YouTube Ad Sequencing

Key Takeaways

in today's video I want to talk about video ad sequencing in Google ads yes video ads and YouTube campaigns are really good at building brand awareness and building brand affinity but they can do much more with AD sequencing not only can we work on building our brand but we can also reinforce messages tell a complete story to user and guide them down a certain path depending on the video creative that we already have in place and linked in our YouTube channel so in this video I want to show you the campaign options that you have to create ad sequencing the video formats that you can use the bid strategies that are available in these campaign objectives and then some possible troubleshooting down the road so let's begin so the first step in setting up ad sequencing is creating your new campaign right no not this time what we need to do first is making sure that we're going into our tools and settings and then heading into your linked accounts the reason we need to go to our linked accounts first is that you need to make sure that your YouTube channel is linked to your Google Ads account if you want to use add sequencing for your video campaigns whichever videos you want to use that channel has to be linked to your Google Ads account let's go back to the previous screen now okay so now if you want to run ad sequencing you have three campaign goals where ad sequencing is available the first one is product and brand consideration encouraging people to explore your products or services the second option is gonna be brand awareness and reach trying to reach a broader audience to build that awareness again another strong value for the video campaigns or if you want to customize a goal you can create a campaign without a goals guidance and just for the sake of this video I'm gonna create the campaign without any goals guidance no matter which one you choose the bid strategies and the targeting options are going to be the same and of course these are video campaigns and then for a campaign subtype again no matter which of the three campaign goals you select ad sequence is gonna be our sub type then we click continue make sure you fill in your campaign name and now we want to select our bid strategy so here's a couple things to keep in mind when you select the add sequence sub type for your video campaigns there are only two bid strategies that you can choose from it's either maximum CPV or target CPM and when we talk about in-stream advertising and the real value of using a CPV because you could save a lot of cost you may want to reconsider that decision if you're doing any ad sequencing and here's the and why if you choose maximum CPV as your bid option skippable in-stream ads are the only type of ad formats that you could show in this type of campaign if you choose target CPM you can use skippable in-stream ads you can also use the non skippable in-stream ads you can use bumper ads or a combination of the three so it gives you more flexibility if you're using target CPM look at your campaign goals look at the video creative that you want to include inside an ad sequence and that can help you determine which bid strategy you want to choose by default your budget is going to be set at the campaign total level and if you use a campaign total budget you are forced to choose an end date but if you want to have an evergreen campaign make it a daily budget and this will allow your ad sequencing to continue give you more time to look at the data and possibly edit it to have a better flow for your users also just to confirm your networks for ad sequencing of course we can't use YouTube's search results those are only available for Discovery ads so we're automatically defaulted to just youtube videos and even better which can make your in-stream ads more specific we cannot select adding the video partners on the Display Network so we know we are sticking our video campaigns only on YouTube to me this is perfect next you select your appropriate languages and your locations pretty straightforward there and when we go down to ad targeting here is where there's another really big difference between ad sequencing campaigns versus any other video campaigns that you could be running with ad sequencing you cannot target users with keywords topics or specific placements however you can use topics placements or keywords as exclusions within the campaigns so of course this means we can only target our ad sequence based on specific demographics or any audiences that we have created either within Google Analytics or Google ads and fed back into the audience manager next you can select whichever content exclusions are appropriate in addition to the other exclusions that you may have and then let's talk about frequency capping by default frequency capping is set to show one entire sequence per user every 30 days frequency capping cannot be edited when you're running an ad sequencing campaign now at the very bottom let's go and start creating our steps for the campaign in this particular example let's say I just wanted to promote the core videos that we have on the paid media pros channel if someone hasn't even started to run Cora ads yet the first step they need to do is get the pixel on the site so that's gonna be the first video I want to show my target audience have my cheat sheet here just for the sake of this video so the first ad group I'm gonna create will be the pixel video and I purposely chose the target CPM bid strategy option just so you can see the different ad formats that are available as you can see the ad itself looks like any other end stream ad that you can create within your campaign we already have the video in place I want to make sure I have the final URL definitely recommended especially if you're choosing the target CPM to try to get more users to go to your website or your landing pages and the call-to-action extension select which companion banner you want and then we can add it to the sequence now let's assume the user has interacted with this first pixel setup instruction video I'm thinking to myself what video do I want that user to watch next so if they have interacted with the core video they see the value of adding the pixel to the website I now want to show them a video of all the different targeting options that Cora has and we already have a video on that one add another step and now I can set who is eligible to see this next video do I want to show the video if there was an impression with the user do I want to show the video if the user definitely viewed it or do I want to show another video if a user skipped it I'm gonna select view now we're gonna talk about skip a little bit later but then we can see the sequence I want to show next typically as users get deeper in the funnel I'm gonna set a higher bid no matter if it's CPV or CPM and the next video option we can see the final URL I used in the first step is still available so I don't have to re add that one we do unfortunately have to add the call-to-action extension every single time because it is an optional element and keep the companion banners the same and I can add that one to the sequence let's just do one more to be safe we've got the user to watch the first two videos they see the value of a targeting option video in kora now I want to show them a deeper video of a specific ad type and in this case we're gonna talk about kora promoted answers so again I'm just gonna select view for people who've watched step 2 again I'm gonna set a higher CPM bid set my call-to-action extension and then add it to the sequence now let's say for whatever reason the user was not interested in that first core video they weren't engaging with it and they skipped it I might have a different strategy in place okay if they weren't interested in Korra but I know they're still interested in social media advertising at any point let's try out a different video to see if we can engage users in a different way so if they skip my first quarter video I can add a new step and it's already defaulted if they skip the first one I'm gonna set a different bid again you can choose whichever one you want and then I'm gonna show them potentially a Facebook advertising video instead just to see if it makes a difference add that one to the sequence and we can see that the tree can keep going and pretty much I'm starting a second ad sequence if the user skipped the very first one and the same element goes up if the user skipped video too we can start a whole different sequence to keep guiding those users in different directions depending on how they're engaging now after you're running these campaigns for a while and you're seeing different data come through and you're looking at the interactions that users are having the engagement that you're getting for whatever reason let's just say option number two isn't working well we do have the ability to edit the step change whichever elements that we want to try to test out a different video in its place within step two if for whatever reason you wanted to delete step two completely you need to be very careful with this because if you delete a certain step every other step or element after that will also be deleted you can't just only delete this video and shift everything up so look at editing your steps and also plan it out very carefully before you create any steps especially if you have a very long ad sequence in mind and just for the sake of this video I'm gonna keep this ad sequence pretty short so I'm gonna save and continue and your campaign is ready it'll take a little bit for your ads to get approved but you have a chance to kind of review it one more time if you want to make any step changes then we can continue to the campaign now of course this is a brand new campaign so I have no stats to look at but we can see different reporting columns within the Google Ads interface when you're running a video sequence campaign yes I realized I forgot to name the other video campaigns this one right here is the Facebook campaign but this is step two and step three of the Korra campaigns so because of that we see the sequence step we can also use the sequence path column to locate where the step is within the sequence and then you can and your other video columns that you typically use to review your video campaigns and then they'll give you the information you need to possibly go back within the ad sequence make any edits remove any steps and any skippable layers to it again it's going to be all based on the data or which creative you have that could come into the mix depending on the goals of your campaign now when it comes to troubleshooting I don't want to run through specific examples I would rather just show you exactly what Google tells you to do on their ad support page specifically for these ad sequences if you change a video within an ad sequence possible errors or issues could come up some users will become ineligible to see your sequence and others may actually repeat previous sequences so for going back to what I mentioned before about possibly deleting certain steps or editing those videos you could mess up with the flow of those users depending on what audience they are in and then if those users are seeing videos again or if they're missing steps the reporting could be impacted and also an inaccurate if those users are kind of crossing steps and we're losing the actual place of where some of these users are another point that they mentioned in the troubleshooting which is what we mentioned very early in the beginning is that you can't create a sequence step until you've linked your YouTube channel so hopefully that was the first step you've done you listen to this video congratulations we don't have to ever worry about that one and then last bulk editing is not available in both the channel and even in ads editor it may or may not be an issue but something you definitely want to keep in mind if you're used to doing everything in editor and those are the main features for video ad sequencing within Google ads since this subtype was announced there's already been a few tweaks to the features for ads sequencing and we can probably expect a few more down the road but if you have a constant video creative and you believe in video marketing you believe in telling a branded story and guiding users down the funnel video ad sequencing is a great feature to test in your video campaign so give it a shot thanks for watching our video make sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel to see more videos you