Module 3 - Important Campaign Settings

What is the most important setting on a YouTube campaign?

Cost per view, once you have got the right audience. We need to understand that we are getting views at the right cost. I have seen people suggesting starting at around 10 pence or 10 cents for a cost per view. I would like to think we could achieve better than that going forward.

As YouTube is about to open up the majority of the YouTube estate to ads, there is going to be a lot more space, but also a lot more advertisers coming in. So it is going to be really important for all of us to keep control of the cost, and keep control of that cost per view.

Within campaigns, cost per view is the thing you want to control most. You have also got things like the goals, so what is your goal. That is one of your important settings and we will talk about it more later in the course.

What are the other settings you have to get right?

Budget, networks, language and locations. You need to set and control your budgets, and decide which networks you are going to run your ads on. A lot of the time we will talk about running in YouTube search results and in YouTube videos, and we might think about the display network occasionally.

Language is super important. If we get that wrong we could be running ads into territories where they simply will not convert, because nobody can understand them.

Locations matter too, getting them correct and excluding certain locations. Within your advanced settings you can even target radiuses, you can add locations in bulk, and you can target specific countries and territories.

How should you bid?

Start at the bottom with cost per view rather than cost per thousand impressions. The question is whether you are bidding on a cost per acquisition basis, a cost per thousand views basis, or a cost per view basis. Google is actively trying to steer us away from bidding on cost per view, purely because if Google can get five pound per thousand impressions it would probably prefer that to us only paying at cost per view.

Google actively markets the TrueView principle, in that it should charge you once somebody has watched 30 seconds of your content. So let us start at the bottom and run with cost per view.

Bear in mind that your account will not run correctly on target cost of acquisition unless you have got conversions to show Google in the first place.

What content should you exclude?

Start with excluded content types and labels, including the mature content and the not yet labelled options. There is a lot you can set up in there.

I like to exclude embedded YouTube videos, because typically they are on people's sites and nobody is really paying attention to the ads at that point. It can also be a good idea to exclude live stream.

Why are conversion events the number one setting?

Because they are how you teach Google what you want, and if you are lazy you will only achieve one level of success. What we need is several layers of success, which means setting up your conversion events in order.

When you are setting a fresh campaign up, the first conversion event might be just to get people to your landing page. If we can get people onto the page, do they then convert? If people are getting onto the page and just bouncing, then with a conversion event of, for example, time on site of one minute, we can teach Google that the people who come and stay and read are the ones we want.

The next level from that is that once Google has learned we are getting people onto the site and they are staying, you might then include a conversion event of a call, a form fill or a purchase enquiry. You would probably set all of those up, but you will see them coming at a slower rate. It might take 100 people onto the site for at least a minute each to find three or four within that group who then go on to fill in an enquiry form, make a purchase or add something to a cart.

So conversions are going to be massively important.

What about devices, networks and frequency?

Devices are worth thinking about carefully, and we often exclude TV screens. That said, you may well be running an awareness campaign and want TV, because typically people cannot really skip, or do not really skip, when they see a YouTube ad on TV. You might also want to exclude certain operating systems, devices or networks.

Lastly there is frequency capping. There are a lot of people who do not bother with this, which I do not know why. They will just let their ads run. If you cap your impression frequency, first, you are not over advertising, so you are not spamming people. But you can also cap the number of views.

Remember, if we are bidding on cost per view and we cap the number of views, we stop ourselves paying for the same person more than once. If I cap the number of views to one per week per person, I could say I want to show this ad 10 times a day to somebody, but once they have watched it once and I have paid, I do not want to pay again. At that point you can manipulate how your audience actually experience and see the ad.

What comes next once the basics are baked in?

Demographics, and then times of day. You can start setting ages within your campaigns, gender, parental status and income, and you can make combinations of these. Typically those are the basics, and you want them baked into all your campaigns going forwards.

Then you can start to get a bit more advanced by looking at the times of day your ads run. That can be really useful for spreading your budget across the day. If you are trying to find out what time of day works and you have only got a 50 budget per day, and all of it gets spent between 9am and midday, you are not really testing the later times of day. So you could split that into several smaller ad groups that run at different times, and actually spread your budget out.

We have talked about locations, and we will talk further about audiences, placements and keywords in other parts of the course. Hopefully that gives you a quick overview. See you in the next piece.