YouTube Audience Targeting

Nov 16th 2015

In the last article, we covered how you can get started with YouTube for branding your business.

We mentioned;

• What guidelines to follow for choosing a video
• Two kinds of ad formats; in-stream and in-display
• Some best practices

In this week’s segment we will dive into the different methods of audience targeting you can use for video ads.

First and foremost, you have the ability to choose the Demographic you’d like to target. Available options are; age, gender, parental status. For instance, this allows you to target individuals who will most likely fit the generation or gender of your most targeted customer.

You also have the choice of selecting from Interest Categories, which are essentially topics of interest your audience is most interested in.

Interest Categories come in 3 flavours:

• Affinity Audiences: Allows you to show your ads to people from a range of interest patterns, such as: beauty mavens, do-it-yourselfers, foodies, gamers, business professionals, etc.

• Custom Audiences: Allows the advertiser to create a custom audience using keywords or a URL in order to build an audience profile. The audience profile could allow you to target individuals with an interest in camping and outdoor equipment, before they ever visit a site like Gear-Up.com. This works really well with keywords related to topics similar with your video.

• In-Market Audiences: Allows you to target individuals who spend time reading about specific topic categories; such as, vehicles, education, business services, home and garden, etc.

You may also want to take advantage of Video Remarketing, which works just like the regular Google display remarketing, only with video instead of image ads. Using this targeting method gives your ad a chance to re-connect with viewers that already watched your videos within the last 180 days or less. This gives you the opportunity to yell Hey!! Here is why you need to come back to my site!

Placements allow you to target websites, URLs, and video positions on sites within the Google Display Network. It also allows you to target specific YouTube Channels or videos for ad placement. This is a really innovative way to make sure your ad is being featured in all the right places that have all the right topic categories your content relates to.

Topics: This option gives you a broad number of choices, such as targeting specific videos, YouTube channels, and websites related to the topics you select.

Topics are very similar to the ‘In-Market Audiences’ targeting in the Interest Categories option we covered above. You can target everything from Finance, Home and Garden, and Business, to Beauty and Fitness.

Keywords: Just like any display marketing campaign, the keywords option allows you to target users who search on topics based on the keywords or key phrases you select. This also works across YouTube channels and videos, as well as the Google Display Network of sites.

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We hope you learned a thing or two about YouTube targeting. Be sure check back next month for yet another helpful editorial from our team! See you soon!