Google Display Ads – Invideo Ads

Google InVideo Ads - Raised $10k for this charity in one day.

I’ve been running a Adwords campaign for a client in the Travel industry and have had a lot of success with a campaign I created using the Google Display Ads feature. Essentially Google Display Ads allow a canny online marketer to create high quality visual stories to sell your product with minimal technical skills. They are actually Adobe Flash ads but you do not need to know any Flash to create and as long as you have great images they are a very powerful tool for the online marketeer. Once you’ve added your text and your images they are quickly converted into a variety of online ad formats – it’s a very efficient process.

An Invideo ad is an animated flash overlay that appears at the bottom part of a video that a user is watching. It’s been one of the most effective ad formats on YouTube. With people watching over 1 billion videos a day on the site, overlays are an easy way to get your ad directly in front of a huge audience.

Invideo ads are an animated banner format YouTube launched in 2007. They typically appear part way through a selected video and disappear after a number of seconds if the ad is not clicked. The overlays are among Google’s most effective formats, with average click-through rates eight to 10 times higher than normal display ads,  according to a Google source.

One thing to note when creating these campaigns – plan way ahead because it can take over 1 month to get the ad approved by Google. So it’s not a particularly agile way of online marketing – due to this slow turnaround time it’s very important that you double check the final copy and images before approval – if you spot a mistake and have to change things – that can be another few week’s before the changes are approved