1. Write Down Your Goal
All good campaigns start with a properly written plan. Think of this plan as your comprehensive guide to helping your business grow and become more visible. Your plan will show who exactly your target audience is, how you can connect with them, and most importantly, how you can increase your sales.
Begin by asking yourself some important questions. What does your brand do? What pain points does your brand aim to solve? Whose problems are you trying to solve? Is your campaign trying to reach new customers who have never come across your band or are you targeting an audience that has already had one or more interactions with your brand in the past?
Decide what your video ad is trying to accomplish. There are various kinds of video ad campaigns. These include:
- Website traffic-oriented ads: These are video ads whose goal is to drive traffic to your website. These ads introduce your brand to your audience and let them know that you have more value waiting for them on your website.
- Lead generation ads: Some ads are solely put out to go straight for the jugular! These ads do not focus on introducing your brand, but instead, they are meant to convince your audience that they need to purchase your product/services. They aim to instantly convert your cold audience into inspired leads.
- Channel growth: These are video ads that are made to increase your channel’s visibility. They do not essentially prompt your audience to purchase but instead aim to lead them back to your channel in hopes of increasing your audience, views, subscribers, and content engagement.
- Brand awareness ads: These video ads are strictly aimed at introducing your brand to a new and fresh audience. This lets them know your unique brand story and builds their trust in you.
- Video Engagement ads: These ads lead your audience back to your audience to your videos and encourage them to engage with your content. This helps your brand and channel grow.
With your answers to these questions, you now know how to set up your video ad campaign, as you have a working list of goals that you can start planning towards. Your video ad campaign is well on its way to fruition.
2. Set Up Your Conversion Actions
To set up google ad campaigns, conversion actions are crucial to ad success. Conversion sets allow you to set conversion goals which you can apply across various accounts and even different ad campaigns. Every time a customer clicks on one of your video ads, they are faced with a certain action step.
This step either leads them to make a purchase on your website, filling and submitting a form, or even downloading an attachment. The actions carried out in this exact stage of your ad campaign are known as conversion actions. The broad categories of conversion actions are:
Macro conversions. These conversions arise when your customers carry out heavy-duty actions such as completing an order on your website or completing a contract form for lead acquisition. Revenue-based conversions include completed e-commerce orders and paid subscription sign-ups. Lead acquisition conversions include completion of application forms and sign-ups for memberships. Inquiry conversions include contact form completions and phone calls put through to you.
Micro conversions. Micro conversion actions focus on the smaller details that keep your ad campaign going. These include newsletter sign-ups, downloading PDF brochures, liking a post on Facebook, and even adding an item to your shopping basket.
Here is how to set up your conversion action sets:
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Click settings.
- Click the “Conversion action sets.”
- Click the “+” plus button to add new conversion action sets. The instructions that follow will guide you through the process.
3. Build Your Campaign Structure
Knowing how to set up youtube ads requires a solid and effective campaign structure. These ads are organized into three layers: the account level, the campaign level, and the ad groups/set level. This funnel structure begins by sectioning your ads into categories based on their purpose i.e.brand awareness, conversions, retargeting. The next level in the funnel splits the campaign into ad sets for the kind of audience you are targeting: an audience that is acquainted with brands like yours or an audience that has already reached certain stages in their conversion actions e.g. the home page, the product page, or the “add to cart” page.
4. Don’t Forget To Exclude Specific Keywords/Topics/Channels
Once you get an idea of what you want your campaign structure to look like, it is now time to focus on your ad keywords. Keywords are the fuel of any ad campaign as they make up a large chunk of visibility and lead generation.
Make sure to dig right in and figure out which keywords you want to bid on. With this out of the way, it is now time to consider keywords that you don't want to include in your campaign. These exclusions also include topics or channels that you do not want your brand and ad to be associated with.
5. Produce At Least 2 Videos Ad Creatives
An ad creative is basically an object that comprises all the data that you use to create your ad. This can be an image, video, other, or any other format that can get your target audience listening to what you have to tell them. For a solid ad campaign, decide what ad format you want to use and do your best to create at least 2 ad creatives.
6. Conduct A Test Run
Before your real campaign is put out there into the world, it’s a great idea to first conduct a test run. This can be done with a snippet of your whole campaign or a simpler version of it. This forerunner will then give you insight into how your real campaign will fare once it goes live.
7. Analyse The Results of Your Test Run
After a decided period, (a week at most), your forerunner is ready to be taken down and analysed. With the help of Google ad reports and Google Analytics data, you can thoroughly assess the insights, reach, and engagement that your test run ad garnered.
8. Learn From Your Mistakes And Put Out Your Real Campaign
After assessing the insights from your test run, compile your observations and take note of your mistakes. With this knowledge, go right in with your real campaign and watch it blossom. There is a lot of planning and processing that goes into putting up your first Google video ad campaign.