This is a really good question that I am often asked about: How much does advertising on YouTube cost? The ad cost can vary in so many different ways. In today’s article, How Much Does Advertising On YouTube Cost?, I will discuss the costs on running your ads on YouTube and its difference to other advertising platforms.
Watch the video version of this article below:
The huge difference between running YouTube ads vs running search ads is the cost. It is a lot cheaper to run your ads on YouTube than in search, and at the same time, you can get more successful campaigns in YouTube ads.
However, to properly utilize your YouTube ads, you need to know the important parameters first. So today, I am going to give you some insights about this.
Important parameters when running a YouTube ad
View rate
View rate is an important number as this will tell you the target audience’s interest level or the number of people who will go from impression to click to viewing. The average number that you want to get is at least 25% for the view rate.
Once you can achieve this average, or even higher, then you will notice that your cost per view is going to be lower. To give you an example, we are getting 0.1 to 0.2 cents per view, and as soon as our view rate drops, our cost per view goes up around 0.4 to 0.6 cents cost per view.
The cost varies, and you may get up to0.16 to 0.20 cents per view. However, you can lower this cost if you can improve your view rate.
Click through rate
The click through rate (CTR) in simple terms, is the number of clicks divided by the number of thumbnail impressions (or the times that your thumbnails are seen on YouTube).
So, for example, your thumbnail is seen 1000 times on YouTube, and you got 100 people clicked on it, your click through rate (CTR) is 10%.
Example of YouTube ad cost
We got the last 30-day history of our account below, which are all video ads that we’re running:
The account summarizes below:
Total spend: $9100
Total views of 354
View rate: 41.92%
Percentage watch: 47%
Cost per click: $4.66 per click
For the percentage watch, out of 354,000 people, we got roughly about 150,000 people who watched the videos. So we’ve got huge engagement with our videos.
For our cost per click (CPR), so we got 1955 clicks that came in on this here, and so we divide that by 19.55. The result is 4.66 or $4.66.
Our ads are in a very competitive industry that the average cost per click is running at $72 per click. So, we have been running video ads, we got 354,000 people to watch the video, and we got 1955 people that clicked through and came to us. That to me is a very good deal.
Conclusion
The view rate and the click through rate are the things that you need to watch out for if you want to know and control your YouTube ad cost.
Your ad costs will vary, and they depend on the quality of your YouTube ads. If your ads are not resonating with your audience then expect that your view rate and your click through rate will go down, and your ad cost will rise as a result.
But if you know which factors to watch out for when you run your YouTube ads, and you closely watch your view rate and your click through rate, then you can control your ad costs and lower it down to a significant number.
