YouTube Ads Optimization: The Definitive Guide

You might spent months or years crafting and shooting your product video and advertise it on YouTube. The end result? You did not get what you wanted.

We get it. You’ve think that you’ve spent too much time optimizing your video ads and still did not get the result.

In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about YouTube ads optimization and how to successfully launch your video advertisement for your business.

This is NOT a step-by-step building from scratch video campaign.

This post will cover about advanced optimization tips and strategies that will improve your existing video ads performance.

Let’s get started.

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Step 1. Have You Decided The Video Goals?

Ask yourself this question: what is your goals of your video ad?

Are you aiming for store visit, conversions, or simply just for brand awareness of your business?

You should be able to find your goals in below marketing objective list:

• Brand awareness
• Consideration
• Driving Action
• Building Loyalty

This will be your foundation of optimizing your YouTube ads.

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2. Check If Your Video Campaign Type Fits Your Goals

Your video ads is getting a lot of views but less conversions? Maybe you’re choosing the wrong campaign type!

Choosing the correct video campaign type is crucial as it affect your bid strategy type that can significantly affect your goals.

If your goal is to get more brand awareness, reach and impression, you should go for:

• Bumper
• Trueview for reach
• Video reach campaign

If your goal is to get more consideration from views, you should go for:

• Trueview instream
• Trueview infeed

If your goal is to drive action & loyalty such as conversion and purchase, you should go for:

• Trueview for action

Have you selected the correct video campaign type? Let’s move on to the next step!

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3. Campaign Settings

After you confirmed that you have selected the correct campaign type, let’s begin by optimizing the settings.

Bid Strategy Type

Each of the video ad format has different compatibility with the bid strategy type.

For example, Bumper ad format is compatible with Target CPM while Trueview Instream is compatible with Manual CPV.

Meanwhile, for Trueview for Action, you can either choose Maximize Conversions or Target CPA depending on your goals:

• If your goal is to drive as many conversions as possible, choose Maximize Conversions bid strategy.
• If your goal is to drive more conversions but in the same time have flexibility to control the cost, choose Target CPA bid strategy.

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Budget

Insufficient budget could be one of the factor that your ads are not performing well.

Imagine that you’re expecting 1 million views while your budget is only $50 per day. That won’t work, doesn’t it?

Here’s how to tell if you have insufficient budget:

When you see the campaign status “Limited by budget”, is a clear indication that a campaign has insufficient budget.

However, this metric sometimes did not appeared accurately. So, you can refer to the display lost IS (budget).

Anything greater than 10 percent is showing that it has a lot of times that your ads did not showed to your potential audience due to limited budget.

You might want to try to increase your budget by 20 percent first, and see how it change.

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Network

No matter what type of goals and video campaign types that you have, it is best to always opt to Google Video Partners (GVP).

When you choose to opt to GVP, you can get estimated extra 20 to 30 percent of audience reach.

This is because, your video ads now is also showing in the Google Video Partners such as websites.

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Language

Different from search campaigns where you need to hardly specify on the audience language, it is slightly different for video campaigns.

Video ads works better in all languages since video format offers a graphic and illustration that search ads don’t have.

However, if your campaign is limited by budget, you can use only specific language depending on your target audience.

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Inventory Type

Inventory types provide an extra layer of control by letting you opt out of groups of sensitive content that don’t align with your brand or the message of your campaign.

As it recommended by default, standard inventory would be the best selection here.

So, don’t change anything!

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Excluded Types and Labels

Excluding live streaming videos, mature audiences, and content not yet labeled will generate you a relevant traffic without wasting your money.

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Device

We understand that mobile generates more views than other device. However, It is recommended for you to target all devices since customers using different devices might be interested in your business.

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Frequency Capping

Frequency capping limit how many times ads show to the same user. It is optional depending on your goals.

If your objective is to get as much as unique reach as possible, try to set at 2 impressions/week/campaign.

Other scenario to utilize frequency capping is when you have limited budget and wanted to reach as much unique users as possible.

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4. Audience Segment Funnel

There are various of audience targeting types that you can select for your video ads.

However, not all targeting types are suitable for all the campaign goals.

Here is the targeting type list based on the marketing objective and funnel type:

As you can see, detailed demographics and affinity are perfectly suitable for brand awareness and gaining reach or impressions. However, it is not recommended if driving conversions is your goal, since it target fairly broad audience.

On the other hand, retargeting types such as website visitors and app users are not suitable for brand awareness since it is targeting audience that are more likely to purchase your products.

Depending on your initial goal on point 1, choose your audience type carefully according to the table above!

For each campaign, it is best to target one type of audience per ad group.

By doing this, it will give you a clearer sight on which audience type is performing well and not so you’ll have the option to bid up for ad group that aiming the well performing audience and bid down for bad performing audience ad group.

Other reason of separating different audience types for each ad group is to avoid layering. Ad group with multiple audience targeting type will have lower reach and higher cost.

Next, don’t forget to always tick the audience expansion to reach more people who are similar to your selected audiences.

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5. Ad Group Bidding Adjustment

By now, you should have already separate the audience segment type per ad group. Leave it a month for the tracking to gain back the data.

Or if you have done this part, we can move to ad group bid adjustment.

Depending on your campaign type and bid adjustment type that you set earlier, you can adjust the new bid of each ad group based on it performance:

• If the ad group performing well, bid up by 20 percent.
• If the ad group is underperform, bid down by 20 percent.

So, how to determine which ad group is performing well and which ad group is underperform?

Now, go to ad group tabs and download the report to do the analysis.

Make sure to add all the important metrics according to your bid strategy prior downloading. For example, if you’re analyzing for Target CPV campaign, don’t forget to include max CPV, views, view rate, display lost IS (rank), display lost IS (budget).

Target CPM:

• Bid up for those ad groups that have high number of impressions, high display lost IS (rank), and low display lost IS (budget).
• Bud down for those ad groups that have low number of impressions, low display lost IS (rank), and high display lost IS (budget).

Target CPV:

• Bid up for those ad groups that have high number of views, high view rate, high display lost IS (rank), and low display lost IS (budget).
• Bud down for those ad groups that have low number of views, low view rate, low display lost IS (rank), and high display lost IS (budget).

Target CPA:

• Bid up for those ad groups that have high number of conversion, high conversion rate, high display lost IS (rank), and low display lost IS (budget).
• Bud down for those ad groups that have low number of conversion, low conversion rate, low display lost IS (rank), and high display lost IS (budget).

Maximize Conversions: You can’t adjust the ad group bid for this campaign bid strategy.

For the above example, we bid up for those ad group with high views, has lost in impression due to rank above 20 percent, and have enough campaign level budget to win more auction.

On the other hand, we bid down for those ad group with low views, high Campaign Display Lost IS budget regularly but not losing impression share due to rank to get more views and clicks at same budget.

Note that we did not bid up or down for some ad groups where impression share is lost due to both bids and budgets as any increase or decrease could adversely affect the impression and views performance.

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6. Device Bid Adjustment

In addition to ad group bid adjustment, you also can do some bid adjustment on each device targeting.

However, please note that for bidding strategy type Maximize Conversions and Target CPA, you’ll only able to adjust to -100%, which exclude the specific device completely.

Same as ad group bid adjustment, we normally use 20 percent to bid up or bid down on each device based on it performance.

Now, let’s download the device report from your account and start analyze.

Same as before, don’t forget to download all the important metrics based on your campaign bid strategy type.

Target CPM:

• Bid up for those devices that have high number of impressions, and device CPM is lower than ad group CPM.
• Bud down for those ad group that has low number of impressions, and device CPM is higher than ad group CPM.

Target CPV:

• Bid up for those devices that have high number of views, high view rate, and device CPV is lower than ad group CPV.
• Bud down for those ad group that has low number of views, low view rate, and device CPV is higher than ad group CPV.

Target CPA: You only able to exclude the device completely (-100%). Hence, you can exclude for device that has very high device CPA as compared with ad group CPA and in the same time has low conversion and conversion rate.

Maximize Conversions: You only able to exclude the device completely (-100%). Hence, you can exclude for device that has low conversions and low conversion rate.

In the above example, we are optimizing a target CPV bid strategy campaign.

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7. Demographic

Demographic is another type of audience targeting that consist of age, gender, household income, and parental status.

With demographic targeting, you can target specifically what kind of audience demographic based on your business.

It is recommended to always include unknown for each demographic targeting as many of the relevant audiences might be part of unknown category.

 

 

For example, if your business is selling about women skin care, then you should choose exclude male from the gender demographic and maybe exclude age 55 above.

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8. Video Creative

Your video quality plays an important role in determining the success of your video ads.

Therefore, we’re going to give you some optimization tips for your creative:

Multiple Creatives in The Same Ad Group

Have you seen the same ads for many time? How do you feel about it?

Yes, this is what we called as ad fatigue, a situation when the audience is bored with the same video ad that appeared repeatedly.

To reduce this, it is recommended to add multiple creatives in the same ad group.

Shoot more videos that offering from different angle, perspective, and point of view.

This way, you also can test which ads is performing best.

Switch Up Creatives

You might already have multiple creatives in the same ad group.

Now, it is time to create a variation of the headline and call to action to appeal different viewers.

Video Duration For Skippable Ad Format

Different ad format has different video duration to show.

Of course for the short ad format such as Bumper ads are 6 seconds max video duration, and non-skippable ads are between 6 to 15 seconds.

Meanwhile, the skippable ad format offer you a flexible longer duration.

However, it is recommended to use a shorter version of ads duration in order to get a better ad performance.

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Ready to Optimize Your YouTube Ads?

To conclude, that’s how we optimize for YouTube ads.

And from this, we always managed to get a tremendous result each time!

Now, let’s turn it over to you: which strategy works best for you?

Let us know how much traffic or conversions you’ll get by using these advanced YouTube ads optimization tips on the comment below.