Leveraging Video Ads To Enhance Your PPC Campaigns

As digital advertising continues to expand its influence with customers, finding a way to maintain relevance and be consistently engaging is becoming increasingly challenging.

This is where video ads hold a lot of sway. Time and again, video ads have proved to be one of the most popular and engaging ad types when it comes to keeping an audience’s attention. By providing something entertaining, informative and useful to your audience, you are making it far more likely that they will make that all-important purchase.

But how can you maximise the efficiency of your video ads when everyone else is attempting to do the same thing?

Success in this area lies in understanding the true potential of video ads, exactly how to create them, and how to refine your video marketing strategy to really bring in results. This article will show you exactly how to create memorable, creative and effective video ads.

• Video ads in PPC - An overview
• The benefits of video ads
• Creating engaging content
• Platform and placement options
• Targeting and audiences
• Performance measurement

Video ads in PPC - An overview

So what are video ads, and how can you create and find them within a PPC setting? Simply put, video ads in PPC are paid advertisements featuring video content. You can find them on common platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok. In fact, most social media platforms and search engines with video content of any kind allow for paid video ads.

Video ads come in various formats: in-stream ads, out-stream ads, video discovery ads, and bumper ads. So they’ll pop up or be shown to users in a variety of ways. (There’s more to this ad format than those skippable ads at the start of YouTube videos, but not everyone knows the full range available!)

As a marketer, the integration of video ads into PPC strategies can drive better engagement and boost conversion rates. But only if you know how.

The benefits of video ads

As you might expect in today's increasingly mobile and video-focused online world, you can expect higher engagement rates compared to static ads with well-crafted video campaigns. You may also benefit from improved brand recall and message retention. Users can enjoy a video ad in a way that basic text and image ads just can’t quite deliver. Because there’s a sense of entertainment and storytelling in a video that is unique to the format.

These enhanced storytelling capabilities lead to better emotional connections between users and your brand, product or service. Which ultimately leads to a stronger connection that is more meaningful to both you and your customers.

Video ads present the ability to convey complex information quickly and effectively. There’s no reading involved, as visual elements and voiceover can convey a lot at speed.

And from a metric perspective? Expect increased click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates if you’ve created a highly intentional and well-researched campaign. You’ll probably also find you have a better performance on mobile devices.

Creating engaging content

So how do you actually make videos that convert? The most vital element is a compelling storyline: engaging narratives that capture your viewer's attention.

With skippable ads being the norm (for the most part) you’ll want to make the opening 5 seconds really eye-catching and attention-grabbing. Put your focus on the start of your video, because that is all you have to gain a viewer’s focus while they’re browsing. Wait too long to get to a strong visual or a memorable line and you’ll have wasted an opportunity, as the user simply skips the ad.

Now, in this highly competitive space, you’ll want a strong call-to-action (CTA), because clear and persuasive CTAs drive desired actions for your campaign. It sounds simple, but in the more open-ended creative world of video production, you still need to keep your CTA at the forefront of your customer’s minds. Even when you’re creating a universe of characters and scenarios to play out in your dream ad.

Speaking of dream ads, now is the time for high-quality production: professional visuals and sound quality boost the credibility of your brand. It’s also a question of staying up to date with your competition. A production standard is just the expected level of quality that users are used to today.

Before you get too excited and plan a 90 minute epic saga for your BBQ tongs that are going on sale, consider the length of your ad. Keeping videos short and to the point (15-30 seconds for most platforms) is the most effective approach. Especially when you’re running multiple video campaigns that need to cover a variety of products and target audiences.

Audience placement and research is one of the most useful elements of any video campaign. So make it a priority to tailor any video content to your target audience’s preferences and pain points.

Finally, it’s worth taking a minute to consider user-generated content (UGC) for authenticity and trust. These campaigns can be run alongside anything that you create yourself, adding yet another way for users to discover your brand via video ads.

Platform and placement options

Every platform that you place a video ad on will have slightly different requirements and available options as a marketer. Here’s an overview of what formats of video ads to expect on some of the most popular paid ad platforms:

YouTube

• In-stream ads: skippable and non-skippable
• Video discovery ads: appear in search results and watch pages
• Bumper ads: 6-second non-skippable ads

Facebook and Instagram

• In-feed videos: appear within the user’s feed
• Stories: full-screen vertical ads
• In-stream ads: mid-roll ads during video content

LinkedIn

• Sponsored content: video ads in the news feed
• Message ads: video content within direct messages

TikTok

• In-feed ads: appear in the user’s “For You” feed
• TopView ads: full-screen ads at the app’s launch
• Branded hashtag challenges: encouraging user participation with video content

Targeting and audiences

Your targeting and audience segmentation are just as important to the success of your campaign as what you put into your video content. You wouldn’t want to waste the budget and time spent on creating the perfect campaign, only to show it to an audience that isn’t entirely relevant. So double down on understanding your audience’s wants, needs and preferences.

Once you’ve thoroughly researched your audience, you should be confident to split them into various groups. Here are just some of the available targeting options that you can use across paid ad platforms:

• Demographic targeting: age, gender, location, language
• Behavioural targeting: past purchase behaviour, online activity
• Interest targeting: hobbies, preferences, followed pages or profiles
• Custom audiences: based on existing customer data (email lists, website visitors)
• Lookalike audiences: targeting users similar to existing customers
• Retargeting: re-engaging users who have interacted with your brand

Familiarise yourself with what targeting options are available within your chosen paid ad platform, and build your audience research around these requirements.

Performance measurement

Like any paid ad campaign, there are a lot of highly useful metrics that you can benefit from tracking and analysing as your video campaign develops.

Here are a few of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can track:

• View count and view rate
• Engagement metrics: likes, comments, shares
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Conversion rate
• Cost per view (CPV)
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)

Video ads are just as much a part of your marketing funnel as any other ad. So take the time to analyse audience retention to understand drop-off points across your campaign.

Using your data as your foundation for new ideas, A/B test different video creatives, CTAs, and targeting options. This informed approach to refining your videos can speed up the effectiveness of your campaign, and save you budget in the long run.

In Summary

With trends often pushing visual content over anything text-based online, it seems like video ads aren’t going anywhere. If you want your video ads to actually convert, you’ll need high-quality, engaging content that really speaks to your niche audience.

Embracing video ads is a vital component of modern digital marketing strategies, so stay ahead of your competition with purposeful video campaigns that do more than just tick a box. Remember, if you understand your audience, you’ll create meaningful video ads that cut through the noise.

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