The key to success

The key to success is asking Google to upgrade your YouTube page from a user channel to an enhanced channel. This is all done at no extra charge from Google.

Currently a large percentage of advertisers still only have YouTube user channels, see example below:

While enhanced channels are nothing new to advertisers, it’s amazing how few people have taken Google up on this free upgrade. With the regular user channel it’s very difficult for users to see how to get back to your site and you have few options for branding.

If you get your YouTube channel enhanced it will open up many more opportunities for you to interact with your users.

What are the benefits of an enhanced channel?

The main benefit is that you are given the chance to upload a channel page header banner to the top of your channel, thus giving users a direct link to get back to your site and try and drive further interaction with your brand.

In the example above the company has chosen to take advantage of the option to tag the image up with different links leading to different parts of the site. This can all be managed within your enhanced channel settings on YouTube (The setting is called ‘image mapped external links’). You can immediately see how this feature makes this site stand out from the standard example.

You also have the option to add a side column branding banner to the bottom left of your channel, as shown in the example below, thus adding further scope for directing people back to your website.

If you take advantage of this in the right way you can ensure that your YouTube viewers are always kept up to date with special offers on your website and display ads to them with calls to action driving them through to view your latest deals & offers.

Other benefits of having this type of channel include:
• 1MB background image to complete your company branding
• Video remarketing
• Google Analytics tracking

All these features enable you to give your YouTube channel the same look & feel as your website.

The full path

There’s not much point adding all this great functionality to your YouTube channel if you don’t have any traffic going to it. The diagram image below shows some ideas for how to drive traffic & make the most of it.

The ultimate aim here is to get users to visit your site after interacting with the video content. If they like the content on your channel they’ll most likely want to check out your site and this allows you to guide users in the right direction to complete your goals.

What to do next

Speak to us about getting your channel enhanced for free as soon as possible. With many people still unaware of this functionality you have a great opportunity to stay one step ahead of the competition.

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  20th June 2011