YouTube Promoted Videos

YOUTUBE PROMOTED VIDEOS:A Look Into YouTube's Promoted Video Ads Program

Mark and I recently interviewed YouTube Promoted Videos Product Manager, Jay Akkad, about their announcement today of the expansion of the Promoted Video ads product.  We asked Jay some detailed questions about how the program works, and we talked with him about what these new enhancements mean in terms of targeting, reach, tracking, performance, and monetization for search marketers and advertisers at large

YouTube Promoted Videos Grows and Expands

Online video advertising is central to a lot of businesses today, and projected by many research agencies for the largest accelerated growth over other ad models. Today, YouTube announced several huge advancements to their Promoted Videos program to help more advertisers easily set-up and manage campaigns with Promoted Videos.

• The addition of Promoted Videos into their Video Targeting tool so you can expand your targeting approach to include specific video content against which you want to advertise in addition to advertising against search results and related content on YouTube.
• YouTube's new Promoted Video API in AdWords (in beta), where agencies can now use Promoted Videos at scale to manage complex campaigns with real-time bidding across multiple clients.
• YouTube has expanded the ability to set-up video ad campaigns in all countries where YouTube is available.  (For anyone outside the US, the campaign will be tied to your Google AdWords account.)

So how are they doing? Well YouTube announced that they have served 1/2 billion views already within Promoted Videos. In the past year alone, Google says that they've seen more than a six-fold increase in the number of times viewers have clicked on to watch a Promoted Video. Many of those Promoted Video ads have reached over 1 million video views.

How Are YouTube Promoted Videos Views Counted?

ReelSEO: How much of a Promoted Video must be watched by an actual audience member, or end user, for it to count as a "view?"

Jay Akkad, Product Manager for YouTube Sponsored videos

Jay: We use the same standards for what counts as a view, as we do with the rest of the YouTube site. There's obviously a bunch of signals that go into how we measure a Promoted Video, and this one we refer to ask the view-count signal. Typically if you start watching the video, we'll count it as a view. That's also when we start to detect what we would refer to as, "spammy" behavior. For example, let's say if you're watching your own Promoted Video multiple times (where you click on the "Promoted Video" link that many times just to watch it). We're certainly not going to count all those extra views.

There's a bunch of other signals that are factored. Such as, if everybody stops watching the video after 2 seconds of play, we know something's wrong and we'll catch that [without counting it].

The intent of the view is to really understand whether the user actually wanted to watch that video, and found enough information by watching it. We calculate views sort of after-the-fact.

We'll look at our logs and attribute views for the majority of videos that cross something like 300 views, and really look to make sure what the view-count signal is. It's a very important signal for us to make sure that the video doesn't get spammed. But typically, we count a view at the start of the video being played and watched.

ReelSEO: Is there a way that advertisers who are running large promotional campaigns can contest their bills, if they suspect clickfraud? (Like you can do with Adwords.)

Jay: Absolutely. One thing to note is, Promoted Videos today is billed on the click. You can definitely follow the same processes as you do for AdWords if you suspect click fraud, and anything like that.

The view counts, on the other hand, are not tied to the same [data] sources; and so, we're looking at more the users' usage logs. We'll analyze those things, and we'll attribute view counts slightly different. We are open to suggestions and always look forward to hearing from our advertisers, if there are any discrepancies.

ReelSEO: Do the views from Promoted Videos get incorporated into the total "View Count" of a video?

Jay: To answer your first question, views definitely get incorporated into the total view count. We definitely see this as a way of helping our users find the content that they're looking for, and help advertisers get their content discovered.

ReelSEO: But we can say that if a video does happen to perform well with clicks in Google's or YouTube's organic results, and it happens to also run as a Promoted Video, then a click on that video in the organic search results won't be counted as a paid click, correct?

Jay: Absolutely correct. The beauty of these Promoted Videos is that these are ads that also get a lot of organic views that advertisers aren't paying for, because of their ability to show up in Google's organic results, and/or YouTube's organic results.

Better Search Rankings With YouTube's Promoted Videos?

ReelSEO: So if the views from Promoted Videos are counted in your total view count, could that be a benefit to one's organic search rankings? Or is it something that gets weeded out?

Jay: Does it help with search ranking? It does in terms that we think it's going to be a positive experience for the user. But again, we want to make sure that we're not enabling any spamming.

The important thing to note is that YouTube has 2 billion views a day. EVery view that we count, is really a user clicking on something that says that they want to watch that video. So that's 2 billion discovery decisions being made every day.

Those discovery decisions get made all across the site. They get made on the search pages you mentioned. But primarily and more importantly, they also get discovered on the "Watch Page," where users are watching a video, and then finding the next video to go to; and we find more discovery decisions are being made there. The primary signal that we measure there is what we call, "co-visitation," along with hundreds of other signals. We look at things like: What other videos did the users watch, when they watched that Promoted Video? Having your own video promoted, and being co-visited with a series of other videos, is definitely helpful (to search rankings).

ReelSEO: Are you saying that the majority of the clicks on the ads – i.e., the views that come from the ads – originate from whatever's being listed under "Related Videos”, as opposed to natural search?

Jay: Sorry, no. Let's differentiate between the discovery decisions being made via ads, and the discovery decisions that are being made just generically across the site. So if people come and watch videos, and click on videos, that aren't ads; then I was speaking more holistically about the 2 billion video views a day.

Targeting and Placement with YouTube's Promoted Videos

ReelSEO: With the Promoted Videos, there's a lot of places where they show up when someone does a keyword search, and they show up as a "related video." Are the related videos based off any tags, because they're not based on an actual keyword search at that point?

Jay: Right, they're being contextually targeted. We're looking at the metadata in the videos. You make an interesting point. We've announced the ability to use our Video Targeting Tool, and we have a large team here that's working to make it a great experience all around. What we've rolled out is the ability to target Promoted Videos [with placement selection.] So you'll be able to fully use contextual targeting, but you'll also be able to hand-select a few videos, a few channels, a few categories – depending on how broad or narrow you want to go – and say "I want my video to run 'here'," and bid on those specific channels, categories, or videos.

ReelSEO: It seems that the only channels you can target are those of partners of YouTube. Maybe that's because those are the only ones that are being monetized?

Jay: Correct. At YouTube, we monetize a fraction of the total views. We make sure that the "uploader" of videos has the ability to make a decision on whether the ads serve on their pages; and has the ability to either be a part of video targeting or not.

ReelSEO: Can you insert multiple promoted videos to show up under the same keywords, or is it the usual – one, maximum?

Jay: The standard Google rules still apply. On one particular page, we can only show one particular ad from a particular advertiser. That's not to say you shouldn't have multiple creatives, or multiple videos, that are bidding on the same keyword; and we will take the best one for you, similar to how AdWords selects your ad for a particular keyword.

ReelSEO: And the creatives can be rotated out with Promoted Videos as well, yes?

Jay: Correct