How Do You Advertise a Video? (Archive, 2021)

Recorded in 2021 during Simon's s.media agency era — a two-presenter Q&A. Published as part of a dated historical record; prices and platform details are as they stood in 2021.

Which channels are best for advertising a video?

YouTube is where it's at — the ROI is off the scale and the targeting is unbelievable. Facebook and Instagram have their place, and LinkedIn is good for B2B, but at the time, YouTube led the pack.

The mechanics per platform: on Facebook, create a business account and a post, press promote, and build a campaign around the video — around 90 seconds is a good length, though shorter formats work in different placements. Instagram runs through the same Facebook Ads Manager (Facebook owns it) — select your Instagram account within the platform, keep it to about 15 seconds, portrait format. For YouTube: get a Google Ads account, create a channel, upload the video, create a Video campaign in Ads Manager, link the video, add your description and calls to action, choose an audience, and away you go.

What's the strategy across social?

Don't just tick boxes — have a strategy for where the placements sit in your funnel. Often that's YouTube for brand awareness at the top of the funnel, with Facebook or Instagram doing the remarketing (or the other way round), or your website visitors remarketed on both platforms.

And a note of honesty about the work involved: yes, you can set up these channels and upload a video yourself, but there's far more to it than that — the back end of Google is like the Matrix. Plenty of people teach themselves; one client had been doing it for twenty-odd years and did a decent job, and even he didn't know everything. None of us do — you learn something every day. The uploading is easy. The most important things are the audience creation and the tracking of results. Track properly and Google or Facebook learns and delivers you more of the good stuff; skip the tracking and you might as well be wasting your money.

How much does it cost?

Typically a penny or two per view — and on YouTube that's a TrueView: you're only charged once somebody has watched 30 seconds (unless you run a non-skippable format that forces the watch, in which case you pay regardless). The best-performing ads we were seeing were in-stream, charged at roughly one to two pence after the 30-second mark. One caveat: we suggested minimum spends of typically £50 to £100 a day per campaign, because the system needs enough data to learn.

What results can you expect?

Take YouTube at a penny a view: 10,000 views costs £100. Those are 10,000 people who watched more than 30 seconds — you'll likely have another ten or twenty thousand who watched up to 30 seconds and cost you nothing. Of the 10,000, expect one to two per cent to click through: 100 to 200 people, at roughly 50p each. (To be clear, you are charged if someone watches less than 30 seconds but clicks through — an action counts.)

Compare traditional PPC on a competitive product: £2, £3, £5, sometimes £10 a click. All of these numbers flex with the product, the market and the competition — but the shape of the argument holds. Traditional search: click, pay. YouTube: watch 30 seconds, get educated, probably watch two or three minutes, learn why the product is good for you — then click, far more likely to buy. Cheaper cost per click, higher intent, and massive awareness thrown in.