Google Expands Video Ad Options
Streamlined system provides greater YouTube integration.
Google wants video advertising to be as pervasive across its network as search and display ads are. The company today plans to enable more integration between its AdWords and YouTube ad offerings for all advertisers. Though the formats available do not all enable video to play directly within the ads, Google hopes the offerings will expand inventory for video ad buyers and inspire more small and medium advertisers to use video ads.
AdWords for video allows advertisers to create video ads for delivery across the Google display network and YouTube in the same interface. The newly streamlined ad management tool lets advertisers link their YouTube accounts to readily create ads in multiple formats promoting those videos. It also lets them pay only when a user clicks to view a video.
Expanding the ad products should increase the amount of video ad related inventory available in Google’s network and on YouTube. Until now, for instance, advertisers were only able to run Promoted Videos in certain sets of inventory on YouTube.
The revamped system replaces the current Promoted Videos format (essentially AdWords-style search ads on YouTube) with in-search and in-display ads that will fall under the “TrueView” name. Like Promoted Videos, the in-search ads will require users to click-through to view a video on YouTube, while some in-display units will include an embedded video that can be played in the ad.
The company is also opening up TrueView in-stream and “in-slate” streaming ad formats to all advertisers; before they were available only in beta to some advertisers. The idea is to get more small and medium advertisers to use video ads. In-slate ads play before long-form video content, and allow users to choose to watch a longer ad before the content, or four :15 spots intermittently within the content.
The new ad options will increase video inventory, said Lane Shackleton, product manager at YouTube. “Now they get access to more inventory because they’re in other formats.” Advertisers can also add call-to-action overlays to videos through the revamped system.
Google also wants advertisers to grow more accustomed to using audience, topic, geographic, or other forms of targeting as opposed to only keyword targeting – the staple of its AdWords platform most smaller advertisers are more familiar with.
Coupled with the new ad options is a streamlined management system for video ads that reduces the number of pages advertisers must sift through to manage campaigns, and lets them create video ads through tools that are more similar to the AdWords tool. The system shows reporting on metrics like video views and view rate.
