Google has expanded the YouTube Promoted Video ads product to enable advertisers to place their videos in the “related videos” section of other videos. Prior, Promoted Videos only displayed on the YouTube search results page. Now, advertisers can opt their promoted videos into the ‘content network’ and have them displayed in the related videos of other videos.

Here is a picture of a “promoted video” in the “related videos” box:

How does this work? Well, it is similar to AdSense, in that Google determines the contextual relevancy of the page and then matches ads to that page. So advertisers looking to promote their videos, would bid on keywords and Google will display their videos on other videos that match those keywords contextually. Unlike AdSense, there is the potential to see the same advertiser show up on the same page, more than once. Why? Simply because the overlay ads shown in the videos and the display ads are run on a different system then the promoted video ads. The feature should be available to all advertisers right now in the YouTube Ads console.

Why now? Matthew Liu, YouTube Product Manager, told us that there are simply lots of people using promoted videos now. In the past six months, clicks on promoted videos are up three fold. CTR on these ads are increasing over time, but are yet as effective as Google’s search ads. YouTube does hope to continuously improve ad effectiveness overtime.

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: YouTube & Video

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz