If someone tells me that I only have to run a video campaign for the rest of my PPC career, I will be a very happy person.
YouTube is easily my favorite channel to reach the desired audience who might be interested in what my brand offers. But one encouragement that I get all the time from clients is that they don't see ROI from their video campaigns.
Even though I will argue every day that video advertising goals should not be direct conversions, we still have a way to prove some ROI in the campaign. In this post, I will show you an easy approach to showing the impact of what your video ad can do on your other campaigns.
Where to Go to Create Audiences for Video Campaigns
Whether you are running an organic or paid video campaign on YouTube, you still need a Google Ads account for this stage. After you are on Google Ads, click the Tools option which is the wrench icon. Then find the manager of the Audience who lives under the Shared Library.
Next, click the plus logo (+) in the blue circle to create a new audience in the Google Ads interface. Initially, advertisers had several options, but this post was about YouTube videos. So the viewer options we want to choose are "YouTube Users."
When we get to the page to make our audience from YouTube users, the first step is to name the audience. Once it's out of the way, we can start to the important parts. Next, we can choose the people we want to include on our YouTube video viewers. Look at all the options we have to make various audiences from our video campaigns.
The first option is to create an audience from anyone who has viewed any video from your YouTube channel; we can then hone in a little bit more. You can create an audience from views of specific videos you choose, and you can create audiences from video views only if the video was an ad. If you want to get even more specific, you can also create videos based off of engagement actions such as liking a video, sharing a video, adding the video to a playlist, subscribing to your channel or even adding any video to a playlist.
There is no right or wrong option here. Create the video audiences you feel are essential to your business goals and create as many audiences as you want. Once you have all of your audiences created, let’s head back to the main Google Ads interface.
Add These Audiences to All of Your Google Ads Search and Shopping Campaigns
The easiest way to add your video audiences to all of your campaigns is to use the AdWords Editor. (I know AdWords is called Google Ads now, but they haven’t changed the name of Editor yet). Within Editor, pull up all of your Search and Shopping campaigns. Then under the “Keywords and targeting” section, choose Audiences. From there you can select all of the campaigns you want to add audiences.
When you add the audiences, be sure to keep the Targeting Setting as “Observation”; this means your ads will not be shown to just the audiences we are adding. We are merely adding audiences to each campaign to collect data and possibly make some bid adjustments down the road.
If you prefer to use the Google Ads interface over the Editor tool, then stay within the Audience manager where we first created the audiences.
Select the video audiences you just created. Then under the “Add to” drop-down, you can add your audiences to whatever campaigns or ad groups you prefer. The interface setup will also ask you to select a targeting setting. Again, make sure to select Observation to make sure we are just collecting user data on this audience.
View Video Audience Performance in Google Ads
In the Google Ads interface, the audience report will show you how your audiences are performing for all of your selected campaigns or ad groups. By adding my video audience to all of my search and shopping campaigns, I can see how people came back to Google and searched for my keywords or products after viewing one of my videos. Here is what one example looks like.
In the picture above, I can see how people who see any video on my channel return to search for keywords in a particular campaign. So far I have seen excellent CTR, cost per conversion, and ROAS from this audience. The basic, high-level conclusion that I can make is that my videos help drive awareness or at least keep the brand's mind up, so that users remember to look for my brand later. This is the type of influence I want to show my clients and use to encourage more funnel effort.
Important to Look For: To use any audience on the Search Network, you must have at least 1,000 users in that audience within the last thirty days. The beauty of a video campaign is that it's not difficult at all to get 1,000 impressions from YouTube ads every thirty days so that at least the "All Audience" viewers have to work most of the time.
End Point
The important thing to remember is that the strategy described above will only show you the impact of your YouTube campaign on your PPC campaign on Google Ads. This strategy will not show the impact of your YouTube video on organic, direct, or even Bing Ads results. It is important to understand that your video ads can have a far greater impact than what we can display, but at least now we have some evidence of their impact. Carry out video viewers in your campaign and see for yourself!