If you have ever watched YouTube ads then you have definitely been in a situation where you were served an insanely irrelevant ad. Something like what is happening in the picture below.
As you can see the video is about a woman winning a lawsuit but the ads are completely irrelevant.
What happens in such a scenario?
Well, you simply wait for the skip button to appear and instead of the ad, all your attention is on the skip timer.
And this is happening because the ads are purely interruptive and not at all relevant to the content you are watching or the state of the mind you are in.
Now imagine if that was not the case, imagine that the ad that popped up was extremely relevant and timely – like in the picture below.
As you can see that the ad now is much more relevant and aligns with the context of the content that you are watching. This ad is much more likely to be consumed and remembered by the user if they are interested in finding help to win a lawsuit.
This kind of ad targeting is called placement targeting and can be achieved easily within Youtube ads, but before we talk about how to do manual placements, let’s learn a bit more about what it is
How to target specific videos on YouTube?
You can do this manually by using the placement targeting option in google ads.
The Manual Placement Method on YouTube is a targeted advertising strategy that allows advertisers to select specific videos, channels, keywords or websites on the Google Display Network where they want their ads to appear.
This method provides advertisers with the ability to place their ads in highly curated content, ensuring that their messages are displayed alongside content that is directly relevant to their target audience.
You can target your ads by:
1- Keywords
2- Topics
3- Placements
When you are building out your YouTube ads campaign in Google ads you can choose where your ads are placed & that is just as important as the ad itself as we have seen above.
Why should you do placement targeting?
Precision Targeting:
By choosing exactly where ads are shown, advertisers can ensure their content reaches a highly relevant audience, increasing the chances of thru-play, ad engagement and conversion.
Stay On-Brand:
Manual placement gives advertisers complete control over the context in which their ads are viewed, allowing for a more strategic alignment with the viewer’s interests and the video content making sure that you are always on-brand.
Higher Engagement:
Ads are more likely to be perceived as relevant and engaging by viewers when they are closely aligned with the content they are already watching, leading to a better viewer experience and potentially higher ad performance.
How does YouTube placement targeting work?
We will not discuss how create a YouTube campaign with placement targeting, if you are interested to learn step by step how create such a campaign you can read our article on how to build a YouTube campaign.
Research:
Start by researching YouTube to find videos or channels that align closely with your brand, product, or service. This involves using keywords, analyzing viewer demographics, and considering the overall engagement and relevance of potential videos.
You can conduct this research in different ways like:
Let’s look at each method individually.
1- Using Adzaps
Adzaps can save hours of manual research and find you all the relevant videos, channels and keywords that you need with a few clicks.
Simply create a campaign and enter your targeting preferences and Adzaps will provide a list of relevant content. There are some advanced filters available that really allow you to filter exactly the type of content you need.
Advanced Filters by Adzaps
You can simply copy these placements or export them into a csv file and insert them in your Google ad account.
Adzaps is completely free to sign up.
An online interactive demo of Adzaps is also available if you want to learn more about it.
Video recommendations by Adzaps
Channel recommendations by Adzaps
Keyword recommendations by Adzaps
2- Inside Google
The other way of finding relevant placements is to use the targeting options inside Google’s own ad platform. It provides you a wide range of targeting options that you can choose from.
3- Search on YouTube
You can use YouTube’s own search bar to find relevant videos. The best thing about this method is that the predictive recommendations also give you a sense of what people are searching for and other relevant content that you can target
Selection:
Based on this research, advertisers compile a list of specific YouTube video URLs or channel IDs where they believe their ads will be most effective.
If you are doing this manually then you will need to copy each single URL/ID and paste them one by one, however if you are using Adzaps you can simply select the placements you want and click copy to clipboard.
Ad Placement:
Through Google Ads, you can then enter these URLs or IDs into their campaign settings under the ‘Placements’ option.
Goto placements section
Click the tab that say “Enter”
Paste in your video links or IDs
Click ad placements when finished
This directs Google Ads to only show the advertiser’s content on these selected videos or channels.
Combining Manual placements with Dynamic targeting:
Keep in mind that while placement targeting is a great way of boosting ad relevance and reaching the right people, it also has some limitations
1- Lower volume:
When you select this kind of targeting you are restricting the Google algorithm to only show ads where you have chosen and that can limit your reach, you need to make sure that you are providing enough placements so that the platform can show your message to enough people,
2- Higher Cost:
Because this traffic is considered highly relevant or higher intent the cost would generally be more than standard video campaigns. But depending on your Lifetime value and ad performance this might not be a big issue for your business.
We always recommend users of Adzaps to have a healthy mix of manual placement targeting and automated targeting to balance out reach and conversions.
Hope this was useful!
PS
If you are running YouTube ads you should definitely sign up to Adzaps, it is free to use for the first 5 campaigns.
