Measuring the Success of YouTube for Action Campaigns
Earlier this year, we shared a series of posts related to YouTube for Action. We explained what YouTube for Action is, how intent-based audiences work, and we explained how to make and run a TrueView for action ad. In this article, we’ll be diving into measurement.
We’ll show you how to use YouTube analytics to understand whether your TrueView for Action campaigns were a success. Ready to dive in? Let’s go!
As a reminder, in order to use YouTube for Action, you need to be set up with conversion tracking. We explain more about this in our article on getting started with TrueView for Action YouTube ads.
Setting up conversion tracking for TrueView for Action
TrueView for Action campaigns are designed for driving conversions. Therefore, your success metrics will be based on conversions.
There are a variety of conversion types that you can track and optimize towards. You’ll likely be looking at transactions, meaning how many people made a purchase after seeing your ad. But you can also track calls, leads collected, website visits, and more.
You’ll want to make sure that each campaign is set up with your most important conversion in mind. This’ll help you track conversions, as well as help YouTube optimize your ads for the right type of conversions.
To do this, go to "Tools" at the top of Google Ads manager and select "Conversions."
Select your primary conversion action from the list of conversion actions. Then, click EDIT SETTINGS and tick the box to "Include in ‘Conversions’."
All the other conversion types can still be tracked in the “All conversions” column. This will help you better understand how customers are converting through the entire journey, not simply around your primary conversion metric.
To learn more about how to get set up to measure your primary conversion, check out the following video from Google Ads.
Measuring TrueView for Action conversions
Once you’ve got your Google Ads dashboard set up to track the right conversion metrics, you’re ready to start measuring your results! As your ad runs, the columns will be updated as viewers take action. The following definitions will help you understand the results.
Conversions
As we mentioned above, the conversions column will list the number of your most important conversion metric. But how is a conversion calculated? Conversions are added to the conversions column for TrueView for Action campaigns in two cases:
- A user clicks on the ad to go to your website and later converts.
- A user views at least 10 seconds of your video ad (or watches to the end if it’s shorter than 10 seconds) and then converts within 3 days of watching.
View-through conversion
If a viewer sees less than 10 seconds of your ad and then converts within 1 days, it will be counted in the “View-through conversion” column. This column will help you understand how many people took action, although they only viewed your ad for a short time.
To learn more about YouTube for Action, check out the other blog posts in this series. And let us know about your experience with YouTube advertising in the comments below!