Not surprisingly, with YouTube registering (slightly) more searches than Yahoo! in September, the site has just launched Search Ads in a Pay-Per-Click format.

Click for a larger view of YouTube PPC ads.

Although not many advertisers are enrolled, as I suspect most companies are waiting for some results to be published to determine ROI, there is an interesting selection of ads so far (as noted in the link above).

We have several clients that have invested in How-To type videos, so I’m excited for this opportunity to use those for YouTube’s PPC. Also wondering if Google would be able to draw parallels between a video on a company’s site and a YouTube PPC campaign, and perhaps give a little boost in Universal Search?

Since the amount of traffic between YouTube and Yahoo! appears to be similar in recent months, the questions as I see it are: How fast would YouTube users know about the search ads, and how likely would they be to click thru to a site or actually purchase based on these video ads? Maybe we’ll be rolling the ROI for this type of initiative into a branding instead of ROI model. I guess time will tell.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 3:07 pm by admin and is filed under Apogee Labs, Industry News & Research, Paid Search (PPC). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.