YouTube Ads to Support SEM: Detailed Guide

With the consistent rise in the digital marketing industry, marketers always seek more effective ways to enjoy many benefits in terms of higher sales, conversions, and profits. No doubt, marketers are welcomed with several effective marketing initiatives that deliver promising results even without spending a king’s ransom. And one of the common yet powerful marketing strategies is YouTube Ads that acts as a great tool to boost brand awareness and strengthen your SEM (Search Engine Marketing). 

Do you know Youtube is the world’s second most popular website with more than 2 billion logged-in visitors a month recorded? 2 billion? It’s a big number! This is the reason why businesses find YouTube a perfect platform to advertise their brands. 

YouTube ads give an edge to your SEO & SEM efforts that attract an SEO company or several marketers to rely on this strategy. But at the same time, it is also important to be proactive to gain attention and educate prospective customers about your brand. Youtube ads make sure you reach more and more targeted audiences and showcase your brand with perfect video content. 

An SEO company or marketers struggle in to find the answer if YouTube helps generate tangible value or not; secondly, if it supports the SEM efforts or not.  So, let’s find out the answers by discussing everything in brief. 

YouTube Ads Support Your SEM Efforts. But How? 

If you’ve never considered YouTube a great marketing platform, you must look at this statistic showing-

“From pre-pandemic (January) to early pandemic (April), the time spent by users on Google-owned YouTube rose by 26 percent.” 

Isn’t this give you a perfect reason to kick off your marketing campaign with YouTube ads instead of spending a tidy sum over running PPC ads?

The stat clearly shows that YouTube is a platform that has emerged as a great opportunity for marketers to reach more targeted audiences with a perfect ad.  But at the same time, be clear that if we keep Youtube Shopping ads aside, this platform generates a low rate of sales or conversion, which will not result in profits, And if you think that it does, you’re living in an imaginary world.  Its impact on sales would not be larger or smaller than that of price. Accept this fact!

Simultaneously, it doesn’t mean YouTube ads fail to market your brand or generate profitable results. On the contrary, it contributes to your brand’s success in other ways—all you have to find that particular way. 

YouTube ads are not new in the advertising world, and there is no surprise that it contributes to SEM efforts being a standard advertising tool. Nowadays, running ads on this platform has become super easy. Not to mention, marketers are utilizing this platform to a great extent to generate more beneficial results. Thanks to the ease of use offered by YouTube, making it easy for beginners to create an engaging ad. With the YouTube Video Builder Assistance, you can use any template, add music and create a perfect ad in a few minutes. 

Besides the ease of usage provided by YouTube, how does this platform ad support your SEM efforts, especially when it isn’t driving any direct conversions? Any idea? Let’s find out.

 The answer is simple-

• YouTube ads help lay a strong base for your new brand, targeting the right audience and hitting your brand keyword over your more high-priced non-brand keywords. 
• With a YouTube ad, you help your brand connect to your targeted audience, and all this is possible with the building-up of a non-brand keyword.
• Talking about the SEM gives you insight into what impact your video ads have made on the targeted audience. 

Now you’re better aware of the fact YouTube doesn’t deliver the direct conversion. However, because this expectation has become nothing more than a void, so, let’s jump to know how one can manage the ads on the YouTube platform and further end up with contributing SEM efforts.   

The Purpose

The primary objective of YouTube ads is to create brand awareness for both new and repeat visitors, and this can be possible by creating engaging video content. Once you’re done with being creative with your ads, the next step is to convince customers to watch the video and move directly to your site via the video medium. It’s the trickiest job but also results in favorable outcomes. Above all, it is also important to do all these tasks at a low cost as possible. 

When creating a YouTube ad, follow a simple tip-

 You must focus on creating 30 seconds of videos. It should not be 15 seconds and also not over 35 seconds. Make sure you display the important message in the first 5-10 seconds to get into your consumers’ heads. 

Know More About Targeting & YouTube Setup

Targeting a YouTube effort supporting your SEM initiative can vary in size depending on your targeted audience, current brand recognition, marketplace demand, etc. Therefore, we recommend you acquire the cleanest data possible, and you can do it in various ways. 

If you want a better understanding of this whole strategy impact, you can segment your data in the following way-

• Prospecting – First-time View: Never been to the site before, never seen the video before. From here, this gets subdivided by additional targets such as demos, topics, audiences, etc.
• Prospecting – Repeat View: Never been to the site, completed one video view.
• Remarketing: Plain and simple, those who have been to the site before.

All the above terms get further subdivided into additional targets such as demos, topics, audiences, etc.

Point to Remember: Ultimately, each part of the setup becomes a remarketing list, which is crucial to your strategy later. So, once you make a target and start getting data, the next step is to create an audience list to collect the data from that segment. After this, you can create and launch your YouTube video ads and allow the audience to populate. 

Once this is done, you can proceed to the SEM side of the effort.

Learn The SEM Phase

When you proceed on to the SEM side of the effort, don’t forget your YouTube ads. But once the video ad performance is fine-tuned, it will not be a matter of much consideration. In your SEM program, you can create this at the ad group or campaign level. Then, after setting this up, you can break it out in the ways listed above. 

In case of any remarketing-based, we would suggest you rely on a maximum click strategy. But why lean on such a strategy when you have a line of other options? If you ask us, the answer is simple. Because if they are looking for you or your category online after watching your video ad, it means they have prequalified themselves, and this way, you can tackle a step forward, capturing more and more traffic as much as possible through this strategy. 

To make it easy for you, you can go with the Max CPC cap on the bid strategy. During this bid strategy, make sure your messaging and extensions match perfectly with the message of the video.  

The Output: Measuring the Impact of YouTube Ads on SEM

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Now you will come to know if YouTube ads contribute to your SEM efforts or not. In the SEM groupings, the audience that was previously exposed to your video will populate with traffic. Although SEM won’t attract all the demands generated by YouTube, it definitely benefits you with a portion of it, offering you more control over the consumer experience of the ads. 

Final Words

This post is all about discussing how YouTube ads support the SEM efforts. Marketers always strive for the best marketing methods that can deliver the maximum output in a limited time. Talking about YouTube ads, this one such strategy is evolving the marketing industry to a great extent, allowing you to reach more people.