Introduction
Not convinced by the title? Let me throw some numbers at you: YouTube has a global audience of over 800 million unique visitors per month and it makes up the 3rd largest property on the web. Not a fan of numbers? Let me put it this way: YouTube is a lot like New York City. There’s a ton of traffic, conversations, and character around the area, and running an advertisement could mean reaching thousands of people who are already engaged by what’s taking place around them. Digital advertising on YouTube supports multiple targeting options which lets marketers reach smaller, more targeted audiences.
User Engagement
YouTube’s combination of video, community, and sharing makes an opportunity to advertise your message to an already engaged audience. More than any other form of media, video makes for captivating sight, sound, and motion, ultimately bringing an emotional and physical involvement to the party.
You can learn a lot about your video assets’ viewership through robust measurement tools like YouTube Analytics, Google AdWords, and Google Analytics. Some of the data you can expect to gather are audience demographics, levels of engagement, and performance compared to similar videos. You can use this data to drive a broader reach and deeper viewership among your target audience. By combining these features and tools, you can create a level of engagement between the YouTube audience and content that is much more than anything traditional media offers.
Audience Reach
As we said in the beginning, YouTube has more than 800 million unique visitors per month worldwide. The network offers access to both potential and current customers, with the best targeting capabilities to you and your advertisers. Also, YouTube’s rich user data gives you the ability to target demographic criteria such as age, gender, location, and language preference.
Here are a couple of the more advanced targeting options:
- Interest Category Marketing- Enables you to target a user wherever they are on YouTube, based on their browsing history or video viewing on the YouTube network. This is what we talk about when we reference engagement on a deeper level.
- Remarketing- Allows you to target users who have already visited your webpage, taken interest in a product, or have items left un-purchased in their shopping cart.
Conclusion
YouTube users watch a lot of videos. According to Google, YouTube delivers over 4 billion views per day as of January, 2012; users also do a lot of searching on YouTube. The search behavior of users on YouTube differs a lot from traditional text search, that of which may have immense value to a marketer delivering a message contained in video. Users perform so many searches on YouTube that it is the 2nd largest search engine in the world behind Google Search. It’s a no-brainer as to why this digital advertising network makes sense.