate over high conversion rate. You can use ad group bids to prioritize top converting videos manually.
- Layer multiple targeting types whenever possible. Remember, YouTube is an awareness platform by nature and has a very high reach. Only a small percentage of your applicable targeting types will convert at a high rate.
- Advance targeting includes Custom Audiences (tip: target users based on search behavior) and Customer Match & Similar To (tip: upload existing customers to re-target and/or create “similar to” audiences).
- When developing video creative, consider best practices such as winning the first five seconds (i.e. the skip function), displaying a clear call-to-action, creating DR-friendly ads (i.e. CTA overlays), and testing frequently.
After his presentation, Sean stayed for a generous Q&A session. It was an engaging and very informative event that gave attendees actionable takeaways. To learn more, view Sean’s presentation slides.
Sarah is a search marketing consultant, helping clients improve ROI through paid search, SEO and social media initiatives. She is also the Official SEMpdx Event Blogger and can be found at all of the monthly events.