You can now track and optimize certain events on YouTube, like a channel subscription, as Google Ads conversions. When a Google Ads account is linked to a YouTube channel, your Google Ads account will receive a new conversion action that can be used to measure and optimize YouTube channel subscriptions. Grow your YouTube channel audience in Demand Gen, by using the YouTube subscriptions conversion action as your goal.
Before you begin
Before setting up your Demand Gen to track subscriptions as conversions, your Google Ads account needs to be linked with the YouTube channel you're promoting. Learn more about Product Linking: Link YouTube channels and Google Ads accounts.
Benefits
Google AI allows for ads to be served to the most relevant users who are likely to convert. Optimizing for YouTube subscriptions allows you to serve ads to users who are likely to subscribe to your YouTube channel.
- Compared to TrueView video ads that run using CPV bidding strategy, optimizing for Engagements can be more efficient for follow-on video and channel engagement.
- You can use either Maximize conversions bidding strategy to maximize the volume of subscriptions for a given spend, or use Target CPA to acquire subscriptions at specific cost per subscription.
How to optimize for YouTube subscriptions
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns dropdown in the section menu.
- Click Campaigns.
- Click the plus icon
, then select New campaign.
- Choose Awareness & consideration or Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance for your campaign goal.
- Select Demand Gen as the campaign type.
- Select Continue at the bottom.
- Choose Conversions.
- Add Engagements (YouTube hosted) as a conversion goal.
- At the ad group level, choose the "video" format type.
- Note: The Engagements format is not available in preview yet, and won't serve on Gmail and Discover.
- Continue campaign creation as normal.
Measure results
The most relevant metrics in Google Ads to understand the performance of your engagements are:
- Conversions: In this case, a conversion is when a user clicked or viewed your ad and subscribed to your YouTube channel within the attribution period.
- Cost per action: This is the cost divided by the number of conversions.
- Earned views: Earned views are measured when a YouTube viewer watches subsequent videos on your YouTube channel or Watch pages after viewing your ad. Earned views accumulate whether the same video or another video is watched on your channel.
Best practices
Make sure to follow these best practices to ensure success in implementing subscriptions as your engagement goal in Video action campaigns or Demand Gen:
| Select Maximize Conversions bidding strategy for the first 14 days of the campaign. After 14 days, if you have a sufficient volume of conversions such as 50 conversions, you can change it to Target CPA, and set the desired Cost/Subscriber. | |
| Make sure to use audience segments relevant to the content of your channel. | |
| Use video creatives which will attract new viewers to your channel. Use a variety of video lengths and formats (short, long, vertical) to maximize the campaign's reach. | |
| Use the URL of the YouTube channel or YouTube playlist URL as the landing URL of your Demand Gen campaign. |
