Module 3 - Placements

What is the placements tab actually showing you?

The placements tab shows you a list of all the channels where your ads have shown. In one particular campaign it had shown on thirty thousand different channels. Three or four years ago, YouTube ads were largely built around placements, because you could run a whole campaign purely on chosen placements, and that can still be attractive as long as the placements you choose have enough traffic behind them.

Why not just build a whole campaign around your favourite placements?

You can build a campaign that way, but the view counts you are chasing are global, and that limits how far it scales. If you use a tool like Vidnetics to search for channels containing certain keywords, say you are a coach with a new book out and want to appear in coaching, mentorship or inspiration content, you can search those keywords and pull a list of videos with them in the title. That can produce thousands of videos, but the view counts on those videos are global figures. If a channel has a million views a week, that sounds great, but you are then competing against every other advertiser who wants into that same popular channel, so your cost per view goes up. The traffic may be more relevant, but we think there is probably a better way, which is to let Google choose the placements for you based on audience, keyword and topic, rather than running placements alone.

There is nothing stopping you running a separate campaign that only uses a curated best-of-the-best list of placements found with a tool like Vidnetics, but the challenge is that a placements-only campaign often does not have enough traffic to scale. If you chose a hundred relevant YouTube channels each with a million views a week, in theory that is a hundred million views, but it is worldwide, you are competing with other advertisers for it, and in-stream ads only show once someone has watched a certain amount of the preceding video, which cuts a big chunk of that potential straight away. If you then geographically ring-fence the campaign as well, you will struggle even more for enough views. A small campaign like this can work fine, but once you want to scale to hundreds or thousands of dollars a day, there is probably not enough headroom in that set of placements to do it properly.

How do you actually build a placements campaign?

You build it as a separate campaign from scratch, choosing the placements yourself rather than letting Google pick them. In the placements tab you can filter to see where your ads have shown on YouTube and Display, or just YouTube. To set one up, create a new video campaign, choose custom video campaign, and continue. Give it a name, ideally with the date included, for example "placements, 19 05 2021". Set a campaign total, in this example £500, starting today and ending in a month's time.

For networks, exclude the Display Network, choose your country, in this case UK, and English as the language. Down in additional settings I like to set frequency capping, for example capping frequency to five views a day and view frequency to one a day. Name the ad group, in this case also "placements", and give it a keyword, for example "marketing".

From there you can search for YouTube channels that include your keyword directly, though the dedicated tools work much better than searching manually. Searching "marketing" might turn up a video with only 405 views that also looks like a foreign language video, so you would probably skip it, or a channel like Formation Marketing with 204,000 views, which looks great, but you do not necessarily know anything about that channel, and those 204,000 views could have built up over the last five years. Building a list that way, one channel at a time, would take forever, and you would need thousands of them for a decent budget. A tool like Vidnetics can bring in that list for you far more efficiently, though you will still need to run it more than once to build a big enough list depending on your budget. You could also add placements via app categories, but that gets complicated fast and is covered separately in the apps optimisation module.

Should you run a placements campaign on its own?

Yes, if you are going to run a placements-only campaign, run it as its own separate campaign rather than overlaying it with topics, keywords or audiences, because mixing them probably will not serve properly. Run it on a small budget to begin with, for example around 20 per cent of your daily budget, with the other 80 per cent on audience, topic and keyword combinations, and see where it goes. You can scale a placements campaign if it works, but be mindful that there is a ceiling of headroom within that set of placements, and you will hit it quite quickly in terms of cost per acquisition.