Okay. I believe we are live. Please give me a moment. I'll make sure everything is fine. Okay. Everything looks good. Welcome to today's Youtube live stream. My name is Uzair and it is four o'clock in the UK. Every weekday I'm here at this time and on this channel to talk about Google Ads, video marketing, digital and online advertising and marketing your business products or services.
If you are new here, the format of these sessions is very informal and you can ask any questions you may have or you are struggling with regards to your digital marketing. I'm going to go through some slides, to begin with and then I'll refer to your questions and I'll try my best to answer them for you. There's a comment box on the right-hand side or under the video so please put your questions in and I'll make sure that I answer them before we sign off.
Today, I'm going to talk about the types and kinds of video ads. There are different formats, different versions, different length of videos which can be used for promoting your business on Youtube or pretty much all over the internet through the Google Display Network. Those of you who have been following me for the past few months or a couple of years, we started our video marketing journey in January 2018 to be precise and since then I have been regularly updating our content.
Video has been the sole format for our marketing, so everything starts with the video and then we push it out on the internet and on the social media right across the board. You've got Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and all these places. What we want to do is to have a multi-touch or omnichannel marketing strategy. The reason why we are using video for ourselves is, it is the most liked, commented and shared piece of content on social media and as you can see on this Youtube channel we have built up a great little community and it is growing by the day.
What we want to do is to put our message in front of our audience and then hopefully build up that trust and video is the quickest, easiest, fastest and the cheapest way to build trust. Why do you want to build trust, it's because people buy from people and people buy from those who they trust. Why do we buy from Amazon?
Not because it's the cheapest. It's because we trust them. If another company comes along and sells cheaper than Amazon you'll probably end up at Amazon and buy from them because we know that we are safe. They offer genuine products. Their customer service is good and they are not going to take the money and not deliver the goods.
They deliver on their promise every time, whereas, with this new company who may be cheaper than Amazon, we never know who they are what they do and a red flag always pops up in my mind when somebody, someone is selling at prices which are too good to be true. We chose video. I've been uploading videos and I'm going to show you a great little win which we had a few days ago, but before we hop on to the slideshow, I would just like to say a quick hello and a warm welcome to everyone Ashish, Mike, Nikhil, Sandy, Muneppa.
Good to have you guys here and if you have any questions then just put them over there in the comment box and I'll answer them at the end. Those who have followed me, you've seen me that we often do the celebrate the win. Not many people do this and it's not about showing off anything like that. It's about showing you the results which we are getting.
This is the Google page one and you can see my video is in the three pack and we have a link at the top of the page which is going to our blog, sfdigital.co.uk/blog. I've got in the top five or six links. I've got two links coming to me and the only two links. Well, these two as well, they have got the video thumbnail but over here.
I've got my thumbnail up there as well as over here. Now, this is very powerful stuff and if you listen to this carefully you can win in your niche or industry every time and beat your competitors. Now, my niche and my vertical is Google Ads, digital marketing, pay-per-click advertising and so on. Some very big names and big boys in there, in that niche and amongst those companies are HubSpot, WordStream, and support.google.com.
Now, I could never dream of beating them in the SEO game ever, but right now I'm right about there, above them at the top. If you've got a local business like a restaurant or a shop or a garage or anything like that, nobody is, I'm pretty certain and I'm 99% sure that your competitors will not be doing this what I am doing.
Even though we are up against some heavyweight boxers, I should say, it's difficult, it's impossible to beat a world champion or heavyweight boxer if you're not a heavyweight yourself but I'm giving these companies as good as I'm getting back. It's possible. You just got to keep doing it and you are going to get the results. Start with being consistent.
That's all I would say. You don't need to do lots and lots. You need to be consistent. Once a week, then you can increase the frequency of uploading content but the quality needs to be good and I know that you know, I log online over here. I get a few people over here and some of you guys have been here literally every day which I truly appreciate but then afterwards people keep on seeing my videos.
I consider these videos as my salesperson or the sales rep. They are doing all the selling for me. The more videos I have, the bigger the sales team I'm going to have, working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all over the world, because once your video gets ranked in Google and Youtube. These are the two biggest search engines in the world.
You are going to get found pretty much everywhere. Let's go into the types of video ads today, as to why you should use them, when to use these and what do they look like. We will start off with the in-stream skippable ads. When you play a video and you see a video pop up and with the skip button at the front.
You cannot skip it until five seconds. Did you choose to skip this, the advertiser will not get charged for a view so that means you as an advertiser has got five seconds worth of free branding. Obviously, you want people to continue watching it. You will only get charged if somebody views the video for more than 30 seconds or until the video finishes whichever is the owner.
You want people to listen to your message and what you have to say but if they don't, you get free branding, even if they skip the ad on the right-hand side especially on the tablet or the computer laptop. You will see that there is an accompanying banner on the mobile, it usually comes underneath that video. You can put your logo on there as well.
Although you have skipped or the person has skipped, your little banner over here will continue to show and that again is giving you free branding. You've got to keep getting in front of those people and if you are not getting the view rate high enough and most people are skipping, that means that first five seconds, you're not giving them the hook, because this is what we call a disruption.
We are disrupting the pattern. Somebody has gone over here to view a video of about golf, cooking, flying, or whatever it may be, football and then you interrupted the viewing with that with your ad. It needs to have that hook. We won't go into great details today about what you need to do. I'll cover that in a separate video but today I just want to show you, how you can put yourself or your brand and your products in front of your perfect audience.
This is a little video which I'm going to show you now is the kind of video we create for our clients. I won't show the full. I think it's about 90 seconds. I'm gonna pause this, for now. Okay. As you can see, it's very informal. It's not a perfect studio setup as such you can hear a lot of background noise and during that video, people are moving around or what you know there's a bit of noise from the air as well because it was very windy when we were shooting.
You don't need to have everything perfect and the other thing is when people are in front of the camera, most people get very nervous, but when you shoot with a smartphone which this video was shot with. All we had was a professional microphone attached to it and most people are very comfortable in front of a smartphone because they are using their phones and creating with their family videos and so on.
So, a lot of the time we don't even take our equipment on location because we know that people will get, they'll freeze in front of the camera and we just waste time trying to shoot that perfect video. For Harper's Foods, who are one of our most loyal customers and we love working with them. They were celebrating their 60th birthday last year and we created a series of videos which I'm going to show you in a bit.
This was the theme about 'Meet the Team', were we videoed various staff members. I'll show you very quickly how we did that one. This was about what, 60, 40, 50 seconds long and these were the little videos which we were creating for them, for that campaign. Then the next one, we move on to is the non-skippable ads.
These are either 6 seconds or 15, up to 15 seconds. Some of you may have seen these last week. In fact, I put the wrong one over here which is 32 seconds but we've got a version over here of 15 seconds, which is a lot shorter but you get the gist. Now, this one is square because we create the same video in three formats: vertical, horizontal and square.
Square one goes up on Instagram, Facebook and all the social media, and as well as the vertical ones. The vertical ones even work really well on the mobile phone because... let me try and show you on our site. If you were to go on... I go to my website and you will... I think you can just about see this video over here, right?
I want to press it. See how it fills up the whole screen? You can see this in focus now. Sorry about the reflection, but you get the gist. I'm doing something different because we are especially targeting the mobiles. Now, I know that a lot of our web visitors are on the mobile phone and visiting our site. You want to give them that best experience.
Also, if were to go to our site, you will notice that over here the video is vertical. Most people put a horizontal, I put a vertical one because we want to be different and then people get "Are you struggling with your digital marketing..." and it is locked, so, what I mean by that is even if someone is scrolling, they can still view the and watch the video.
This we have custom designed and built our site like in this way. I've got the call to action over there and the header. If you want a website which has got your navigation bar visible at all times, you need to lock the header, so, no matter how far down the page they are, they don't need to look around or where is the call to action.
You got a button there, there and two up there. Let's go back to our slideshow. Okay. This was the non-skippable ads so it could be up to 15 seconds. Then, we have the video discovery ads and as the name suggests, when people search on Youtube especially, you will find that video like that. It will have the thumbnail.
It will have that little orange button or the yellow button, whatever you see it as an ad, the title, description and also you will see the views. If someone sees a video which has got five thousand views or ten thousand views, you'll be intrigued. "Oh, let me have a look at it as well!" That's a great way to get yourself and your brand discovered.
A lot of marketers say, "Well these are complete waste of time! They don't work!" They do work if you've got good quality content and you want to get eyeballs. All these video ads are aimed at the top of the funnel audience. We want that awareness to be built up and not direct... conversions happen way down the funnel.
You don't want to be looking at conversions only. You want to look at the level of engagement and secondly, you are building up a remarketing list of those viewers who have viewed your video over here. This is why video for me is extremely important but this is on the Gmail where we run these ads. You can see how big the ad is.
You have the photo, the learn more, call to action button, headline, description and this is a different version and you see over there the ad. On Gmail, it works wonderfully well as well and again because most of the advertisers are not running these ads, the cost is very low. Then, we move on to, well, we've got another one here.
The discovery has the same type of ads but on the mobile phone, sometimes you'll see the ad at the top with the headline and the description here and sometimes you will find it underneath your main video. These are one of my favourite ads. I love these because these are fun to create and it can potentially create a lot of awareness for your brand and you get a real brand lift because these run-in tens and tens and hundreds of thousands of time and over a period of time you will see that people do start to remember and recognize your brand.
Now, if you're a local business, what you want to do is run these ads in a 5-mile or a 10-mile radius around you and you will find that most people who are your target audience would have come across your brand at some stage during your campaign. Let me show you, these were from again the Harper's campaign. We created the six-second along with the 'Meet the Team' videos and we ran it all over the internet.
That was one then we created another one and these were all shot with the iPhone. Then, we move on to the out-stream ads. The bumper ads will you can only buy them in cost per thousand, but then you will get thousands of views at a time. So, if you had a ten-dollar budget per day for video ads, depending on where which country you're in, Google will then... let's say it was three dollars a thousand.
You know you can potentially get up to 3,000 of views on your bumper ads for very little money. Next one is the out-stream ads. These appear on website apps and Google Video Partners. Google can potentially place an ad on Ask.com, Wiki, CNN and all these places where it can potentially place a video ad or any other Google Video Partner, channels and platform.
The last one is the mast has which is only for enterprise-level or for big companies which run on the Youtube Home Feed and it will reach a massive audience. You will need to contact Google directly and they will set it up for you. You can't just go into your Google Ads account and set this one up, usually, it is for a big push, for an offer or a branding campaign and so on.
Most companies, they will run this for a few hours, I think or maybe a day or two. It will not be going on for weeks or months on end, because it's pretty expensive and also the amount of traffic Youtube gets on the home page is absolutely, well, ridiculous. Okay. Now we go to the comments and questions. Please, put any in there now and I'll try and answer them for you.
Okay. Mike, "Have you ever run campaigns for pre-paid funeral plans?" I, personally, haven't but I know a few of my friends have. It's the same way as you would target... in fact I tell a lie, we have. The ones were... which campaign was it? I'm just trying to think. We had one which we had run about a couple of years ago.
I can find it out for you Mike, but yeah, it's the same. Well, I wouldn't say the same but the process of creating a search campaign, I guess that's what you want, is the same. Okay. Mike, thank you! (Mike:) "This is this channel is my second home." Well, you should be. It should be the first because you should be here all the time and you probably spend more time over here than at your home.
Sandy, "Tell me your first video experience and your first video ad experience." My first video experience of creating videos was horrible. Absolutely. It was just unbelievable. It was frustrating, I came to the point of giving up so many times, I cannot tell you. I would record a video like a three, five-minute video for like four hours and I would keep on making mistakes.
I won't like it and so on but then as you practice, as you go along, you become better at it. I'm not saying that I'm perfect. I want to put out the best quality content. That's the key to it. My setup is fairly simple straightforward and when I put up videos, people tend to like it. I cannot teach you how to shoot a video.
With my photography background, I was more comfortable behind the camera and not in front of the camera, so it was like a completely an alien experience for me, like of my God, that you know, the lens is staring at me. I was very uncomfortable but you get used to it and as you keep practising, that's the only way to overcome this.
Nobody can teach you. Suraj Hedge, it's nice to have you over here. Sandy, "Please send the first video of SF digital." I will have it on this channel, somewhere. Yeah, you'll just need to go back and go to the bottom of the view and you will find. They were not good but I, in fact, there was one video I remember, I forgot to change the white balance on it and I shot it for like four, five hours.
I made a really nice video and then I went home, came back the next day and I was looking all orange because the white balance was off and I was so fed up. I couldn't tell you that day. I thought, "Sorry, I'm gonna put it up." and that video has racked up about over 50-60,000 views up till now and it's one of my most popular videos.
The content people are looking at my face now, although I am on camera. The reason I'm being on camera and most people when they go live, they are just showing the screen or they are uploading videos they just showing the screen and not themselves. Putting yourself in front is the best way to build trust and this is what I want to do, is you guys to trust me to be an expert in Google Ads and video ads and so on. (Sandy:) "Will non-skippable ads eat more budget than skippable ads?" Well, you want to spend the money don't you Sandy?
It is about branding and you need to spend the money if you are getting a brand lift. The way to look at videos is keep running them and don't just run it for like 10 days or two weeks or something like that and then keep looking in your search campaigns. Has there been a lift in the brand campaigns or not?
You need to run it for a good few months and at a decent budget. I've been doing this for two years now. Youtube videos and video SEO and now I'm starting to get my voice out there, a lot more people have heard me, have seen me somewhere along on the internet, so I know that this is working and I continue to do this because I continue to get more customers and business from here. (Sandy:) "Should we add pixel for bumper ads and discovery ads for remarketing?" Bumper ads, you can't pixel, unfortunately.
Adam, "Congrats on the big win!" Yes, thank you. I was very happy today to see our link above HubSpot and WordStream because I could never think that it was possible and go support.google.com, well, you know that is some going. We've got about 100 keywords where we are ranking our videos on page one of Google already and every day, we are getting more and more keywords getting ranked and but this was the first one which is the feature snippet.
We just carry on, continue to work hard and put-up content. (Adam:) "You mentioned you did a free 90-day ad support for a case study. How did you transition them from a free support trial to a paying client?" Oh, I think you are referring to when I got started. Obviously, we had a photography business. Nobody knew us. That we were going to start Google Ads and why should they trust us to their Google Ads, so I went to our existing clients and said look let's run a campaign.
I'll run it for you for 90 days and if you like the results and I show you the results then we can continue to serve you and then we can talk about our compensation. That's how we got started, but you need to be confident in your abilities and what you are doing. Don't just try to learn on the job, because that's not fair to the client and it's not fair on you, because you are pretty much gambling away with somebody's hard-earned cash which I would never do and in fact in Google Ads also I'm a lot more conservative when I'm running ads because when I'm trying to test something, we would test it on our ads quite often, very aggressively to see what's happening and what's not happening.
There is always testing to be done on the client accounts as well, but we test with caution and not to hamper the results for our clients. Nikhil, "Are Youtube ads free?" Unfortunately, not. They're only free if nobody views them until 30 seconds or to the end whichever is the sooner. If somebody's skipping your ads after six seconds, that's free but you don't want that because you want clicks to come through to your website.
You want people to stop. You interrupted their video pattern. They are going to Youtube to watch something else and up popped your ad and it has disrupted their viewing. Now, there's a big difference between TV ads and Youtube ads because on TV you can't skip the ads. You have to watch through it whereas on Youtube you have the option but this is why people don't mind watching these in-stream ads because they know in five seconds, they can skip it but at least you got five seconds worth of free branding.
If you're looking at from that point of view, yes, you get free branding even on the Google Display Network you don't get any clicks. Then, you've got free branding but that's not the point. You want clicks, to people to come to your website. (Nikhil:) "What should be time limit to run a Youtube video ad?" As long as you like.
You keep changing. Don't run the same ad over and over again. It's called ad fatigue. People get sick and tired of it. You will find brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, Pepsi, McDonald's they change the ad campaigns every quarter. At Christmas time, they will have Christmas ads, you know, wintertime they will have winter, summertime they will have summer campaign going on.
Something different and a different offer. You should try. Your offer could be the same but definitely do different ones. Srinivas: "What is the cheapest product to start practising Google Ads?" I'm not sure what you mean by cheapest product, my friend. (Olumide:) "How do I exclude mobile app placements on GDN?" Good question. I'm glad you asked. You can only do this through the Google Ads Editor.
There is a video on this playlist about Google Ads Editor, where I have shown you how to do that. In the interface you can't do it, I'm afraid at the moment. Okay. Nikhil, "But I've heard 15 seconds is the best to run an ad on Youtube." It all depends. What you classify best ads? What results you are looking for?
I say this all the time. Don't listen to others. I don't because what may work for you may not work for me and what may work for me may not work for you. You've got to test it out. Try it out and if it doesn't work then at least you know in your heart of hearts that you tried your best and it didn't work.
At least you gave it a shot, but you got to try it out yourself. I wouldn't be just running my campaigns on a hearsay of somebody saying well this works and that doesn't work. Yeah, of course. I will take on somebody's opinion and then I'll try and run it myself and see if it works or not. That's it for today.
I shall be back again tomorrow at four o'clock same time as today in the UK, but obviously, it's the same link on our channel. Thank you very much for being here. Stay safe and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Goodbye for now.
