The Complete YouTube Ads Course | Welcome and How to Use It

Welcome to the course, and thank you for getting involved. We all know why we're here: Google is the biggest search engine in the world, and YouTube supports Google, since Google owns it. The thing every Google professional should really be concerned about is answer engines, tools like Alexa and Siri, which are trying to take Google's position. Google wants to defend itself, and it's doing that using video, which is why YouTube is going to become more and more important over the next couple of years.

Inside YouTube Studio you can see every video already on a channel, and any one of those videos can be used as an advert and promoted to a genuinely focused audience, which is exactly what this course covers later on. Engagement is the one signal Google cares about most, and Google has been talking about becoming primarily a video platform for a few years now, even though that hasn't fully happened yet. Even so, today, if someone creates a genuinely meaningful video, it tends to appear near the top of Google search, because Google is wary of losing ground to answer engines as more people search by voice rather than by typing.

That's why engagement matters so much: the more a video keeps people watching, the higher it climbs in search. If you spray and pray with an unfocused audience, you're not just failing to get the best result, you're actually doing damage to the campaign. The benefits within this course are about getting both things right at once, ranking video at the top of search and reaching the right audience for it, which in turn brings your cost per view down, much like the good old days in PPC, where following the recommendations, entering negative keywords, refining placements and improving ad content all brought cost per click down too. So the two questions worth asking constantly are: is my content good enough, and is my audience good enough. That's the introduction, so it's time to move on to the next module.