Module 3 - Setting up your first video advert - Part 1

Where do you start once you are logged into Google Ads?

Start by switching to expert mode, then go to campaigns and create a new campaign. If you remember the last lesson, we switched to expert mode under tools and settings, because when Google first sets your account up it sets it up as a smart campaign with a simple, basic interface. If you did not catch that, check the previous lesson.

The interface can be quite difficult to navigate. The menu on the left hand side is useful. I always tend to set it to all, and view by campaign types, because it just makes it easier and everything comes down the side. At the moment you can see we have only got smart campaigns.

The reason we are here is to learn how to set up YouTube ads. I am presuming quite a lot of you know how to do search campaigns already. So we start at campaigns, then a new campaign, and that is where we are going to start pretty much all the way through.

Why should you create a campaign without guidance?

Create the campaign without any guidance because that gives you access to all of the different options, instead of the ones Google wants you to have. Google is going to try to hold your hand throughout this whole process, and it is a bit like paint by numbers, if you know what I mean.

If you start off with leads, for example, it is going to try to get me to create the campaign with a target cost of acquisition per lead, and I do not necessarily want to do that. I want to tell Google what I want to bid and how I want to set the campaign up.

So rather than using the templated system above, I am going to use video without any guidance. There are lots and lots of different options within video, and again my choice is custom. I am not going to go down the route of being pushed into driving conversions.

One of the options we will talk about later is ad sequence. That is really useful when you want to show one advert, and then the people who watch a certain percentage of that video get the next video, so you can tell people a story.

How should you name a campaign?

Name the campaign with enough detail to identify it, plus the date you started it. Naming campaigns is really personal choice, but if you keep consistency in the format you will be able to work out where each of them sits when you have lots and lots of campaigns running.

So this one is a video advert, it is our own marketing campaign, and this particular campaign is keywords and audiences, and I am starting it today, which happens to be the 10th of May 2021. That is my basic naming principle. You can put quite a lot into there.

What are the core campaign settings?

The core settings are your bid strategy, your budget, your networks, your locations and your language. I am going to bid maximum cost per view on this particular campaign, and we will go into why I am doing that later in the course.

For budget you can do campaign total, so total campaign spend, or daily spend. Let us stick it on five pounds a day. You could set an end date if you wish.

For networks, YouTube search results yes please, YouTube videos yes, but video partners on the display network I do not really like. Why not? Because the display network is all over the place. It could end up almost anywhere. As a rule I tend to uncheck that.

Be careful with which country you are running in. If you choose all countries it is going to go worldwide. For this example I am doing the United States. You could add others. For languages I am going to do English, if I can spell English. That is flipping typical.

Standard inventory you do not really need to worry about at this point. Under excluded types and labels you could start excluding bits and pieces. You might want to exclude live streaming, or exclude mature content. As a rule you can leave that as it is to start with.

What do the additional settings do?

The additional settings cover devices, frequency capping and ad scheduling, and they are where you start shaping who sees the ad and how often. Conversions come in at an account level, and we will get into that later in the course.

Devices are quite interesting. Let us say I am going to show my advert on computers and mobiles only, and take out tablets and TVs. That depends on what you are advertising. TV is not easy to get people to click through from, but if you have got a brand awareness campaign you might want it to run there. You can also choose different operating systems, so if you wanted to be on iOS only you could do that, and you can go down to specific devices. Generally you probably should not touch these unless you find there is a winner in there and you are getting loads of conversions from a particular source.

Frequency capping is always a good one. Let us say the most I am prepared to show this to somebody is five times a week, and I am going to set view frequency at two times a week. So I do not want to pay to show my ad more than twice to somebody during the week, but I am going to let them see it five times before they view it.

For ad schedule, let us say I am going to run it Mondays to Fridays, 9am to midday, and then 2pm to 6pm, leaving lunchtime out, based on my GMT time zone because I am in the UK. All of this is personal preference at this point, but you should really understand your customer. That schedule is a massive generalisation, but there you go.

Why build the ad group as a template?

Build it as a template because you are going to duplicate this campaign out, and everything you enter now becomes the basis for every campaign that follows. This is not going to live as a live ad.

So I name the ad group template, and this one is keywords and audiences. If I am advertising pay-per-click, I might describe the product there, or note that it is short format, so that you understand what is inside each of your ad groups.

Once I copy the campaign, I can adjust things inside the individual campaign. Things like the time of day will be fixed across most of my campaigns, as will the view caps. That is what the template is doing for you.

For demographics on this template I am going to run 25 to 54, so I am taking the rest out. If you take out unknown, that will take a lot out and you will be more specific. There is more on this later in the course.

Remember this is just a template, and you can adjust it. Do not put your audiences in at this point. Do not put your keywords, topics or placements in at this point either. They go in when we use the template at the next stage.

My maximum cost per view here is two pence, because we are going to work our way up. I am not trying to build everything at once. This is a tour around how to get going and how to get your template up to start with. There is an uplift option you can play with later. Stick with the basic settings at this point.

How do you attach your video and build the ad?

You attach the video by copying its shareable link from YouTube Studio and pasting it into the campaign, and the ad then builds in the preview on the right hand side. Go into your channel, into YouTube Studio, into content, and pick the video you are going to use as the ad.

Be careful which one you pick. I have massively failed here, because the first one I chose is unlisted and scheduled to go out, so let us choose a public one instead and get the shareable link for that.

For this example I am going to choose a skippable in-stream ad, and we will explain more about that later in the course. Then you choose where you are sending people, which is our website, and specifically a page from within our site. You can choose to have a different display URL.

For the call to action we are going to say click here, and you should try different calls to action in different ads. That is key. Then the headline. You will notice there is a very limited number of characters, and that is always a pain. It will become one of the pains of your life if you are building these types of ads regularly. Let us use YouTube ads as the headline. You will see it starts building your ad over on the right hand side, so you can see how it would appear.

URL options is a more advanced section that we cover later in the course. Then give the ad a name, and I would put the date in there too, so 100521 for the 10th of May 2021, and create the campaign.

What happens once the template campaign is created?

Once you continue to the campaign you can see the campaign and the ad listed on the left hand side, and at that point you have a template. That has whizzed you through it.

I have to be careful here, so be careful at this point too: pause that one, because otherwise it will run, and it is not complete. It is not complete yet. Jump on to the next piece and I will show you how we then go and spin that up into different ads.