You can manage your brand's presence on YouTube by deduplicating your reach across multiple campaigns. This helps you optimize toward unified reach and frequency goals in Google Ads.
With video campaign groups, you can group campaigns across multiple bidding strategies and ad formats. Video campaign groups help you boost performance, simplify management and reporting, and reach your awareness and consideration goals.
On this page
- Benefits
- How it works
- Campaign compatibility
- Set up video campaign groups
- Reporting and measurement
- Best practices
- Frequently asked questions
Benefits
- Improve your efficiency: Your grouped campaigns work together to reduce wasted impressions and help you reach more people efficiently.
- Target specific devices: You can target specific devices with individual campaigns while your campaign group maintains your overall reach goal.
- Simplify your management: You can manage one reach and frequency goal across multiple campaigns at the same time.
- Hit your goals: This feature helps you reach your exact frequency and reach targets for your brand campaigns.
- Control your brand: You can manage how different YouTube ad formats work together to build your brand.
How it works
You can control how your grouped campaigns work together using one of 2 optimization goals:
- Increase campaign group reach: Aims to increase ad reach by deduplicating reach across eligible campaigns. For example, if user A is reached through a YouTube video view campaign, then a YouTube video efficient reach campaign will try not to serve user A, thus driving greater unique reach when evaluated at the campaign group level.
- Set a campaign group frequency target: Deduplicate reach and coordinate frequency across eligible campaigns, with users on average seeing your ads a specified number of times per week.
Campaign compatibility
Different campaign subtypes work in unique ways when you turn on optimizations for a video campaign group. Some are fully optimizable, while others are "countable", meaning their impressions, reach, and frequency contribute to the group's totals, but their core bidding/optimization remains unchanged.
| Campaign subtype | Optimizable | Countable |
|---|---|---|
| Efficient Reach | ||
| Non-skippable reach | ||
| Target Frequency | ||
| Video views | ||
|
||
| Audio reach | ||
| Reservation campaigns |
Important:
- Include optimizable campaigns: To get the best results from group-level optimization, add at least one campaign subtype that allows optimization, like Efficient reach or Non-skippable reach.
- Understand how subtypes work: Subtypes like Video Views campaigns and Demand Gen campaigns keep focusing on their own goals like views or conversions. However, they still add to the total reach and frequency count for the group.
- Manage frequency caps: To meet your group-level target frequency easily, keep individual campaign frequency caps flexible across your separate campaigns.
- Set frequency goals at the group level: Video Reach campaigns with a Target Frequency solution optimize for their own frequency goal instead of the group goal. To optimize for frequency across a whole group, use Efficient Reach or Non-skippable campaign subtypes in the group and set the frequency target at the group level. Learn more About target frequency.
- Check your inventory: This optimization applies only to YouTube inventory.
Set up video campaign groups
- Go to Campaign groups within the Campaigns menu
.
- Send the plus button
to create a new campaign group.
- Select Video campaign group as the type.
- Name your new campaign group.
- Add the desired video campaigns to the group.
- Check the box to Optimize your campaign for reach and frequency.
- Choose your optimization goal within “Reach and frequency” tab:
- Expand reach to optimize the campaign group to reach as many unique uses as possible.
- Expand reach with a frequency target to optimize the campaign group towards a weekly frequency target (between 2 and 7).
.- Select Create Campaign Group after all preferred settings are selected.
Reporting and measurement
You can track the performance of your optimized group to understand its true impact. Start on the “Campaign groups” tab to find overall metrics like unique reach, average frequency, cost, impressions, and average cost-per-thousand impressions for the group.
For a deeper look, select your campaign group and go to the “Insights and Reports” menu to open the “Brand report”. This report shows your total impressions, cost-per-thousand impressions, and how many people you reach.
You can also build Unique Reach reports through the main “Reports” section or by using pre-made templates. To do this, choose the campaigns inside your campaign group, pick your dates, and download the file. This lets you compare spend, impressions, unique reach, and frequency distribution at both the group level on your executive summary tab and the individual campaign level on your campaign breakout tab. From there, you'll also find extra details about the people you reach, such as their devices and demographics.
Best practices
- Start with new campaigns: For the clearest measurement and to allow the optimization to work from the start, use newly created campaigns when adding to an optimized Video Campaign Group.
- Include optimizable campaign subtypes: Ensure your group contains tCPM-based campaigns like Video Reach Efficient Reach or Non-skippable to allow the system to optimize effectively towards the group goal.
- Budget allocation: Allocate a significant portion of the group's budget, for example, at least 50%, to the optimizable tCPM campaigns.
- Broad targeting: Use broader audience targeting, like demo or affinity, rather than restrictive contextual targeting.
- Avoid frequency caps at the campaign level: Video campaign groups that include campaigns with individual frequency caps may not achieve their overall frequency goals since the frequency caps can aggressively restrict ad displays.
- Avoid frequent changes: Allow the system time (typically around 1 week) to learn and optimize. Frequent changes to targeting, bids, or goals during the flight can impact performance and take time to adjust.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between the "Set a campaign group frequency target" goal and a frequency cap?
- Target frequency goal: An optimization setting where Google Ads aims to achieve a desired average number of exposures per user per week across the group.
- Frequency cap: A hard limit on how many times a user can see ads from the campaigns in the group within a period, designed to prevent ad fatigue.
