Signing up with Google Ads

Before you can access the full system and start setting up your YouTube campaign, you need to sign up for a Google account, if you don’t have one, by visiting https://accounts.google.com/signup and following the steps. You also need to sign up for Google Ads with your Google account. Sign up at https://ads.google.com

In the past, Google required people signing up for the first time to create an initial campaign for text-based ads to run on Google’s search engine. If you’re required to do so, go ahead because you can immediately pause or delete it once done.

Getting a tour

When you first arrive at the main Google Ads interface, you may be offered a tour that walks you through key features of your account. Taking this tour is a great idea because it familiarizes you with the options available.

You also see the campaign you might have created as part of the initial setup as well as various toolbars with lots of options. Bookmark this site in your browser because you’ll be visiting the tool every day when you have active campaigns.

Google Ads offers helpful guidance in a variety of different ways.

• When you click on the question mark icon attached to a feature or section, simple definitions appear.
• Clicking on a link to Learn More opens a help tool with an article explaining the relevant feature or section.
• A large searchable library of content appears when you click on the upper-right corner of the question mark icon and then click on Get help.
• Google’s support team is available by phone Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET. You can find the relevant number listed on the Google Ad’s website. If you’re in the United States, you can call 1-844-201-2399.

Driving leads

You can create a video campaign designed to drive leads by encouraging people to explore your product or service, sign up for an email or provide their contact information, or engage in other actions that help drive your business.

This campaign type uses an ad format known as TrueView for Action. This skippable video ad format runs in-stream, meaning that your video ad plays before, during, or after another video on YouTube. These ads give users the option to skip them after five seconds.

Along with your video, you’ll be able to include a text headline and a call to action (CTA.) Headlines can contain up to 15 characters and is the primary line of text next to your video ad. Use headlines to promote your product or service. Your call to action can contain up to ten characters and appears alongside your headline. You’ll use your CTA to direct people to the website you specify as your final URL.

Go to Chapter 4 to find out more about skippable ad formats and Chapter 6 to discover creative tips to ensure that your ad creative performs well.

Delivering website traffic

If you’re interested in getting more traffic to your website, you can create a video campaign against this goal.

Just start by following the steps listed in “Setting up video campaigns,” earlier in this chapter and choose the option Website Traffic. When you’re asked to select a campaign type, choose Video.

If you haven’t yet setup conversion tracking, you’re asked to do so. Check out the sidebar “Conversion tracking,” earlier in this chapter.

Growing product and brand consideration

Marketers looking to move people from awareness to consideration in the marketing funnel by encouraging them to explore their brand, products, and services can set up a campaign to drive product and brand consideration.

Follow the steps in the section “Setting Up Video Campaigns” earlier in this chapter, choosing product and brand consideration and then selecting video. You’re offered a campaign subtype:

• Standard consideration, where you can drive views of or engagement with your product or service, leading to increased consideration. This campaign type uses videos to encourage consideration by driving interactions and engagements.
• Shopping, which enables you to promote relevant products alongside your video ads, encouraging people to learn about your products and services and to shop on your website.
• Ad sequence, which lets you tell your story by showing ads in a particular sequence. It uses a mix of ad formats so that you can show a sequence of ads to people over time. See the nearby sidebar “Ad sequencing.”

When it comes to creating your video ad, you have a new option available to you. You can create in-stream ads, but you can also create TrueView Discovery Ads (formerly known as TrueView in-display ads). These ads let you place your video ad in moments of discovery — for example, your video ad can appear next to related YouTube videos, as part of a YouTube search result, or even on the YouTube mobile home page.

Unlike in-stream ads, which play before, during, or after videos on YouTube, these discover ads consist of a thumbnail image taken from your video along with some text. The size and appearance of the ad can vary a bit depending on where the ad is appearing, but the idea is that discovery ads invite people to click to watch your video.

Think of it this way: Discovery ads are a bit like inserting your ad in a moment of intent, when someone has searched for something (see Chapter 5 for more on moments of intent). You’re charged only when the viewer watches your ad by clicking on the thumbnail.

Adding the link to your video ad and choosing the video discovery ad option gives you some choices and some input boxes to complete. Follow these steps:

1. Choose a thumbnail from the four that Google Ads automatically suggests.
2. Write a headline of under 100 characters.
3. Write two lines of description, both under 35 characters

4. Give your ad a name.

   This name appears only in Google Ads, so viewers do not see it.

5. Preview your ad.

   You can toggle between As YouTube Search Ad and As YouTube Related Ad to see how your ad looks in different placements (refer to Figure 7-4). You can also see how it appears on mobile versus desktop.

Creating brand awareness and reach

You can create a brand awareness and reach campaign if you’d like to reach a big broad audience in order to create awareness of your brand, product, or service.

If you choose standard awareness when you create your video ad, you can see how your ad will appear on YouTube and on the Google Display Network. Figure 7-5 shows the different examples.

You’ll have a few campaign subtype options:

• Standard awareness: This subtype lets your reach viewers on YouTube and across the web. It’s designed to deliver reach, impressions and views using in-stream video ads.
• Skippable in-stream: This subtype lets you reach people on YouTube and across the web with skippable in-stream ads optimized for efficient impressions.
• Out-stream: This subtype helps you expand your audience reach specifically with ads designed for mobile devices, reaching people on their phones and tablets.
• Ad sequence: This subtype lets your drive deeper awareness or consideration by showing video ads in a specific order. Tell your story by showing ads in a particular sequence to a single user. Use in-stream or bumper ads, or a mix of both. See the nearby sidebar “Ad sequencing.”

If you choose out-stream, you have some additional options to create your ad. You can include a headline of up to 80 characters, a description of up to 100 characters, and a call to action of 15 characters or less. You can upload a logo to accompany your ad and, of course, enter the URL where people will be taken if they click on your ad.

In-stream videos are what most people are familiar with. Also referred to as pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll, these video ads run before, during, or after a video. Simply put, in-stream video ads run when you’re watching a video.

Out-stream video ads can appear in nonvideo environments. Say that you’re reading an article online, and you’re scrolling through the page of content. You may have seen that sometimes a page of content opens up and gives way to a video ad that’s effectively been placed in the middle of the nonvideo content. That content is an out-stream ad.

If you’re feeling unsure about which type of video ad is right for you, start with in-stream. In my opinion, it’s the most flexible, useful format and works just as well for beginners to advanced marketers.

Designing your own custom campaign

While Google Ad’s option to let you choose a goal and build a video campaign based on preselected choices makes things quick and easy to get started, sometimes you may want more control over your video campaign and the variables you’ll customize. This desire is especially true if you’re an advanced marketer with your own methodologies and approaches that you’d like to follow.

When you’re setting up a custom campaign, all the variables are open to you. Note that some options toggle on and off as you make selections, so play around if you find something is greyed out that you want to use.

Overview

The Overview section gives you a bird’s-eye view of all your campaigns, showing you data from the last seven days. You can change the date range in the upper right-hand corner. All the different data found in the Overview section has its own matching section within the left-hand menu, allowing you to dive deeper.

If you have time to check only one thing every day or so, make it the Overview section. It’ll give you confidence, at a glance, that things are chugging along how you’d like.

I particularly like to look at the Biggest Changes box, which shows you the last seven days compared with the previous seven days, showing all your various campaigns listed by those who have had a large increase or a significant drop in the spending of your media budget.

Recommendations

The Recommendations section is an incredibly useful tool that takes some of the thinking out of optimizing your campaign.

After your campaigns have run for a few days or weeks, recommendations will appear in this section, advising of tweaks you can make to improve the performance of your campaigns. These recommendations will appear and refresh periodically, so check this section at least once a week.

Don’t worry if you don’t see any recommendations —you may not need any! All the recommendations that do appear here are customized to be relevant just to you and your campaigns; they aren’t blanket messages applied to all accounts. New feature suggestions also appear here.

Campaigns

The Campaigns section provides a complete listing of all your campaigns in your account at any one time. Each campaign you have is listed with columns for budget, campaign type, summaries of the number of impressions and views delivered, the view rate, average cost per view, and total cost.

You can select one or more campaigns and

• Copy and paste the campaign to duplicate it.
• Enable, pause, or remove the campaign.
• Change your budgets or bidding strategy.
• Create automated rules that change how and when your ads appear or adjust bids based on dynamic conditions.
• Tweak your targeting criteria.

You can also search, filter, and segment your campaigns so that only certain ones appear.

As you’re creating and running campaigns, compare their performance to determine why one campaign did better than the other. It may be your ad creative, your bidding or placement choices, or other variables.

Ad groups

Each campaign you create can have one or more ad groups within it. For example, you may create Cardio Classes, Strength Training, and Dance as ad groups in a Group Fitness Class campaign.

Although these ad groups are all subject to the budget set at the campaign level, they can have their own bidding strategy, targeting and placement, and video ad creative.

To create a new ad group:

1. Choose your campaign from the left-hand side menu.

2. Click on Ad Groups.

   A list of all the created ad groups for that campaign appear. (You created at least one ad group when you set up the campaign.)

3. Click on the blue plus icon.

   You see a screen, shown in Figure 7-6, that lets you create your new ad group.

4. Enter a name for the ad group.

   Choose something distinct that describes your ad group. For example, for a Group Fitness Class campaign, you might create an ad group for Cardio Classes.

5. Set your maximum bid.
6. Make your selections around demographics and audience targeting and where this ad group’s ads will run based on keywords, topics, or specific placements.
7. Paste in the URL of your video to create your video ad.

8. After you complete everything, click on Save and Continue.

   A new ad group appears in the campaign.

You can pause ad groups if they aren’t performing well, which directs more of your campaign’s budget to the other ad groups.

Just like the Campaigns section (see the preceding section), you can view the performance of ad groups, and filter, download, and email reports.

Ads & extensions

The Ads & extensions section lets you review all the ads you have running in a campaign.

You see a thumbnail of each video ad, the campaign and ad group that the ad lives in, whether the ad has been approved, its type, and data about how well the ad is performing. You can also see the impressions, views, view rate, average cost per click, and total cost of each ad.

If you look at Figure 7-7, you can see that the top listed ad has a cost per view of only $0.02. That amount is a really cheap cost per view and a great use of the media budget. It means that it costs only 2 cents per view of the ad. You can also see that 1,793 people have seen the ad. The ad below it has a cost per view of $0.10, which is still a great cost per view but a lot more than the ad in the top spot. The marketer behind this campaign will be considering why the first ad performed so well and whether there is anything to learn and apply to other ads moving forward.

When you scroll to the bottom of this page, you get a summary of your Total Video Campaign results.

Campaigns, ad groups, and ads all work together in a nesting hierarchy. Your campaign sets your total budget, bidding type, places your ads will run, start and end dates, and other campaign-level settings. Ad groups live within campaigns. You can create several ad groups and tweak settings for your maximum bid and your target audience and further narrow where your ads will appear. Ads live within ad groups. You can create several different video ad creatives within an ad group.

You can see extensions in the Extensions tab at the top of the page. Extensions are a powerful way to improve your ads and help potential customers find you. However these extensions typically apply only to text ads running in your campaign, not your video ads.

Videos

Clicking on the Videos section shows you a list of all the videos you’ve uploaded to your Google Ads account, along with how they have performed.

I like to sort video ads by average cost per view to see which ones performed the best by the dimension of cost.

Landing pages

The Landing Pages section collects a list of all the web pages where your ads click through to. A landing page is the page on your website that you designate as the destination for someone to click through it. It’s effectively where they land after they have clicked your ad.

Keywords

When you first set up any campaign or ad groups, you can choose where your ads run and include keywords that can trigger your ad to show. For example, you can create a list of keywords that cause your ad to appear when people view content related to those keywords on YouTube, websites, and apps.

If you set up keywords, a list of them and their associated performance data appears.

To add keywords:

1. Click on the Keywords left-hand side menu to visit the Keywords section and then click on the blue + icon.
2. Choose which campaign or ad group you’d like to add keywords to.

3. Enter keywords, one per line (see Figure 7-8).

   You can copy and paste them from a list, if you’ve created one. You can also enter related websites or details about your product and service, and Google will automatically generate example keywords for you.

4. Choose your Keyword setting.

   Audience shows ads to people who are likely to be interested in these keywords. Content shows your ads on webpages and videos related to those keywords.

   Choose Audience because you want to reach people interested in those keywords, regardless of the site they’re visiting or video they’re watching.

5. Click on Save.

   You return to the Keywords section, which now lists the keywords you added to your campaign or ad group.

Audiences

When you first set up your campaign or ad group, you chose the types of audience you’d like to reach in the People section. The Audiences section breaks out a complete list of all these people, your audiences, broken down by their type and the campaigns and ad groups where they appear.

To add audiences to your campaigns or ad groups:

1. Click on the blue pencil icon.

   A screen that allows you to edit audiences appears.

2. Click on Select an ad group.
3. Select the ad group you’d like to edit.
4. Select audiences to add to your group.
5. After you finish making your choices, click on the Save button.

In-market audiences are the people who are actively browsing, researching, or comparing the types of products or services you sell. Based on signals of behavior and intent, you can reach these people directly. Don’t worry: The people in-market are anonymous to you — you can’t target a specific individual, only groups of people who appear to exhibit the behavior that suggests they’re actively looking to buy.

Affinity audiences are those people you can target who have certain interests. For example, if you want to reach people with your group fitness classes, you can target people who like sports and activities, health and fitness, diet and nutrition, and other related areas of interest.

Try different audience targeting techniques to see whether you can uncover people who are more interested in seeing your video ads and taking your desired actions.

Demographics

You can use the Demographics section to see the different demographics your campaigns and ad groups are reaching.

Topics

The Topics section displays a list of all the topics your ads are running against. You can choose topics to show ads on content related to a certain subject, with the option to set up the ads when you first set up your campaign or ad group or add more topics later. For example, you can add topics to your ad group for cardio classes for Beauty & Fitness, Health, Hobbies & Leisure, and Sports.

To add topics:

1. Click on the blue pencil icon.

   You a screen that allows you to edit topics.

2. Click on Select an ad group.
3. Select the ad group you’d like to edit.
4. Select topics to add to your group, as shown in Figure 7-9.
5. When you finish making your choices, click on the Save button.

Placements

In the Placements section, you can choose to show your ads on certain websites, apps, or videos. You can list specific YouTube channels, YouTube videos, websites, apps, or app categories.

To add placements to your ad groups:

1. Click on the blue pencil icon.

   You a screen that allows you to edit placements.

2. Click on Select an ad group.
3. Select the ad group you’d like to edit.
4. Select the placements to add to your group.
5. When you finish making your choices, click on the Save button.

You can start your campaign running as broadly as possible, without limiting your targeting, or you can start small, being specific with who you want to reach, slowly opening up to new broader audiences. Both strategies help you find the right people.

In the Placement sections, you can also

• See where ads are shown: Click on Where Ads Showed in the top horizontal menu to see a long list of every single instance of where your ad showed.
• Add criteria that lets you specifically exclude certain placements: If you click on Exclusions in the top horizontal menu bar, you can add criteria so that your campaign or ad group doesn’t run in excluded placements.

Settings

The Settings section lets you edit the settings applied to your campaigns and to your account as a whole so that you can make broad changes to everything in one go.

In Campaign settings, you can enable, pause, or remove your campaigns and change budgets, dates, rotation settings, and more.

The Account settings section lets you edit some advanced settings that apply at your account level. These settings are the upper-most level settings and apply to your entire account with Google Ads and all your campaigns contained within it.

Locations

The Locations section provides a list of all the locations you have chosen to either target or exclude. You can choose to see a geographic report that shows you where your customers were physically located when the ad was shown.

Ad schedule

If you’ve set up your campaigns to follow an ad schedule, showing ads only at certain times or on certain days, you can find details in this section. You can choose to drill down by day and hour.

Devices

The Devices section breaks out where your video ads ran for each of your campaigns. It’s interesting to compare whether you get better results from one type of device over another.

Advanced bid adjustment

In the Advanced bid adjustment section, you can adjust bids. Bid adjustments allow you to show your ads more or less frequently based on where, when, and how people search. For example, sometimes a click is worth more to you if it comes from a smartphone, at a certain time of day, or from a specific location.

Change history

Given that Google Ads is such a comprehensive tool that lets you customize so many different options, the Change history section may be the best feature of all. Visit this section to see a list of all the changes you’ve made to your ads, bids, budgets, keywords, placements, and so on.

You can find details of your changes here, which is helpful if you find that you’ve made a mistake or a change you’ve made has negatively affected performance but you can’t quite remember the change you made.

Tools

Despite being not much more than a little spanner icon in the upper right-hand menu, the Tools section contains a lot of incredibly useful and compelling tools that you can try out.

Some of the best tools for your video campaigns are

• Keyword planner: The Keyword planner is a cornerstone tool of the Google Ads solution. While it’s primarily used to generate keywords that will trigger your text ads running on Google’s search engine, you can use keywords to trigger your video ads on sites and videos that feature those keywords.

• Audience manager: Audience lists help you reach people who have visited your website, watched your video, engaged with your app, or shared their contact information. You can set up an audience source to reach the right people, with the right message, at the right moment.

  You can set up campaigns that remarket to people who have visited your YouTube channel. The Audiences section shows you a list of any audiences you’ve created. Clicking the blue pencil icon lets you ad selected audiences to campaigns or ad groups.

• Portfolio bid strategies: Portfolio bid strategies let you automatically set bids for multiple campaigns. Think of this tool as a way to create an overarching bidding strategy for all your campaigns rather than specifying unique bidding strategies for each campaign you’re running.
• Shared budgets: You can apply a shared budget to any campaign or create a new one. The idea here is that you can set your overall budget available and make all your campaigns share from that pool.

Bulk actions

Bulk actions is an advanced section where you can create automated rules that do things like pause or enable your campaigns based on certain triggers.

Measurement

Measurement of your Google Ads campaigns is so important and fully featured that it has its own chapter! For details on the Measurement section, see Chapter 16.

Setup

In the Setup section, you can edit your billing and payment information and manage account access, including users, managers, and security settings, as well as your general preferences, such as language, number format, and more.

If you need help, you can call Google. You can find the telephone number for your country in the Google Ads tool. If you’re in the United States. you can dial 1-844-201-2399 Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET.