Advertising on YouTube: Best Practices

6 min readJun 16, 2020

YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine with one apparent reason: internet users are getting more and more attached to online videos.

Watching online videos on the platform has now become a daily routine of most people.

It comes as no surprise that more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content is watched every single day.

That is what makes this platform extremely potential for savvy marketers to expand their reach and improve their online visibility.

With all tons of content uploaded every single second, marketers are fighting tooth and nails to make theirs stand out. One of the most common ways to get the viewers’ eyeballs is using YouTube advertisement features.

They’re willing to spend more and more bucks to maximize their advertising campaigns to increase their ROI.

If you’re looking for the best ways to create a winning advertisement on YouTube, you’re on the right page.

In this post, we’re going to dive even more in-depth some best practices of advertising on youtube and helping you get the results you’ve been dreaming of.

#1. Define Target Audience

First, before you’re going too far in your YouTube ad production, you need to know who you’re going to advertise.

Once you can define your target audience precisely, there’ll be more chances for your YouTube ads to get seen all the way through.

By all means, it’ll help you to produce cost-effective, more time-saving video ads.

Try to understand what trends are your target audience hype for. What kind of content they want to see. Or what issues most of them are facing.

Then, you can tailor engaging video ads that your target audience can’t help but watch the entire video.

#2. Choose the Ad Format Very Carefully

YouTube provides you with some ad formats so you can pick one that best suits your business needs and preferences.

There are at least four format ads that YouTube provides:

TrueView ads;
Non-skippable ads;
Bumper ads;
Outstream ads.

And choosing the right one isn’t all smooth sailing.

To help you out, you can read YouTube guidelines about choosing the right ad format here.

Choosing an ad format is actually very related to your goals too. So, if you know what you want to achieve with the ad, you’re most likely to pick the right one easily.

With the well-picked ad format, you won’t be able to maximize your reach and save more bucks because the strategy you use is much more efficient.

#3. Make Use of Targeting Options

What makes YouTube is such an ideal marketing channel is its targeting options. You can make use of those options to set what type of audience you want to appeal to.

We’ve talked about defining a target audience on #1. This time, the targeting options show you the handiest way to narrow down the audiences even more.

You can target detailed geographics, affinity audiences, and custom affinity audiences. What’s more interesting is that you can also target audiences based on their life events.

For example, if you select “New Pet” on your target options tab, you can show your ads to a person who just purchased dogs or pet supplies.

#4. Utilize Remarketing to Re-engage Customers

With remarketing options, YouTube allows you to create personalized ads to millions of viewers across YouTube based on their past interactions with your videos or channel.

According to Google Ads Help, you can do remarketing to reach users who have done the following YouTube-related actions:

Viewed any video from a channel
Viewed videos with certain topics
Viewed any video (as an ad) from a channel
Viewed specific videos (as ads)
Subscribed to a channel
Visited a channel page
Liked any video from a channel
Added any video from a channel to a playlist
Shared any video from a channel

#5. Constantly Monitor the Progress

It’s crucial to spend more time monitoring and keeping track of your YouTube ads’ progress. It’ll help you get a solid grasp on how well they’re performing.

You can use free analytics tools like Google Ads, to make the monitor process even more seamless.

On the Reports tab, you can learn more about how users find and engage with your YouTube ads.

Also, you can learn the traffic for each of your ads. And of course, you’d be able to see the conversation rate, too.

You can also use YouTube Studio to see how all videos (both ads and non-ads) are performing.

#6. Focus on the Valuable Content

At this point, you must’ve known that it’s essential to learn and make use of every feature that YouTube provides for your advertising campaigns.

But don’t forget, you also need to take the content quality pretty much seriously.

High-quality content is the backbone of your campaigns. A good, relatable YouTube ad will be able to catch viewers’ eyes for sure.

No matter how much time and bucks you’ve spent to make your ad get seen by the target audience, the viewers can skip it from the get-go if the content provides no value.

So, make sure to pay attention to your content because that’s a significant deciding factor whether or not an audience watches the video all the way through.

Remember, you don’t need fancy equipment to produce high-quality content. Even a simple animated explainer video will bring you the best results if you have out-of-this-world ideas.

Download FREE e-Book: Building Youtube Channel for Your Business

#7. Determine the Right Metrics

Determining what metrics you should pay more attention to can help you to achieve goals from your campaigns.

Here are some of the critical metrics for your Youtube campaigns:

Views
Clicks
Engagement rates
Conversion rates
Unique viewers
Earned actions
Earned likes
Earned shares

If you create an ad for more sales, you should keep an eye on the conversion rates and earned actions.

If you want to boost your brand’s online visibility, you can rely on views, earned shares, and engagement rates.

So, what are you aiming for?

Learn More: 35+ Experts Reveal the Most Important Video Marketing Metrics to Track

That’s been some of the best practices you can implement to your YouTube ad campaigns.

If you want more detailed information about advertising on YouTube, go read our post The Essentials For an Effective YouTube Strategy

Do you have a must-have strategy in advertising on YouTube? If you do, please leave a comment below!