Create a video action campaign to drive more conversions while optimising for the lowest CPA. Video action campaigns generate multiple ad combinations that show to the right people in the most relevant ad formats. In this article, you’ll learn how to set up a video action campaign.
For subtitles in your language, turn on YouTube captions. Select the settings icon at the bottom of the video player, then select 'Subtitles/CC' and choose your language.
Before you begin
Conversion tracking
Set up conversion tracking on your website and make sure the google tag is working properly. Optimise for lightweight conversion events, such as 'Add to basket' or 'Site visit', and choose a conversion counting option that makes sense for your campaign. If you measure shop visits, you can include this as a conversion event to optimise video campaigns for omnichannel goals. This provides valuable signals to our systems so that you can achieve your desired results faster.
Budget requirements
Your budget settings affect how quickly we can optimise your campaign for conversions. For campaigns using target CPA bidding, it’s recommended to set a budget that’s at least 15 times your target CPA. Use the chart below to understand how long it takes to optimise your campaign depending on the current budget.
| Budget setting | Optimisation time |
|---|---|
| More than 15 times your target CPA | 7–8 days |
| 10–15 times your target CPA | 2 weeks |
| 5–10 times your target CPA | 3 weeks |
For campaigns using Maximise conversions bidding, the daily budget should be at least 10 times your expected video CPA.
Considerations
Optimise your campaign as you create it
As you create your campaign, you may receive notifications based on your setting selections. These notifications may alert you to issues that can result in decreased performance or that may be significant enough to prevent you from publishing your campaign.
The campaign construction navigation menu that appears as you construct your campaign provides a holistic view of your construction progress and will call attention to notifications that you may want to address. Move between steps in the navigation menu to easily review and resolve potential issues with your targeting, bidding, budget or other campaign settings. Learn how to Set up your campaign for success.
Create a video action campaign
Step 1 of 2
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu
- Click the plus button
, then select New campaign.
- Select the Sales, Leads or Website traffic goal.
- Select the Video campaign type.
- For the campaign subtype, Drive conversions are automatically selected.
- Click Continue.
- Enter a name for your campaign.
- In the 'Bid strategy' section, set your bidding strategy to target CPA maximise conversions, max conversion value or target ROAS. If you select Target CPA, set the target amount that you’re willing to spend for a conversion.
- Note: tROAS and MaxConv Value bidding strategies will only be available when the campaign has collected 30 conversions. Learn more About value based bidding for video action campaigns.
- In the 'Budget and dates' section, set your budget type, budget amount and the start and end date for the campaign.
- For the budget type, select Daily (the average amount that you’d like to spend each day) or Campaign total (the total budget that you’d like to spend for the duration of the campaign) and enter the amount that you’d like to spend.
- Only enter an end date if you’re running a short-term seasonal campaign or if you're using a campaign total budget instead of a daily budget.
- Select the languages and the locations that you want your campaign to target.
- Choose your content exclusion settings to define where ads in your campaign can show.
- (Optional) Add Sitelink assets.
- (Optional) If you want to add a product feed to your campaign, expand the 'Product feed' box and click the tick box.
- (Optional) Click Additional settings to target specific devices, set a frequency cap and set a schedule for the ad.
- Enter a name for your ad group.
- Choose the demographics and audience types you want to reach.
Note: To help you find more conversion opportunities, you’ll no longer be able to add content targeting to new and existing video conversion campaigns in the coming months. From early 2023, all existing content targeting settings will be automatically removed from video campaigns that drive conversions. To manually remove content targeting from existing conversion campaigns, go to your ad group settings. Learn how to Optimise your video campaign for conversions.
Step 2 of 2
- Use the editor to create your ad.
- Your YouTube video: Search for a video you’ve uploaded or paste the video URL from YouTube. Provide the final URL (the landing page people visit when they interact with your ad) and the display URL (the website URL that appears in the ad).
- Call-to-action: Enter a call-to-action that compels people to click on the ad (up to 10 characters).
- Headline: Enter a headline that promotes your product or service (up to 15 characters). Headlines are only shown with skippable in-stream ads.
- Long headline: Enter a longer version of the headline that promotes your product or service (up to 90 characters). Long headlines are only shown with in-feed video ads.
- Description: Enter a description of the product or service (up to 70 characters).
- (Optional) Click Ad URL options (advanced) to add a tracking template, final URL suffix or custom parameters to the final URL.
- Select either an image that's automatically generated from the videos in your YouTube channel (recommended) or an image that you manually upload as your companion banner. Companion banners appear on computers only.
- Enter a name for your ad.
- When you finish, click Create campaign.
Vertical-friendly video ads
Optimise your App, Performance Max and video campaigns by having vertical videos in your creative assets as a best practice. The mobile-friendly, full-screen experience of vertical videos can help improve your campaign’s engagement with mobile video viewers.
For YouTube, vertical videos are supported in all video eligible campaigns with possible placements in-feed, in-stream, on YouTube Search and YouTube Shorts. In some cases, just by adding a vertical video asset to a video action campaign can deliver 10–20% more conversions compared to just having horizontal videos for YouTube Shorts.
Outside of YouTube, your ads also run on Google video partners to reach more people. A large share of Google video partners inventory is vertical-focused, like gaming and video apps, to further utilise your vertical and square video assets.
To start creating vertical video assets, learn more about video creation in Google Ads.
