PPC tips and advice

Google's Promoted Videos available in Australia

Google Australia recently announced on its blog the introduction of their new service, "Promoted Videos". This is a new way to place videos on YouTube (as well as on other video related sites) and to make it easier for people to find these videos. Having been tested in the US for a period, this feature is now being rolled out to other countries and provides new marketing opportunities for video content.

Promoted Videos works in a similar way to Google's Adwords system, in that advertisers will be able to compete on keywords on a price-per-bid basis and drive traffic to their videos, after they have chosen the best site to place them upon (such as relevant YouTube search results pages, video watch pages, and Google's publisher network). There are also 'Call-to-Action overlays' in Promoted Videos, whereby advertisers will be able to add a clickable overlay to their videos, allowing them to drive viewers to a website off YouTube. This means that advertisers can track the performance of a video and whether viewers are converting into customers.

The idea of Promoted Videos is to help advertisers find a relevant audience for their videos and quickly get a decent number of views of them. There are reportedly 20 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, so it's currently not easy to make a video stand out from the crowd, particularly in the business market. Google has now taken the opportunity to target those willing to pay for a placement and will undoubtedly reap extravagant rewards from doing this,such is the popularity of YouTube and other video sites.

Google's aim is not only increase its revenue from Adwords advertising though, but to broaden the functionality of its current campaign management tools, whilst simultaneously giving searchers an enhanced ability to find particular videos. So it appears that it will be a win-win-win formula that will increase in popularity in relation to the rapid speed that the demand for online video viewing and placement has grown in recent years.

This article was first published in the December 2009 edition of our monthly newsletter.

If you would like to find out more about Promoted Videos and the opportunities for the Australian market, please contact us now. Alternatively, please request a FREE website assessment and see what you could achieve with a successful search engine marketing campaign.