If you have a YouTube video which gets a considerable amount of views every day, then you can improve your CTR with this method. In a YouTube video – usually, we are allowed to include links only to other YouTube videos or links to Channel or subscribe page. This is usually done using the annotation feature. But this method will allow you to add external links inside the video! Usually, we get traffic from YouTube videos through the link in the description and as we all video marketers know, the CTR is very low in that case. To quench your curiosity, let me show you how it looks. Read on!
How to include clickable links in YouTube videos
You can also add a thumbnail image in this overlay which would be more effective. When a user clicks on this overlay he or she will be redirected to the URL of your choice. To enter the call to action overlay details you need to go to your ‘Video Manager’ and click on Edit in the corresponding video. You will get a tab named Call to Action Overlay in the settings like shown below. You can enter all the details here and your overlay will be ready to rock. Now if you go to your YouTube account and do the same, you will not find the call to action overlay feature enabled in your video yet.
Activating the Call to Action Overlay Feature
- To activate the CTA Overlay feature you need an AdWords account. You should promote your YouTube video to get the feature. But do not worry; you need not pay anything for the campaign. You can set up a very low budget campaign – like $1 per day, let it run for a few days and then pause the campaign to get more YouTube views. Until you completely delete the campaign, your CTA Overlay would be active. You will get this feature as soon as you set up your campaign. You need not even wait for the ad to be approved and start running.
- If you login into your AdWords account, you can see a link ‘All Video Campaigns’ in the bottom-left corner. Open the page and click the new video campaign as shown below.
- YouTube gives this special privilege to the videos which are being promoted but the special advantage is that these overlay links are displayed even when the video is being viewed from other sources of traffic. So if one of your videos went viral or gets a good amount of views from YouTube internal search or through Google search, then this is a good opportunity to redirect more of that traffic to your squeeze page or blog.
Hope you found this method useful. I would recommend that you set up tracking for your links with your tracking system of choice or something as simple as goo.gl URL shortener and see what kind of text in the overlay gives you the maximum CTR. There is no golden rule for copywriting except testing it.
