Best Practices for Awareness and Consideration Video Campaigns

Awareness Campaigns

• There are three strategies for driving awareness on YouTube: 
  • Strategic content alignment along with higher impact ad placements to increase brand association and maximum campaign impact to remain top of mind with your target audience.
  • Maximize reach and frequency on your campaigns to optimize your return on investment (ROI).
  • Broaden exposure to new audiences in order to capture more market share.

Our product recommendations for each awareness strategy are:

Consideration campaigns

For driving consideration on YouTube, we recommend a strategy that focuses on creating interest in your brand & growing brand equity by optimizing for views when you tell your brand’s story to an engaged audience.

Learn more about Video Reach Campaigns Efficient Reach and Video View Campaigns.

Campaign implementation best practices

We recommend that you review the following aspects for overall campaign implementation best practices:

• Planning: Use Reach Planner and Traffic Estimator to ensure your campaign goals are met. 
  • Adjust your bids, budget, flight dates, and targeting settings to achieve your desired outcome.
  • Check Traffic Estimator before launching your campaign.
• Targeting: To maximize performance, we recommend you choose demo, detailed demo, affinity, or custom affinity audiences.  
  • Content Targeting doesn’t work on home feed (will block serving). While you can use this at your own discretion, be aware that content targeting will limit serving.
  • Shorts has limited reach with contextual targeting and may sometimes also block serving when placement targeting is used.
  • We suggest going as broad as possible to allow for Google AI to optimize your multi-format Video Reach Campaigns Efficient Reach and/or Video View Campaigns.  
• Creatives: To better engage YouTube viewers across devices, it's best to upload a variety of different video creatives across orientations—including horizontal, square, and vertical videos—for your video campaigns.
  • Include a mix of assets, including at least one horizontal and one vertical; :06 & :15s for Awareness and :30s+ for Consideration. For both Video Reach Campaigns and Video View Campaigns, we recommend having a vertical video asset to take full advantage of mobile In-Stream & Shorts because lack of vertical assets restricts reach & views.
  • Adding a vertical video to an ad group with only landscape videos to Video Reach Campaigns increases Average Watchtime per impression on Shorts by over 20%.¹
  • In Video View Campaigns, ad groups with both vertical and horizontal videos get up to 100% more views on Shorts than ad groups with horizontal only videos.²   
  • Shorter assets are better for Video Reach Campaigns, with longer assets being more ideal for Video View Campaigns. 
  • To start creating vertical video assets, learn more about Video creation in Google Ads.
• Bidding: Keep in mind that a competitive bid is necessary. We recommend that you focus on bid guidance in-platform.
  • Make sure you start competitive bidding based off of historic CPM bids for skippable In-stream for Video Reach Campaigns Efficient Reach and CPV bids for skippable In-stream for Video View Campaigns. 
  • Low bidding can cause under pacing, and low bids can also prevent you from serving on some formats. You will find bid guidance in-platform during campaign construction that takes into account all of your campaign settings and targeting.
• Measurement: Align campaigns with the correct key performance indicators (KPIs).

  Strategy	KPIs
  Grow brand awareness	Brand awareness lift Incremental reach to TV Completion % of CTV impressions
  Maximize reach and frequency	ROI Reach CPM Frequency
  Broaden exposure to reach new audiences	Reach Search Lift increase
  Create interest in your brand & grow brand equity	Consideration Lift Views Search Lift Earned Actions

  • Brand Lift study is available and we highly recommend running a study with market minimums.
  • Metrics may look different on multi-format campaigns due to the variety of formats within a single campaign.  
  • With Format Segment Reports, you can get granular reporting at the format level on key brand metrics such as impressions, spend, and views within Video Reach Campaigns Efficient Reach and Video View Campaigns. Segmentation includes In-feed, Skippable In-stream, and Shorts.
  • View Through Rate (VTR) and viewability are broken out by individual format and are not a primary measurement of Video Reach Campaigns due to the mix of skippable and non-skip formats. To use Format Segment Reports, go to “Segment’ > Format (Video only) reporting feature.
  • Use Cross-Media Reach Measurement to measure deduplicated, on-target reach and frequency across video campaigns on YouTube and TV. Cross Media Reach Measurement helps compare efficiency, optimize ad investments, and understand unique reach across devices and formats.
  • Search Lift measurement determines how your ads impact a person’s likelihood to search for your product or brand on YouTube and Google Search.  
  • To use Brand Lift and/or Search Lift, contact your Google account representative.