How To Connect Your YouTube Channel with Google Ads
Lucas Dantas
June 28, 2022
No Comments
Read More »
In this tutorial I will teach you how to get more traffic to your website using ads on Youtube. As an example I am simulating a Website Development campaign on Youtube Ads to drive traffic to a landing page.
The website traffic campaign helps you drive interested customers to your website.
Using this campaign goal, you can build a list of site visitors and get more conversions with a compelling call to action and other features that encourage people to take action after your video plays.
1. The first step to create the campaign is to click on the NEW CAMPAIGN button.
2. In the next window, choose Website Traffic.
3. Choose the option “video” and click on CONTINUE
4. Make sure you have setup Conversion Tracking on your website. If you haven’t, here is a video explaining how to do it
5. On this next screen, you will have to give your campaign a name. This is totally optional, but having a name pattern will help you find and manage campaigns in a much easier way.
For this one I will name it [YT] [TRAFFIC] Website Development
YT for YouTube
TRAFFIC for Website Traffic objective
6. Now select your bid strategy. If you have been running campaigns for a while and there is conversion data on your Google Ads account, choose Target CPA and specify a value based on your previous results.
But if this one of your first campaigns, my recommendation would be to use the Maximize Conversions option.
7. Now choose how much you want to spend on the campaign. You can either choose Daily or Lifetime.
Using the lifetime option you will spend for the entirety of your campaign schedule.
The daily budget option allows you to to choose the amount you would like to spend per day.
I, personally, like the daily budget campaign because it makes it easier to change the budget on the fly. If you have a budget set for the month, the lifetime option could be useful.
8. On the Location settings you will choose where people will see your ads. Click on Advanced Settings to fine tune your target.
If you only do business locally, it’s recommended to target your location and set the miles radius according to your preference.
In this screen you can choose to target your video ad to specific states, cities, zip codes. You can also exclude specific areas using the same options.
9. In the next step, choose the language you would like to target.
This option could be very useful if you have video ads in different languages.
10. Expand the Inventory type settings and choose the one that fits best with your video.
If you believe your video can be shown when users are browsing consuming any type of content, the Expanded Inventory could be used to reach to more people.
In this example, I am simulating a Website Development campaign on Youtube Ads so the best option for me is Standard Inventory.
11. In Excluded Types and Labels, you can decide more specifically which content type you would like to exclude from your campaign.
I normally choose Embedded YouTube videos, Live streaming videos and Content not yet labeled.
The embedded and live videos are usually being watched by people that are not very likely to see an ad or interact with it. And the content not yet labeled will prevent Google to deliver your videos to any type of content. In the next steps, you will understand the reason behind chosing this one.
12. The Sitelinks increase the chances of someone to interact with your video ad by clicking on a link. Click on New Sitelink Extension and add at least 2 extensions.
This option allows you to highlight services/products you are offering by providing a title, description and URL. I recommend to only create sitelinks that are related to the content of the video ad you are promoting.
After you have added them, this is how the sitelinks will look like along with your video ad in the mobile preview.
13. On the next section, you can specify the Devices where your video ad will appear.
When video ads appear on TV screens, people can’t click on ads. If you have a low budget and only want to show your video ads to people who can click on the links, choose only mobiles, tablets and computers.
14. In Frequency capping is where you can specify how many times people will see your ads. You can set limits based on days, weeks or months.
Ads can be are very repetitive sometimes and Google Ads will keep delivering ads to the same people if they have engaged with it by watching a larger of the video. This option allows you to be less repetitive and reach a larger number of people.
You can choose to set caps based on impressions, views, or even both.
If you choose impressions, keep in mind that this limits the number of times your video will appear in someone’s screen.
The view cap is only reached when someone watches 35% or more of the video.
15. Finally, the ad schedule allows you to choose at what times your video will appear.
From my consumer standpoint, I hardly interact with video ads late at night, but I understand that for some business this might make sense. Limit your ads could help you target the right people at a time they are more likely to interact with.
16. Let’s ignore Third-party management and jump to the next part of your campaign.
17. Now let’s name your Ad Group.
The ad group is a container where you add information about the audience you are reaching for this campaign.
18. The first option for the ad group is Demographics.
This options allows you to choose gender, age, parental status, and household income of the people who will see your video ads. For this, consider your current customers and think about who are the people who are most likely to buy from you.
Example: If you do wedding photos, the people who will hire you are probably between 18-34 years old or even 18-44.
As I am simulating a campaign for website development, I will target people between 25 and 64 years old, these are the age range of entrepreuners and older business owners.
19. For better comprehension purposes, let’s jump Audience Segments and go ahead to expand the Advanced settings option.
20. Using these three features is how you can find the right people to show your video to.
I created this ad group to target people based on KEYWORDS. So I have chosen the ones that are directly related to the service I am offering, but also indirectly related.
A person who is looking for website development will also look for:
I have gathered them all in the same ad group. This will allow me to find the best performing keywords and get rid of the ones with a low performance.
21. Now let’s work on your ad settings.
Fill out the next section with the URL of your video, the landing page of the service/product you are offering, call to action, headline, long headline and description. Below you will see how your video will look like.
22. Click on CREATE CAMPAIGN to finish this part. But we are still not done, because now it’s time to create more ad groups.
23. Go to the top menu, click on Tools & Settings then click on Audience Manager.
24. Now click on CUSTOM SEGMENTS.
In this screen is where you can create audiences to get better targeting options.
Click on the plus sign and read carefully all the options you have available in the next screen.
Here you can create audiences based on:
For a wedding venue, for example, you could create audiences such as:
While you are here, imagine all the directly related interests and indirectly related interests you can target to promote your video.
Ps.: Stay away from the keywords or terms that have the word “free” on them unless you are giving something for free along with what you are offering.
Ps.2: Don’t merge all the audiences unless you have identified the best keywords, websites, and apps to use.
Narrowing too much your audience can make your ads less likely to be delivered and can prevent you from identifying what is working and what is not. By separating them, you can measure what audiences bring the best results and then you can create combined segments using your previous results.
25. After you have finished, you should see something similar to this:
26. Now that you have created all the audiences you want, let’s go back to create more ad groups.
Clone your ad group by copying and pasting it into the same campaign and repeat the same instructions of step #17. Create ad groups based on:
TOPICS: Think about the topics that is somewhat related to your video or the type of people who normally buy from you.
PLACEMENTS: Make a list of YouTube channels, videos, apps and websites that are related to the content of your video.
Ps.: Choose large channels and videos with a lot of views to target, small channels will hardly ever show your video.
The last ad group you will create will contain the audiences you have created on step #17. Create it without setting any option other than the ad.
Then click on the ad group and click on Audiences and then EDIT AUDIENCE SEGMENTS.
In the next window, you can see Google will include audiences based on your website content.
For testing purposes, I recommend using some of them but don’t add to many audiences if you have a low budget.
27. Click on BROWSE and then Your custom audience segments.
After you are done, you will see your campaign similar to this.
Keep in mind that is not necessary to create an ad group with each content option (keywords, topics, placements, custom audiences). This tutorial has the goal to show you the several options that Google have available for you to find the right people to show your video and have them coming to your website.
For your first campaigns, this tutorial should be enough, but later you will be using the combined audiences and will merge the content options into the same ad group. But this is only done based on data, the numbers will show what is working, how well is working and also what is not working.
On YouTube Ads you can focus on what is working to get better results at a lower cost, that is what we are all about, right?
Thank you so much for reading this tutorial! If you like the content of this tutorial, do not forget to share it!
Help me improve my blog by telling me how.
The whole point of this blog is to help you, let me know what you’re having problems with and I will come up with the solution.
Recent Comments