Create a Video campaign

Video campaigns allow you to reach and engage with your audience on YouTube and through Google video partners. When you create a Video campaign, you can choose from different campaign goals, campaign subtypes, and ad formats that tell people about your products and services and get them to take action.

What you'll learn

A successful Video campaign should include the right targeting, bidding, budget, and ads to reach your goal. This article guides you through the process of creating a Video campaign:

  1. Choose a goal
  2. Spend your budget effectively
  3. Reach people searching for your brand or business
  4. Organize your ads with ad groups
  5. Create relevant ads

Instructions

1. Choose a goal

When creating a new Video campaign in your Google Ads account, you'll select one of these campaign goals: Sales, Leads, Website traffic, Product and brand consideration, and Brand awareness and reach.

The goal you select should align with what you want to achieve with your campaign. For example, if you want to encourage people to visit your website, you can select Website traffic. Learn more about Video campaign goals

The goal you choose also determines the campaign subtype you can choose. A campaign subtype determines the ad formats you can use in the campaign to better optimize your campaign towards the goal. For example, if your overall goal is to get people to visit your website and encourage them to make a purchase, you'd select the Drive conversions campaign subtype.

Create a new campaign and set a goal

  1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
  2. Select Campaigns.
  3. Click the plus icon , then select New campaign.
  4. Choose your campaign goal: Sales, Leads, Website traffic, Product and brand consideration, or Brand awareness and reach.
    • The goal you select determines the campaign subtypes available.
    • If you don't have a campaign goal in mind, choose Create a campaign without a goal's guidance.
  5. Under the "Select a campaign type" section, select Video.
  6. Under the "Select a campaign subtype" section, select a campaign subtype. See how each subtype can help you reach your specific advertising goals:
    • Drive conversions: Drive sales and leads with action-focused ads and targeting.
    • Custom video campaign: Customize your settings with different ad types.
    • Video reach campaign: Get the most reach for your budget. Within this campaign subtype, you can choose to reach more unique users using bumper ads, skippable in-stream ads, or an optional mix of both formats (Efficient reach), or choose to reach users with your entire message using non-skippable in-stream ads (Non-skippable in-stream).
    • Influence consideration: Get people to consider your product with your ads.
    • Outstream: Tailor your ads to phones and tablets.
    • Ad sequence: Tell a story with a series of ads in a sequence.
    • Shopping: Promote your products and get people to shop on your website.
  7. Click Continue.

2. Spend your budget effectively

Your budget influences how often your ads show and how prominently they're featured.

Your bidding determines the way your budget is spent. You can choose to put your money towards getting people to see your ad, click your ad, or make a conversion on your site. Learn more about campaign budgets and bidding.

Set up your bid strategy and budget

  1. Choose your bid strategy. Your bid strategy is how you optimize bids to meet your advertising goals.

    For example, your bid strategy lets us know if your goal is to get views (CPV), get impressions (CPM), get as many conversions at the target cost-per-action you set (CPA), or get the most conversions within your budget.

  2. Enter your budget. You can choose a campaign total budget (the amount you'd like to spend on the entire campaign) or a daily budget (the average amount you want to spend each day).

    Campaign total budget

    Google Ads will try to spend your total budget evenly over the duration of your campaign while taking into account higher and lower traffic days to optimize your campaign's performance. You'll only be billed up to the amount you enter for a campaign, even if Google Ads serves more views or impressions than your budget allows.

    Daily budget

    On days when you're more likely to get clicks and conversions, you may spend more. However, over the course of the month, your budget will average out to the amount you enter in Google Ads.

  3. Set a start date and end date for your campaign (required if you use a campaign total budget).

If your campaign spends the budget fully, either reaching the daily limit (for daily budgets) or the average per day budget (for campaign total budgets), think about increasing your budget to scale your success. If not, adjust your targeting, bidding, and ads to see if your campaign performs better.

3. Reach people searching for your brand or business

In your campaign, you can reach people in a certain location, those who speak a specific language, or those with a particular interest using campaign targeting. Google Ads also allows you to add content exclusions to your campaigns, so that you can make sure your ads don't run next to sensitive content. Learn more about targeting.

Set up campaign targeting

  1. Choose the networks where you want your ads to run. A network is a place where your ads can appear. For ads, these can include:

    YouTube search results

    Your ads can appear next to search results on YouTube. This option is only available for campaigns using in-feed video ads.

    YouTube videos

    Your ads can appear on YouTube videos, channel pages, and the YouTube homepage.

    Video partners on the Display Network

    Otherwise known as Google video partners, your ads can appear on sites and apps on the Display Network. It's recommended to keep this option selected, as it can help you expand your reach beyond YouTube.

  2. Select the language preferences for your ads. Depending on the languages you select, your ads will show to people who visit sites and apps that match the languages. Learn more about language targeting
  3. Select the geographic locations of the users to whom your ads will appear. Learn more about location targeting
  4. Choose your content exclusion settings, which lets you opt out of showing your campaigns alongside content that may not be appropriate for your brand or product.

    Inventory types

    With inventory types, you can opt out of groups of sensitive content that don't align with the brand or message of your campaign. Learn more about inventory types

    Excluded types and labels

    Select content types and digital content labels to exclude from your Video campaign. For example, you can exclude your ads from running next to live streaming videos or content labeled for mature audiences. Learn more about content types and digital content labels

  5. (Optional) Click Additional settings to set up device-specific targeting, limit how frequently your ads show to people, or set up an ad schedule.

After you set up campaign targeting, you'll set up ad group targeting.

4. Organize your ads with ad groups

You can create ad groups to organize your ads by a common theme. For example, if you sell desserts, beverages, and snacks on your website, you could create 3 ad groups for each product category. With ad groups, you can refine your targeting to better reach your intended audience.

  1. Define the people that you want to reach with your ads. You can choose from:
    • Demographics: With demographic targeting, you can reach people who are likely to be in demographic groups that you choose, including age, gender, parental status, or household income. Learn more about demographic targeting.
    • Audiences: Audiences are groups of people with specific interests, intents, and demographics, as estimated by Google. Learn more about audience targeting.
  2. Narrow your targeting by adding relevant keywords, topics, and placements.

Now that you've set up your targeting, you can begin creating your ads.

5. Create relevant ads

When creating your ads, focus on giving your ads relevant headlines, call-to-actions, and other creative features that inspire your viewers to take action.

Create your ads

  1. Search for a video that you've uploaded to YouTube, or enter the video URL from YouTube.
  2. Choose an eligible ad format. You'll see a message in Google Ads if a specific ad format is not eligible for the campaign. Depending on the goal that you selected, you can choose:
    • Skippable in-stream ads
    • Non-skippable in-stream ads
    • In-feed video ads
    • Bumper ads
    • Outstream ads
  3. Enter the final URL, which is the landing page you want people to reach when they click your ad.
    • By default, only the domain shows up in the text of your ad. So, if your final URL is "www.example.com/shoes", your ad will show "www.example.com". To show more of the URL in your ad, add a display URL.
  4. Enter the display URL, which can be a different version of the final URL, or the same as the final URL. The display URL will not affect the page that people land on when clicking your ad.
  5. Enter a call-to-action, which should be compelling and direct people to the website specified in the final URL.
  6. Enter a headline, which will appear as the primary line of text that promotes your product or service.
  7. (Optional) Click Ad URL options (advanced) to add a tracking template, final URL suffix, or custom parameters to the final URL. Tracking parameters can help you track where your traffic is coming from, such as mobile devices.
  8. Add a companion banner to generate an image or a group of images that appear next to your video. Companion banners appear on computers only. You can select either an image that's automatically generated from the videos in your YouTube channel (recommended), or an image that you manually upload as your companion banner.
  9. Enter a name for your ad.
  10. If the ad looks good, click Create campaign.

What's next

Once you've finished setting up your campaign, it may take a few days for your ads to start showing. Ads are typically approved within a day. It may take longer for bidding to fully optimize performance.

Optimize your Video campaign

Want to make your Video campaigns even better? Learn best practices and tips in our optimization guides.

  • Reach a broad audience and build awareness with Video
  • Drive action with Video
  • Use square and vertical video to engage mobile customers

Learn more about Video campaign subtypes

For more specific instructions on campaign subtypes, see:

  • Create a Video action campaign
  • Create a Video reach campaign
  • Create a video ad sequence campaign
  • Create an outstream video campaign

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