You can use assets to help show additional information alongside your YouTube ads that can help you increase store visits and transactions.
On this page
Asset types
Location and affiliate location assets
- Location assets: Location assets can help people find your business locations. To use location assets, you need to have a physical location you’re promoting, and that store needs to be listed in a Google Business Profile account.
- Affiliate location assets: Affiliate location assets let you promote third-party locations, or affiliates, that sell your products. If you sell your products through major retail chains or auto dealerships, you can use affiliate location assets to help people find nearby stores that sell your products.
Both asset options show a “teaser” of business information alongside your YouTube ad. When a user clicks or taps the asset, it expands to a location page that shows more business information, such as address, phone number, and store hours. The store shown in the asset is selected based on the user’s device location or a location they have shown interest in.
Sitelink assets
Sitelink assets add more links to your YouTube video action line items. Sitelink assets take people to specific pages on your site (for example a product, or store hours). When someone clicks or taps on your links, they go directly to what they want to know or buy. Each ad can show up to 4 sitelinks. People can browse and select sitelinks while watching your ad.
Sitelink assets give you the flexibility to change link text and URLs to keep them up to date for sales and special offers, without the need to create a new ad. Detailed data helps you evaluate how individual sitelinks perform compared to other parts of your ad. You have the option to specify the dates, days of week, or times of day your sitelinks are eligible to show.
Sitelink assets appear below eligible ads that play before, during, or after another video on YouTube. Sitelinks only appear below eligible ads on mobile devices. You need at least 2 sitelink assets for the sitelinks to appear in the ad.
Learn how to Manage your YouTube assets.
Reporting for YouTube assets
Asset reporting is available in the standard YouTube report.
Upgraded dimensions
- Sitelink reporting: Data models for sitelink assets were upgraded in 2022.
- Asset (upgraded)
- Asset Status (upgraded)
- Asset Type (upgraded)
- Location and affiliate location reporting: Data models for location and affiliate location assets were upgraded in November 2023.
- Asset (upgraded Location)
- Asset Status (upgraded Location)
- Asset Type (upgraded Location)
Legacy dimensions
Below is a list of legacy dimensions that show historical data for legacy assets available in offline reports:
- Asset
- Asset Status
- Asset Type
Basic reporting for YouTube assets is also available from the YouTube assets tab in your Display & Video 360 advertiser. The YouTube assets tab provides advertiser-level data for the entire time that your asset has been set, such as:
- Clicks
- Impressions
- Click-through rate
- Average CPC
Store visits conversions reporting
If visits to your physical locations are important to your business, you can use conversion tracking to help you confirm how your ad clicks and viewable impressions influence store visits.
Store visit conversions for YouTube in Display & Video 360 are only available to certain advertisers. For example, they’re not available to advertisers with sensitive location categories related to healthcare, religion, adult content, and children.
If you’re eligible for store visits conversion reporting, your Display & Video 360 advertiser must also meet all of the following requirements in order to to access the data:
- Use Floodlight optimization or a YouTube-enabled Floodlight activity for conversion tracking.
- Have sufficient store visits data to attribute to ad click, YouTube: View, or viewable impressions traffic and pass our user privacy thresholds.
- Have an active location asset or affiliate location asset.
Store visits conversion metrics are available for eligible advertisers in the YouTube Conversions report. Learn more About store visit conversions.
Limitations
- YouTube assets are available with YouTube in-stream formats shown in mobile apps.
- YouTube videos must be public to use with YouTube assets.
- You can enable either location assets or affiliate location assets per advertiser - not both.
- Sitelink assets can't serve with vertical videos. Use horizontal videos for YouTube ads containing sitelinks.
- Affiliate location assets are not available for YouTube video action line items.
- Only individual Google Business Profile accounts can be used for creating location assets. Google Business Profiles included within an organization can't create location assets.
- Business names for location assets are limited to 80 characters. If a synced location is updated with a business name that exceeds this limit, the system rejects the invalid update and retains the last valid business name. This ensures the asset continues to sync using the previous valid data instead of being removed.