September 20, 2021
YouTube Video Action Campaigns: What to Know About the Transition
By now, most marketers are familiar with Google’s newest ad products aimed at increasing direct action from YouTube ads: TrueView for Action & Custom Intent Audiences. If you’ve already tried those products and are still looking for additional ways to grow conversions from your YouTube ads, give these three advanced strategies a try.
1. Custom Companion Banners
When setting up a new In Stream video ad, the interface defaults to using the auto-generated companion banner to show alongside your video. This takes the form of a montage of your channel’s top videos, your logo, and a link to your website:
However, you also have the option of adding your own companion banner image, which can help increase conversion rate. For one advertiser, we saw nearly a 60% increase in conversion rate from using a custom banner compared to an auto-generated one.
Custom companion banners can often do a better job of mimicking the look and feel of the ad itself for more continuity in the ad experience as well as highlighting any special offers or selling propositions. The best part about companion banners (both custom & auto-generated) is that they stay on the screen even after someone has skipped an ad, so the viewer will continue to see your offer while they are watching their video.
2. Top Bid Adjustment
In order to reach more premium inventory on YouTube that typically gets a higher level of traffic and engagement (think videos from really popular creators), you can use the top content bid adjustment setting to increase bids on this inventory from 0-500%.
You can find this setting by navigating to “Advanced bid adj.” on the left menu in Google Ads and then selecting the “Top Content” tab at the top of the page. Top content adjustments need to be made at the ad group level, which can make them a little more challenging to manage. Nevertheless, they are a great way to boost up impressions, views, and even conversions by reaching top quality placements.
3. Mobile-specific Campaigns & Vertical Videos
Over half of all YouTube video views are on mobile devices, and that number is quickly growing. To capture these mobile views more effectively, you can create campaigns specifically targeted to mobile devices in combination with vertical video ads that are better suited for mobile screens.
By creating a separate campaign for mobile devices, you can ensure that mobile traffic gets a larger budget. This can help to scale views and conversions. Note that vertical videos will automatically only serve on mobile devices even if you add them to an ad group that has both desktop and mobile traffic, so it isn’t necessary to create separate campaigns to take advantage of the ad format.
As new developments to YouTube ads have improved direct response performance, advertisers have been looking for more ways to scale successful efforts. By using these three advanced tactics, you can continue to increase the sophistication of your YouTube strategy and grow conversions. Contact us to learn more about how you can expand your YouTube advertising efforts.
