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YouTube Advertising in the Google UI: How to Take Advantage

Published: January 7, 2016

Author: Jaime Sikora

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YouTube advertising recently migrated into the Google UI, which is great for SEMs, seeing as YouTube’s advertising interface left a little to be desired (to say the least).  Now that your YouTube paid ad account is in the AdWords UI, here’s a couple of things you should use immediately:

Customized Columns on the Campaigns Tab

If your account has more than one conversion type that is being tracked, you can create customized columns on the campaigns tab.  This way you don’t need to segment by conversion type every time you want to see data for separate conversion types by campaign. This can be done by going into the columns button & selecting modify columns in the campaigns tab.

From there, select custom columns:

From there, select add column:

Column name and description are up to your discretion, but I like to keep it as the conversion name (perhaps ‘lead’ or ‘sale’ or ‘sign up’, to keep things clear).

Now, let’s say you’re tracking different conversion types, as I stated previously in this example (however, there are clearly other tracking options).  From the dropdown button, you’ll want to select conversions.  Conversion name will be one of the options; click the arrow to make it the selected segment:

From there, all conversion names should show with a tick box next to them.  Tick the appropriate box and select ‘save’.  I would then recommend repeating this step for all your conversion types, but of course this depends on your own account’s needs.  I’d also recommend tracking conversion rate and cost per conversion type.  This can be done by repeating the same steps but selecting ‘conv. Rate’ or ‘cost/conv.’ from the dropdown and selecting the appropriate conversion type.

Save set of columns

Another great feature of YouTube being in the AdWords UI is that you can save a custom set of metrics that you’d like to see at once (mixing and matching from views, conversions, etc.).  This is a pretty basic AdWords feature, but it’s nice to apply to your YouTube campaigns.  Most SEMs are familiar with this option for their AdWords campaigns, but just in case you’re not, when modifying columns, tick the box in the bottom left corner:

This is great for monthly report and weekly reporting needs.

Additionally, applying an old favorite such as AdWords labels can always be helpful for tracking campaign performance and reporting on different campaign types (in-stream vs. in-display, contextual vs. remarketing, etc.):

Dimensions Tab

Another good friend is the Dimensions tab.  You can now more easily see performance by geography, time of day, and search terms.

This can help you aggregate performance at account level and see if there are times of days that should have a bid modifier or various geographies that should be excluded.  Additionally, from the search query report, you can easily see if there are some terms that need to be added as negative keywords or excluded.

Ad Naming Conventions

One of my favorite features of YouTube now being in the AdWords UI is the ease of reporting at ad level.  All video ads can be found in the ads tab.  You can easily apply AdWords labels (landing page, video length, etc.) then filter by label for ease of comparing ad performance. You can also export the data and pivot it by label.  I personally prefer to employ the following naming convention for ads: video content type – video length – landing page.  For example – Puppies – 30 sec – Homepage.  This makes it easy for filtering for a specific ad and looking at total stats for that ad type.

Change History

Finally, one last thing that’s great about YouTube being in the AdWords UI is being able to very easily view the change history.  Now it’s very simple to see what may have caused a performance change or to keep track or your optimizations without a manual log.

Any other new features you’ve been using to optimize your YouTube campaigns? Leave a comment!