This article outlines how to better understand the performance of your YouTube video ads, including your adherence to our creative best practices, and suggestions on how to optimise performance.
Before you begin
There are two views available for you to measure your video’s performance:
- 'Ads data' view: This measures how your video performed when it’s used as an ad. You’ll have access to this data quickly after your ad is served to users, with no additional action necessary.
- 'Organic data' view: This measures how your video performed when it was served to users in an organic context like search. This view uses YouTube analytics data to report performance, which requires that you link your video’s YouTube channel to your Google Ads account.
Depending on your needs, you can then monitor the following for any of your video ads:
- Audience retention performance for each video (available for both views)
- Video performance and viewer engagement (available for both views)
- Per cent of views and per cent of cost of each video (available for the ads data view)
Instructions
Get a summary of your videos' performance
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Assets drop-down menu.
- Click Videos.
.Get video metrics and insights
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
- Click the Insights and reports drop-down in the section menu.
- Click Insights.
- Use the filter at the top of the page to find and select your campaign.
How to find audience retention
The 'Audience retention' card shows you the per cent of viewers that made it to each second of your video. For the chart, you can compare the performance of your video ad with the content of the video. For example, if you notice that audience retention drops significantly in the first ten seconds, but your compelling content is later in the video, you might want to consider reordering your content. By making your video content more compelling from the beginning, people may be more likely to watch your videos from start to finish.
You can also reference the 'Top retention' card for the view percentages for when your video had the most retention. You can check your retention by age, gender, device, ad group and campaign.
Get per second watch time for Shorts
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
- Click the Assets drop-down menu.
- Click Videos.
- In the 'Videos' section, click the Analytics tab.
- In the 'Audience retention' card, select Shorts as the format.
How to find unique reach
The 'Unique users' card shows the cumulative number of unique users who were served your ad, and the average number of times that your ads are served to a unique user.
Unique reach can help you understand how many people were served your ad across different devices, formats, sites, apps and networks. For example, if your ad is served on someone's mobile, desktop and tablet, your ad will receive three impressions, but unique reach can tell you that each of those impressions came from a single user (your ad reached a single user three different times).
As of May 2022, unique reach includes co-viewers, when ads are served to multiple people together on connected TV devices. Learn more about co-viewing.
How to find video performance and viewer engagement
The 'Performance' card gives you a visual summary of the actions taken by people after they accessed your video. Depending on the view, you can get metrics relevant to an ad context (for example, 'impressions', 'views' or 'clicks') or organic (for example, 'likes'), using the measurement methodology for that context.
You can also get engagement with specific features of your ad by using the 'Moments' card. For example, you can mark a segment in your ad when your brand logo or product image shows, and have insights into viewer engagement with these key brand moments.
How to find per cent of views and per cent of cost of each video
The 'Per cent of views' and 'Per cent of cost' are available for the ads data view only. If you’re running many videos as ads simultaneously, 'Per cent of views' and 'Per cent of cost' can help you understand a specific video’s contribution to the total views or total cost of either your account or a single campaign.
How to find out if your video is following our creative best practices
YouTube has a multitude of data-backed creative best practices that have proven to drive campaign performance on our platform. We now offer Creative guidance in Google Ads within Video Analytics and Recommendations. Using Google AI, we automatically assess your video ad within 72 hours of it running within a campaign to determine if you are missing any of our four key best practices – brand logo, text overlay, voiceover and ad duration – with more on the way.
To check if you’re missing a best practice, go to Video Analytics and below the retention curves, you’ll find 'Ideas to try'. Here you’ll find which best practices you’re missing and get actionable suggestions for optimisation, many of which drive to Google's free creative tools to help you make edits quickly. For more information about this new feature, read About Creative guidance in Google Ads. For a summary of all video creative best practices, visit our ABCDs best practices.
