YouTube Ads Interactive Features

Key Takeaways

of course the main purpose of running a video campaign in Google is to have people watch your video ad but there are several elements that you can attach to your video campaigns that can have users either go to your website or just interact and watch more videos and that's exactly what I'm going to show you today I'll show you what all of those interactive features are to see if it makes sense for you to add them to your video campaigns the first interactive feature I'm going to show is an auto end screen because really the advertiser doesn't have to do anything it says Auto in the name Google will automatically create this feature for you so let me select a video and we're going to have to watch this entire ad now it's not going to show up every single time but Auto end screens are available for instream ads and mobile app install ads only YouTube created end screens do not appear okay and here we get to this point I'm going to talk about this one a little more Google's creating it using information from your campaign if it was an app there'd be app details name icon it's p the information from the link to the store and there would be a link to the store with it this one makes sense because it's a commercial for a new TV show another opportunity to have someone engage with the ad click on it and go to whatever landing page you have now since this is an instream ad we're only going to see this unless a user watches the whole video and since they watch the whole video ad The Advertiser is already charged any other actions the user takes after they watch the whole video are free so you're not going to be charged twice for someone clicking on any links within your auto end screen next let's look at the second feature next interactive feature for YouTube ads would be call to action buttons or as Google calls them call to action overlays highlighting this section right here this is the call to action overlay it's going to appear while the video ad is running and then after 15 seconds it collapses into a thumbnail we see a short headline the blue called to action button with text and then under the headline there's a link and even under the overlay we see a secondary link now if you look at this section over here The Wider image is a companion Banner but underneath the companion Banner image we see the exact overlay for this example I understand that this is the first of two ads but let's pretend it's the only ad once the actual video starts playing the call to action button above the recommended playlist will stay there let's look at it in Google ads when you're creating the ad under the URL portion you will see an additional checkbox for call to action now if you're running a YouTube action campaign these are the objectives of sales leads or website traffic these are also the three objectives that are being transitioned to demand gen if you don't know what I'm talking about check out this video here but those three objectives currently make call to action overlays mandatory you can go back and check the buttons because they're optional for instream ads for any brand awareness and reach or product and brand consideration objectives they are also optional for bumper and non-skippable ads so you see for the call to action that is is the blue portion of the button you get 10 characters and the headline in our case it just says pay media Pros you get 15 characters so the plus is you get to customize it to be whatever you want the negative is that you get very little character space you only get one overlay at a time so really if you just want to do call to action button testing you'd have to duplicate the ad and only change your CTA so as we see it is another way to drive more traffic to a particular landing page now for the most part you're going to see these on skippable instream ads The Advertiser is only charged when a user watches either the complete video or at least 30 seconds of the video unless they click on your call to action button before the 30 seconds if that's the case you will be charged for the view but then if the user goes on to complete the video ad after clicking on the call to action overlay you will not be charged twice let's head on to the next interactive feature and that is going to be site link assets you may call them site link extensions these are only going to appear on mobile devices and you may have noticed in this top corner here I'm in a demand gen campaign cuz originally these were only available for the YouTube action campaigns but since those are being rolled over to demand gen like I explained in the video link I shared earlier site links are available when you're running a video ad in a demand gen campaign I am in a specific ad that we're pretending to create scrolling all the way down and here you will see site link I click on an option here to start creating them and here we can see we can add links at the campaign level you need at least two for site links to appear in the ad but your ad can show up to four so then while they're watching the ad on a mobile device again mobile only a user can scroll down and potentially click on some of the links whatever I just added a few you can see in the example here that's what it may look like on a mobile device tried to find a real example and I know I've seen it before but couldn't find it quick enough for this video one last thing about this interactive feature is that site links don't appear on campaigns running with Google video partners for demand gen currently video Partners is a beta and it's not automatically selected it's only if you opt into it where your site Link's not appear next you can add product feeds to your video campaigns once again we are in a demand gen campaign that's because the sales objective is being rolled into demand gen when you're creating a campaign you can select a product feed then you would find your merchant center account I'm not going to click on it it's just going to pull a bunch of client accounts choose it and then you could add your product feed I'll admit I haven't set one up in the new demand gen video campaign feature but when it was the normal video action campaign with the sales objective you would have the product filter set at the ad group level I'm not going to get in a whole mess of like making sure that your feeds are eligible to show any of that stuff however you do need at least four approved products for a feat feed to show in a video ad assuming your feed is good it's attached to the ad you can start running video campaigns that look like this let me show you an example it's took me less than a minute to find this one on my phone here we see an ad vertical video on a mobile device the call to action overlay is still there but when we keep scrolling down we see the option to view products this one definitely has more than four and then if the user wants to they can click on one let's click on the dog and then we could start shopping so again choose the sales of objective when you're creating a video demand gen campaign another asset you can attach to your video campaigns is the lead form asset notice up top I have selected a video campaign video campaigns cannot use account level lead form assets those are only available for search and performance Max campaigns so you will have to use it at the campaign level you can still use an existing one that I have here ignore the disapproved I use fake URLs or you can't create a new asset maybe you want to have a different experience between video and search knowing that the intent is completely different I actually recommend that I'm not going to get too far into this one because I have an 18-minute video talking about lead form assets that you can check out here but if you want to create something super simple maybe capture some first party information someone's name quick email have it be autop populated by Google based upon their account information and then let them go on so they can go back to what they were doing on YouTube and the main purpose of why people go on YouTube is to watch video Keep keep it short keep it simple and start building your first party data and then there's a third asset you can attach to your video campaigns and that's going to be your location or affiliate location assets location assets will help you drive more foot traffic to your business affiliate location assets or if you don't have an actual brick and mortar location but you sell your product in other stores you can drive foot traffic to those stores in hopes that they will buy your product now how this works in YouTube is that these location assets could show up alongside the YouTube ad a user can click on the little icon or text for the business information it can expand a location page that shows more information about the exact location address possibly phone number maybe the store hours and the store that the user is shown is based on their location or possibly a location they've shown interest in in the past all you have to do is make sure that you have these location assets set up and for which ad formats it's going to be any YouTube instream and bumper ads and the user will only see it if it's within the actual open business hours that you have set up in your Google business profile or if it's on the affiliate side the open hours that those stores have set up within their own Google Business profiles and the last interactive feature I'm going to talk about today is going to be related videos I'm already in a video campaign and I clicked on the gear icon to open up the campaign settings this will also be within the campaign section when you're creating a new campaign now related videos are available for product and brand consideration brand awareness and reach objectives but you can also find it when you're creating a campaign without a goals guidance here we see the section at the bottom scrolling down you can start adding videos that'll show up similar to like a site link extension underneath the actual video ad so think of the two main objectives I already mentioned product and brand consideration brand awareness and reach your goal is pretty much to try to get users to become aware of your product or or your brand you're just trying to reach as many users as possible possibly in a different subtype so if you're already paying for them to watch a video ad any other views of other videos after that are going to be free so encourage them to continue to watch more and more videos you can see here you need at least two additional videos but you can show up to five the videos need to be public or unlisted on your YouTube channel let me just add a few options here to show you what it could look like I just added our three most recent videos but let's say we were promoting our lead gen course I would probably choose videos that were more focused on lead gen to have it better connect to the users I'm trying to Target or if it is a remarketing campaign maybe you do just want your three most recent videos to keep the user engaged and possibly show them something that they just haven't seen before think of the scenarios that work best but when I'm running these type of campaigns I'm going to add the earned views column to my reporting to see if I'm getting additional video views from adding this feature to my campaign now Google says these these videos will only appear in the YouTube app or on mobile devices no desktop no TV and like a typical asset even though these aren't an asset they're not guaranteed to show every time and Google has the discretion to choose how many videos to show they also get to choose the order the videos may show so don't consider this any sort of ranking you can't move them up and down anyway but this is definitely one of those opportunities where I would encourage longer form content a user was already watching video they clicked on this addition feature for a specific reason have them try to interact with your brand as long as possible Google doesn't even give you the warning here to try to keep it short if someone's clicking on this Google wants them to stay on the platform as long as possible not only benefits them but it'll also benefit your brand and that's really the whole point of all these interactive features right getting more engagement more traffic to your site or just interact with your brand as long as possible adding all these elements when they make sense to your campaign will only help you achieve the additional engagement that you're probably looking for YouTube is already an extremely coste effective way to drive traffic and build awareness this just helps you stretch out your dollar even more if you have any other questions about these interactive features for video ads on Google let us know in the comments thanks for watching our video we really appreciate it if you liked it give us a thumbs up below if you really liked it maybe think 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