Opening up YouTube to new display advertisers

One of our goals is to democratize access to display advertising and make it accessible and open -- like search advertising -- so new advertisers can participate easily. We launched Display Ad Builder in 2008 to help you easily set up and run display ad campaigns.

Display Ad Builder is a self-service tool within AdWords that helps you choose from dozens of professionally designed templates to run ads across the 1 million sites that make up the Google Content Network -- including YouTube -- in a matter of minutes. Over 20,000 advertisers have used Display Ad Builder to create display ads quickly and simply, and over 80% them had never run a display ad campaign before.

Since we launched Display Ad Builder, we’ve added more templates and fonts to help you design display ads quickly. Today, we're announcing a new feature in Display Ad Builder that lets you use simple templates to create InVideo and companion ads on YouTube.

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.

Building overlays has always been difficult for small advertisers, who often don’t have access to the resources needed to create these animated ads. That’s where Display Ad Builder in AdWords comes in.

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Now, any advertiser can use Display Ad Builder to turn their image ads into overlays and run a campaign on YouTube in minutes. Depending on the type of campaign an advertiser wants to run, overlays can be bought on a CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) basis, and can be matched to YouTube videos based on numerous criteria, or even on a video by video level.

With this new format, Display Ad Builder will enable more advertisers to run display advertising campaigns on YouTube. For example, if you’re a small business that sells beauty products, you can quickly use a template in Display Ad Builder in AdWords to create an overlay ad and then run it on popular fashion and beauty videos.

If you're interested in creating your own InVideo ad, or any other type of display ad, click here to get started.

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew