Google Ads AI essentials: Video campaigns best practices

A guide on how to make the most of your YouTube investment using Google AI solutions

About video campaigns

With all the different devices and content types available now, people’s viewing habits are more varied than ever. Luckily, combining your expertise and creative vision with Google AI-powered solutions offers exciting new ways to create, enhance and launch video campaigns that help drive high-impact results.

Knowing your media objective will guide you to the right video campaign type and give Google AI the information it needs to help you achieve that objective.

Follow these best practices below to make the most of your Google AI-powered video campaigns.

Boost awareness with video reach campaigns

  • Whether your specific goal is reach, ad completions or reach at a specific frequency, Google AI in video reach campaigns helps optimise the video assets that you provide to deliver on your reach goal in the most cost-efficient way.
  • Based on an NC Solutions sales lift meta analysis, AI-powered video reach campaign mixes earned an average return on ad spend of 271% (3.7x) higher than manually optimised campaigns.1

Learn more about using video reach campaigns.

Increase brand consideration with video view campaigns

  • Video view campaigns let you maximise views seamlessly across in-stream, in-feed and YouTube Shorts in the most cost-efficient way.
  • In early testing, video view campaigns get on average 40% more views than in-stream skippable cost per view campaigns and 30% less cost.2

Learn more about using video view campaigns.

Create and convert demand with demand gen campaigns

  • Demand gen campaigns help you find and convert consumers with immersive, relevant and visual creatives that grab attention and spur action in the right moment – across YouTube, Discover and Gmail.
  • On average, advertisers see 33% more conversions at a similar cost-per-action (CPA) by adding product feeds to demand gen campaigns.3

Learn more about using demand gen campaigns.

Simplify video creation with Google AI

  • Using a variety of formats, like vertical video ads for YouTube Shorts, helps maximise your reach and impact. The following features are available today in App, Performance Max and demand gen campaigns – that make this a breeze:
    • Video generation technology that repackages existing assets into new vertical, horizontal or square video ads: It transforms existing static images, text, Google Merchant Center or app-store listing assets into video ads. More video assets in a campaign means more ways to reach people with the right ad, in the right environment.
    • Technology that flips horizontal videos into vertical or square videos: All the critical visual elements that tell your story are preserved. Whether you create your own assets or have Google AI assist you, having ads in multiple orientations is important to maximise performance across all campaign types.
  • Advertisers that included at least one video of each orientation (horizontal, vertical and square) to their Performance Max campaigns delivered 20% more conversions in YouTube compared to horizontal videos alone.4

Enhance creative assets to follow best practices

  • YouTube’s 6-second bumper ads are essential for driving reach and frequency.
  • Use Trim video (formerly known as Bumper Machine) – Trim video uses machine learning models to transform your long videos into shorter ones, so you can make 3 or 4 6-second bumper ads in just a few minutes. The models are trained on the ABCD guidelines for effective YouTube ads, so you can be sure that the bumpers it produces are optimised for YouTube.
  • Use audio, specifically voice-over, to reinforce your brand and message. To make sure that all of your ads tap into the benefits of YouTube’s sound-on environment, you can easily add a voice-over to any ad. Just type your script, choose a voice and let Google AI do the rest.

Customer success story:

 

Maybelline was faced with a challenge of reaching consumers in a constantly changing media landscape and the team was interested in testing new formats and ways to engage with their target audience. To maximise reach, Maybelline tested video reach campaigns with in-stream, in-feed and Shorts ads. Using video experiments, the team tested whether adding Shorts and in-feed video for reach formats could drive awareness lift and bring incremental reach versus the video reach campaigns that they used to run.

In a head-to-head test, video reach campaigns delivered 64% more impressions at a 39% lower CPM than video reach campaigns with in-stream ads only.

Video resources:

Tip

Review all of our AI essentials.

 

1. NCS Sales Lift Meta Analysis (2022 campaigns), n=280 Google campaigns, n= 13 Overall YouTube campaigns including AI-powered video reach campaign mix component, n=267 YouTube channel baseline.
2.Google Data, Global, Product Performance, VVC vs TrueView in-stream h2h tests conducted in January – February 2023.
3.Google Internal Data, Global, 1 November – 31 December 2023.
4.Google Internal Data, Global, November 2022.

 

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