YouTube Cards

Google has released a new way for us to market on our YouTube videos. It is called Cards and from what I can tell it is a huge improvement from the old style grey box that they used to have. Cards allows you to add a new layer of interactivity to your videos and the good news is unlike the old way of doing it cards are rendered for both desktop and mobile views.

The new way to add URL's, customize images, title text and call-to-actions that show up looking slick and inviting. Just like the old way of doing it you can still designate when and for how long the card lives on the screen and at any other point in the video a user is able to hover over an icon to browse all of the cards present on the video.

The fight goes on between Apple and Google however and as always we are the only ones to suffer because of this childish behavior. Because iTunes is not supported on Android, merchandise cards linking to iTunes will be unavailable on Android devices.

Another great feature of cards is we have the ability to use YouTube Analytics to track the performance of our cards. This is a great tool for anyone that is using YouTube as a promotional tool for their business and can also provide some great feedback for what is and is not working that we can then apply to our websites and blogs to help our conversions.

Cards offers 5 types of cards.

Merchandize cards: Similar to merch annotations, merchandise cards can promote a creator's licensed merchandise directly from the video

Fundraising cards: Similar to fundraising annotations, fundraising cards can link viewers directly to projects on whitelisted fundraising sites.

Video or playlist cards: This car can link to another public YouTube video or playlist which can be of interest to the viewer of the current video.

Associated website cards: Link directly to your associated website from a card. 

Fan funding cards: This card lets your fans show their appreciation for your videos, by making a monetary contribution directly on the video page.

To access this new feature go into your video manager and check out the tutorials.