Video content is a great way to get your message to a target audience. Even if people won’t take the time to read your written marketing message, a video is a fast and visually compelling way to engage with potential customers. For many products you see advertised in video ads, most consumers wouldn’t read a long article about the item. However, when it’s placed in a quick video ad, people will watch. To make video ads more effective this holiday season, Google is allowing advertisers to set conversion actions at the campaign level for video ads.
There are a lot of activities a person can do in response to an ad they see on the internet. Some of these actions have more value to the advertiser than others. For example, many ads measure the number of people who click on the ad. However, clicking on a site doesn’t necessarily lead to sales. Google allows advertisers to set up conversion actions so they can measure how many times an ad let to a specific action.
Allowing advertisers to set up conversion actions produces ad reporting that’s more useful to the retailer. As an illustration of something that can be used as a conversion action, Google talks about using newsletter signups. With this information, the retailer can decide which ads are most effective based on a meaningful conversion action, and not which ad generated the most clicks.
Conversion actions have been around for a while, but Google has made a change that will make conversion actions easier to use for video campaigns. Before, advertisers could only set conversion actions for videos at the account level. Now, marketers will be able to set conversion action at the campaign level.
As stated in a Google Ads Help post, “These actions can be included in the “Conversions” column, which is used to evaluate performance and optimize bids. For Search and Display campaigns that have specific budgets for different marketing goals, you can override the default, account-level setting by selecting which conversion actions you want to optimize for at the campaign level. Starting today, this campaign-level setting is now available for Video campaigns.”
By allowing video advertisers to have different conversion actions for each campaign, Google Ads has increased the number of ways video ads can be optimized. Business can create one video ad that has form signups for a conversion action, while another video ad campaign is focused on getting people to add items to a cart. Instead of all video ads sharing the same goal, this new feature lets advertisers create a specific conversion action for that campaign.
Furthermore, advertisers aren’t limited to a single conversion action per video campaign. Though it takes a little more effort, it’s possible to choose several conversion actions for a particular ad campaign. According to Google, advertisers that want to optimize a campaign for multiple conversion actions, simply need to place the various actions into a “Conversion actions set.” Once the set is created, these conversion actions can be applied across other campaigns that share the same marketing goal.
For more information about recent updates and changes to Google, read this article on the new privacy options Google introduced for platforms like YouTube and Google Maps.