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Chapter 23 Using Call-to-Action Overlays on Your Videos 257

Note

Learn more about YouTube’s Promoted Videos in Chapter 22, “Advertising
Your YouTube Videos.”

But here’s the deal. It doesn’t matter how big a budget you have, you still get to
include a Call-to-Action Overlay. You can budget as little as $1.00 a day—and per-
haps spend less, if no one clicks your ad—and gain the Call-to-Action Overlay fea-
ture.

For some businesses, then, this argues for a strategy that incorporates multiple low-
cost Promoted Video ads. That is, you create a Promoted Video ad for each video
you want to link back to your site, setting as low a budget as possible; the size of the
budget doesn’t matter, all YouTube cares about is that you’re promoting the video.
This lets you add Call-to-Action overlays at a very low cost.

With this strategy, you set a minimal promotional budget, get a little exposure for
your videos on YouTube’s search results pages, but then reap the rewards of viewers
linking directly from those videos back to your website. It’s not a bad deal.

Creating a Call-to-Action Overlay

You add a Call-to-Action Overly from the editing page for the promoted video. You
only have this option, remember, if you go to a video that you’re currently promoting.
If you’re not advertising a video, you don’t have the Call-to-Action Overlay option.

To create a Call-to-Action Overlay, go to your My Videos page and click the Edit
button for the selected video. When the video editing page appears, scroll to the
Call-to-Action Overlay section, just below the video player, as shown in Figure 23.2.

Start by entering the overlay’s title, no more than 25 characters. Then enter two
lines of descriptive text, 35 characters maximum apiece.

If you want to include an image, typically your company logo, that image has to be
sized at 56 × 56 pixels and hosted elsewhere on the Web. Enter the URL for this
optional image into the Image URL box.

Next, enter the URL you want displayed on the overlay into the Display URL box.
This does not have to be the same URL you link to. Instead, this should be a short
and simple URL, typically the URL for your site’s home page.

Finally, enter the URL for the page you want to link to into the Destination URL
box. This can be a longer URL, to an individual page on your website. I recommend
pointing to a special landing page on your site, so that viewers can click the link to
get more information or purchase what you’re selling.