Module 3 - Channels

What are placements on YouTube?

A placement campaign is a list of channels or individual videos that you want to place your ads into, and Google calls that placements.

If you are here to advertise on YouTube, you want to know where your ads are going to go. There are, I am guessing, tens or hundreds of millions of channels on YouTube, so we can go and pick which channels we want to advertise into. If you were going to do that manually it would be almost impossible.

I will give you the example of network marketing, because I am going to briefly show you one of our clients. There is a bunch of ads at the top of YouTube, then some videos, so we could go off and look at Eric Worre. Eric has got a really popular channel and you would probably like to have ads in his channel. He is one of the famous people within network marketing, and everybody probably wants to run their ads into his channel if they are into network marketing.

If you go back three or four years on YouTube, everybody was talking about placements. You could say, right, I want this particular video from Eric's channel, go into that video, choose the link, copy it, and put that onto a list of channels or videos you want to advertise into.

How do you see and choose placements inside Google Ads?

Go into video campaigns and open the placements section, which both reports where your ads showed and lets you build the list of where you want them to show.

If I go on to placements it is going to show me where ads showed. I can look at which channels, for any particular campaign, and you can search at account level, campaign level or ad group level.

Equally, you can create campaigns and choose the placements you want. I can go in here, edit the placement list, and select where I want to put my ads. I can use Google's own tool, choose channels, and search for network marketing. Press return and Google gives me a list of channels that it says relate to network marketing. I know Fraser Brooks has got a great channel, and we might find Eric Worre in here as well, you would hope.

What is the problem with relying on placements?

Scale. That is the issue with channels and placements.

If I chose a hundred different channels, those hundred channels on a daily basis, even if they are really big channels, might be getting a million views between them. That sounds like a great opportunity, but the problem is that there are obviously other advertisers fighting for the space, and not all of the videos within somebody's channel are always monetised.

It can be a bit misleading, because some of these guys are going to have some of their videos monetised and some of them not.

What changes when Google opens ads up to the whole YouTube estate?

We will get the opportunity to advertise across a far broader list of videos, because at the moment you can only serve ads into monetised channels.

Over the next six months we are starting to see Google saying to YouTube, you are going to allow the majority of the videos within YouTube to show ads. They are saying that is going to happen on the 1st of June, and as it happens that is three days from now, because I am recording this video on the 28th. We are about to see YouTube switch its policy to allowing ads to go onto the majority of the YouTube estate.

That could go two ways. I think YouTube are obviously trying to recruit a lot more people to buy the premium version of YouTube so they do not see any ads, which is obviously bad for us as advertisers. But I cannot see the majority of people buying premium, unless that is YouTube's ultimate goal and then the advertising model will switch.

Later in the course there is a module called Vidnetics. Have a look at that, because that is a tool I use to choose hundreds and hundreds of placements to go into campaigns.

Will ads into unmonetised channels be cheaper or more expensive?

The question begs itself, and the smart money is on Google keeping the money for themselves.

If I place an ad into Fraser Brooks's channel, his channel is monetised, so if my ad appears Fraser gets some of that money and YouTube, or Google, gets the rest. If we are paying eight pence per view, let us say Google takes six pence and Fraser gets two pence.

So what happens when Google allows ads into channels which are not monetised? For example, one of our channels is not monetised, and we are about to see ads maybe popping up in that channel, but we will not benefit from it. Google will take all of the revenue. Does Google drop the cost in the Fraser example down to six pence to get the view, or do they keep it at eight and keep all the money for themselves? Well, the smart money is on them keeping it all for themselves.

When are placements the right choice?

When your budget is small, because you can choose very specific videos based on keywords.

Channels and placements can be a good idea to complement your ad campaigns. Watch the video section of this course, which will show you how to search by keyword and how to find videos that relate to the keywords you are interested in. Tie that back to your keyword research and find very specific placements, using what I have described in other parts of the course as the 49/51 rule.

Choose the ones that work. If a placement seems a bit iffy, if you are not sure about it, keep it out of your list and just go with the ones you are pretty sure are spot on.

What other placement types can you choose?

Alongside individual videos you can choose video lineups, specific websites to show on, and apps and app categories.

If we go to placements, add, and select an ad group, then go back into your ad group, you can choose individual videos there. There are detailed videos within the course about the other placement opportunities. In particular, be careful with the app store, and there is a whole section on that.

I will see you on the next section of the course.