By John Eberhard

YouTube advertising is where you create a video that can then be displayed before other videos on YouTube. These are called pre-roll video ads, and this is done through Google Ads (Google owns YouTube).

The way this works is your video will be displayed before a video that someone is going to, and if they watch your video longer than 10 seconds you get charged money, anywhere from 6 to 18 cents per view. If they watch your video longer than 30 seconds it will be credited with a YouTube view.

This is an excellent way to get your message and your company in front of people. So what type of video works the best for a YouTube pre-roll ad?

1. The video should ideally be short, like under a minute. It doesn’t have to be under a minute, but if it is you will likely get more people to watch the whole thing.
2. It should be fast-paced, no long intro. It should get right into it. The video should be tightly scripted so it moves along and makes its point, doesn’t waste time, doesn’t repeat itself, etc.
3. It should move along from one visual element to another and not stay on any visual for too long. I like to have each visual element not last more than 5-10 seconds.
4. It needs to have a “call to action” at the end of the video. This is where you tell people what you want them to do, usually to contact you. And you give your contact info on screen.
5. I like to have a quiet but peppy music track, quiet, under the voice. This gives the whole video more energy.
6. I find that working with a recorded voiceover, then showing various video clips and still images, tends to work better than an all “talking head” video. But you can intersperse a talking head with other video clips, which keeps it interesting.

YouTube Ads allows you to have a button in the lower left corner of the video, with words like “learn more” or “subscribe” or whatever on the button. This button can then link to a landing page on your website. So you can send people to a page on your website or a landing page just for this ad. The landing page should have a phone number where they can you, and a form for them to fill out. That’s for lead generation.

If you’re selling products online in a shopping cart, you can send them to a page where they can buy the item that you talked and showed in your video.

Your YouTube ad campaign can be set up so that it tracks how many leads or sales you got specifically coming from that campaign.