So you have been creating excellent video content for some time now? But the traffic and new subscribers aren’t rolling in as fast as you expected?

You’re not alone. Many video content creators assume that only by creating high quality videos, they’re going to get positive returns for their business.

The reality is that good video marketing is as much about marketing as about video. Both video and marketing have to go hand in hand to succeed with video marketing.

So if you’re looking to get your videos in front of an interested audience, then Google Adwords targeting options can really be useful.

With Google Adwords, you can not only reach a whole new audience, but also optimize the delivery of your video ads. Let’s see how.

Keyword Targeting

If you want your video ads to appear on Youtube videos and channels based on related phrases and keywords, keyword targeting is the way to go.

As you’ll see later, targeting ad placement on a specific YouTube video or channel is usually better for your campaign, but keyword targeting can also work well in some cases, especially if you begin by putting in the time to find the best keywords for your business.

Apart from the standard AdWords Keyword Planner, you can use additional research tools like BuzzSumo and KWFinder.

Once you’re in Keyword Planner, begin your research by putting in a couple keyword ideas.

You can then start sorting and playing with the suggested keywords based on several factors like search volume, competition and more. You can also download the keywords as an excel file to refer later. 

Placement Targeting

You can use Google Adwords placement targeting options to reach people watching videos on other Youtube Channels.

In fact, with a Google Adwords video ad campaign, you can show your videos on a specific Youtube channel, or even just a particular video. In my experience, this is the best targeting mechanism to promote your Youtube videos with an Adwords video campaign.

But keep in mind that if you want to make this kind of targeting work for your videos, you must have a deep understanding of your target audience, and the competitor Youtube channels where they watch the most videos.

The good news is that you can always test a placement with a small budget to see how it’s working for you. Create a separate ad group for each placement targeting you want to test and wait for the performance reports to gather enough data.

If the performance with a particular placement targeting is low, it’s time to try to a different Youtube channel or video to show your video ads.

Whenever you create a new ad group, you can save a lot of time by copying and pasting the video ad as is from the previous ad group. Then get rid of the previous placement targeting and fill in a new one.

Setting low bids can also result in low performance of your video ad campaign. Selecting certain channels to show your video ads doesn’t mean your ads will show on those channels. If you are targeting a channel with really high traffic, a low bid won’t cut it.

So before you decide that a placement targeting isn’t working for you, you might want to test further by increasing your bid for that placement.

In order to check if your video ads actually showed up on the channels you selected, you need to select your campaign in your Google Adwords account.

In the left sidebar, look for the tab that says Placements. Once you’re there, click Where Ads Showed. So you can see how your ads are showing up for the placements you picked. 

Life Event Targeting

For your Google Adwords video campaigns, you can also target audience based certain milestones in their lives. For some businesses, this can result in a very high performance, successful campaign.

For example, you’re a local makeup artist or florist, you can choose to how your video ads to people close to getting married.

Or if you are into local entertainment or a packers and movers business, you can target people based on moving life event. Once you start exploring, you’ll see many viable events based on which you can target people to display your video ads.

To do this from your Google Adwords account, go to the Audiences area. Then click on Intent & Life Events. Next, select Life Events and pick the event for which you want to target an audience. 

Language & Location Targeting

Do you have a multilingual target audience? Or do you prospect communicate in any of multiple languages?

Language and location targeting can help a lot in improving on the delivery of your Youtube video ads.

For example, your target audience may consist of people who speak English & French, Hungarian or English, or any other kind of combination.

In fact, that’s true for certain parts in the world. In many regions, the people speak more than one language.

Note that this type of targeting can’t be done on ad group level. The location of your target audience and the language they speak is set at the campaign level.

So in order to run Google Adwords video ads with separate locations and language targeting, you’ll need to make different campaigns. You can’t do this by altering the ad groups within a single campaign.

The ability to make your targeting differ based on location and language is critical if you plan to reach a target audience who speak more than a single language.

It’s also essential to know that when you target languages from the Google Adwords campaign settings, whether a person will the ad in that language depends on the language of his or her Google interface.

So if you set your target language for French, for example, the users who have their interface language as English won’t see your video ads. That holds true even if the person speaks both French and English.

Therefore for most scenarios, it’s best to target all the languages and pay attention to location setting as well when you are targeting people who speak different languages.

To find out the locations where your Youtube video ads are currently being served, select your campaign and you’ll see a Locations option on the left menu.

Once you click on the Geographic report tab, you can choose between the user location report and the geographic report. Both the options will show you different data.

The geographic report is good when you want to know the locations in which your target prospects have indicated an interest.

The user location report will not show you the places of interest. The user location report is a good option for when you need to see information only about the locations.

So based on the information from these reports, you’ll know where the people who your video ads are located. So you refine your location targeting even further. For example, if you’re targeting prospects in a whole country, you may want to narrow it down to specific regions. 

Custom Affinity Audience 

If you have really done the hard work of defining your target audience in detail, creating a custom affinity audience can be a really useful tactic.

If you already know about Affinity audiences, you know they this is a kind of targeting based solely on topics. But custom affiliate audience is a bit different.

Using this targeting option, you can pick an audience based on a more complex set of parameters. These factors can include URLs, topics of interest and even mobile applications.

By using this advanced tactic, you can make sure that your targeting is more specific and nuanced when it comes to reaching your audience.

Let’s say your target customers visit a specific site or a particular app a lot during a certain period of time. So using custom affinity audience, you can specify these channels to target your best possible audience. 

To use a custom affinity audience, head over again to the Audience area of your Google Adwords account, and then go to the Affinity option. You may have to scroll down a bit to locate the option of Custom Affinity audience.

Just click and you will see a dialog box where you can set the custom audience as per your criteria. 

Conclusion

As we have seen, if you’re looking to start with Google AdWords video ads, there are plenty of placement targeting options at your disposal.

You can get traffic to your YouTube videos by choosing an audience depending on keywords, placements, custom affinities, life events and more.

It’s worth repeating again that targeting an audience based on specific Youtube channels and videos usually is the best way to go.

But with continuous experimentation and trying different options, you may find that some other targeting works even better for your business.