People are turning to YouTube to help them learn new skills, connect with others, and discover their next purchases with 70% of YouTube viewers saying they bought a brand as a result of seeing it on YouTube.1 A few years ago, we began to see YouTube’s role shift from being a singular entertainment destination to a prominent knowledge hub that inspired action. This insight led us to build TrueView for action, our direct response video solution that helps brands engage with prospective customers on the watch page.
As customer journeys become more complex, it’s important to reach customers in moments of exploration and evaluation. That’s why we’re evolving TrueView for action and scaling its best features to more places on and off YouTube with Video action campaigns. We’ve seen Video action campaigns drive 20% more conversions per dollar compared to TrueView for action.2
Easily tell your story in more places
With Video action campaigns, you can tell your brand’s story with longer headlines and have access to top performing places like YouTube’s home feed, watch page, watch next feed, and Google video partners — all within one campaign. To ensure you achieve the best performance across all Google networks, you won’t be able to opt out from any available inventory.
Reach even more potential customers
Simply scale your desired audience strategy and find interested customers with the intent to take action across multiple places, whether you’re reaching your ideal users with custom audiences or remarketing to customers you already know.
Optimize performance with machine learning
Video action campaigns is backed by Google’s machine learning capabilities, so it’ll uniquely serve your ads where they’ll perform best whether that’s when your customers are scrolling their home feed or watching their favorite creators. Smart Bidding also works seamlessly across all surfaces to help you achieve your desired return on investments.
How to get started and prepare for the upgrade
Starting early 2022, all existing TrueView for action campaigns will automatically upgrade to Video action campaigns. To get ahead of this change and start driving conversions immediately, we recommend creating new Video action campaigns by using the responsive ad group type during campaign set-up. If you’d like to continue creating TrueView for action ads, you can do so until September 30, 2021 and any existing TrueView for action ads will continue to run until early next year. To make this process easier for you, we’ll also launch a copy and paste feature in Google Ads over the next few weeks, which allows you to copy existing TrueView for action ads and paste them as Video action campaign ads.
Learn more about Video action campaigns in our Google Ads Help Center or reach out to your Google Ads account team with any additional questions.
Posted by Nicky Rettke, Director of Product Management, YouTube Ads
1. Google/Talkshoppe, US, whyVideo study, n=2000 A18-64 Genpop video users, Feb 2020.
2. Google Internal Data, Global, Aug 2020 to Sept 2020. CPD spend weighted by ad group for Video action campaigns vs. TrueView for action campaigns with 330 advertisers.