What Kind of Ads Can You Run on YouTube?

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world after Google. Approx. Nine million South Africans are on the platform on a monthly basis. In a previous article we mentioned that 8 million South Africans are on Facebook every month. That should help put things in perspective about how popular YouTube actually is.

Google owns YouTube and acquired the platform back in 2006. This allows all Google advertisers to simultaneously advertise on the YouTube platforms should they wish.

In this article we will be taking a look at what types of ads you can run on the YouTube platform.

The Different Types of Ads You Can Run on YouTube

1. Non-Skippable Video Ads

What if you could force someone to view your brand message? Sounds pretty cool, right?

With YouTube you can run non-skippable ads that are around 15-20 seconds long. This means that if someone was to search “How to fix a car engine” and desperately wanted to watch a video on the subject they would be shown your ad before they could continue learning the ins and outs of fixing a car engine.

However, forcing someone to watch an ad is not always a great move. If your ad is super boring it could easily leave a bitter taste in someone’s month and instead of getting the user excited about your brand.

To prevent this make sure to create compelling video content that people would want to engage with and would find interesting.

2. Skippable Video Ads

In general we believe it’s always a good idea to give someone the option to view your ad or not. This is where skippable ads come in.

These ads can be skipped and the best thing of all is you will only be charged if your ad is viewed, not when someone is clicking skip.

There are two ways to run skippable ads: in-stream or in-display:

• In-display ads are when your ad is shown within the video the user is watching, and
• In-stream ads are the ads that are shown right before the video.

3. Bumper Video Ads

Bumper video ads are similar to skippable ads in that they can be shown before a video.

They are also similar to non-skippable video ads in as the user needs to watch six seconds of the ad before they can continue watching the video they want to.

4. Display Video Ads

Display ads can be a video or image ad. They are usually shown on the right side of the platform right above other video suggestions.

5. Overlay Text Ads

Overlay ads are semi-transparent, text-based ads that appear on the lower part of the video. They usually pop up when a video is already playing and one has the option to close the overlay window.

6. Sponsored Card Ads

Sponsored card display ads can display content that might be relevant to your video. For example, if your video talks about “The best ways to lose weight”, you can show card ads within the video promoting specific weight-loss products. You can link these cards anywhere you want, for example, linking it to the product page itself might help drive more traffic to your website.

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