About Video action campaigns

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 Optimize your Video campaign for conversions.

Video action campaigns are a simple and cost-effective way to drive more conversions on and off YouTube, all in a single automated campaign. In this article, you’ll learn about the benefits of Video action campaigns and how Video action campaigns work.

Video action campaign depicting three devices


Benefits

  • Drive more conversions: Expand campaigns to run on more places on and off YouTube and drive more conversions while still optimizing for the lowest CPA.
  • Improve campaign performance: By combining inventory from YouTube, Google video partners, and more, Video action campaigns can help you drive improved performance for your campaigns by reaching new customers.
  • Scale your campaigns easily: Video action campaigns make it easy to run your ads on mobile, desktop, and TV in one campaign, without having to set bids and budgets for each inventory source.

When to use

Video action campaigns may be a good choice for you if:

  • You want to use video to drive action to your business, service, or product.
  • You’re looking to increase scale or improve CPA performance and efficiency.
  • You already use conversion tracking in your campaigns.

How it works

  • Video action campaigns use the skippable in-stream and in-feed video ads formats.
  • The video that you include in the campaign should be at least 10 seconds in length.
  • Ads included in your campaign can use a call-to-action (CTA), headline (both short and long), and a description in the creative.
  • Some features aren’t supported on all ad formats included in Video action campaigns. For example, contextual targeting is supported for skippable in-stream ads but isn’t supported for in-feed video ads that appear in the YouTube Home feed.
  • You can add assets (for example, sitelinks or lead forms) or a product feed to your campaign to influence conversions. Keep in mind that adding assets or other creative options to the campaign may change the appearance or functionality of the ads included in the campaign.

Creative guidelines

Visual representation of in-stream and video discovery ads on mobile phones.

*Ads can also appear in videos running on desktop and in the YouTube app on TV. Functionality may be different depending on the device.

Features

Specifications

Step 1 Call-to-action

Max 10 characters

Step 2 Headline

Max 15 characters

Used in the skippable in-stream ad format

Step 3 Long headline

Max 90 characters

Used in the in-feed video ad format

Step 4 Description

Max 70 characters

Step 5 Creative options (optional)

Used in the skippable in-stream ad format

You can add:

Adding a creative option may change the overall appearance of the ad. Only one creative option can serve at a time in a single campaign.

Mobile phone Icon Only available on mobile


Vertical-friendly video ads

Optimize 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, you can also opt into 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 utilize your vertical and square video assets.

Note: Vertical videos may also be served in-feed to people using desktops as your best performing assets are served based on user behavior and environment.

To start creating vertical video assets, learn more about video creation in Google Ads.


Check below how Video action campaigns look in different places on YouTube and Google video partners:

YouTube Home feed

Example ad displayed on the YouTube home feed on a mobile phone

YouTube watch page

Mobile

Example ad displayed on a YouTube watch page on a mobile phone

Desktop

Example ad displayed on the YouTube watch page for desktop computers

TV

An illustration that provides an example of a skippable in-stream ad.

YouTube watch next

Example ad displayed on the YouTube watch next page on a mobile device

YouTube search results

Desktop

An illustration of a video discovery ad appearing in YouTube search results on desktop

Mobile

Example ad displayed in YouTube search results on a mobile device

Google video partners

Example ad displayed on a video partner website on a mobile device
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