Google Content Exclusions- Brand Safety Strategy-By Sarang Kinjavdekar

You are an advertiser, running a Display campaign for your Brand/client. You are very Brand sensitive and do not want your brand to appear on porn, sensitive, tragedy or any other website (which is not in line with your Brand and you do not want to associate with such content/placements/media/publishers etc).

So how to do it in under 1 minute and make sure your brand is safe?

Log in to your adwords account (This process is for New Adwords console)


Follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Go to settings >Click 
2. Now go to Account Setting
3. Then click content exclusions

Once you click on the content exclusions, the below screen will open

Select the categories you do not want. For example, i have selected 8 categories that I do not want. Remember, you are doing this at the account level. So this will automatically be reflected in all the campaigns at content exclusion level. You do not have to enter it again for any of your future campaigns.

How is this beneficial?


Lets say you are a brand associated with Baby products and your target audience is Young mothers. You dont want your ad to show on any tragedy, conflict, porn or for that matter games sites. Using the above will help you to get rid of it


Is it guaranteed that my brand will be safe?


Well,I would answer this as - YES and NO. Why? See below

See the disclaimer from Google Below

What should you do next?

My recommendations- First, audit what kind of business you are in, what is your brand association, what kind of content you want your brands to be associated with. Based on that, you can select the categories as mentioned in the above figure and make sure that your brand is safe.


Any other Tactic?


Yes sure, you can also do the manual addition of all the websites, apps, placements that you want to remove from your media placements list.

Go to placements>Click 
Then select Exclusions from the top menu
Then Click on the + sign

Once you click on the + sing, the below will open. You have an option to exclude the placements at 3 level as shown

From Account, Campaign and Adgroup level. For the sale of this topic, I will take you through account level exclusions.

Important thing to remember here, if you select Account level, it will automatically be applicable to Campaign and Adgroup level. Similarly, if you select it at Campaign Level, it will automatically be applicable to Adgroup level

Thanks for reading

Sarang

2018 Guide- Use YouTube Video to drive Sales and Revenue- By Sarang Kinjavdekar

You can now use Trueview for Shopping to drive sales. Let's say you are an ecommerce player, you have a Television commercial or a 3 minute video which showcase all your available categories or say the Top selling products.

People , nowadays are always on mobile and always looking for interactive content. User A saw your promotion email and then he was served a display ad followed by your YouTube video. This means, that he is already aware of your brand. Now you want to make sure that while  watching video, he can click to the products he saw in the video and make a purchase. 

At the outset, this looks very difficult. But now, you can do it easily with Trueview for shopping.You can now Incorporate e-commerce experience into video content by using TrueView for shopping. This means, combining the Upper funnel (awareness) to the lower funnel (driving sales) or also the middle funnel (consideration).

With the introduction of TrueView for shopping, YouTube viewers can now click through to a brand's products, which lets consumers easily purchase items that are right in front of them on-screen. This is possible by using the cards functionality on YouTube (see Technology used below for more details). By creating helpful, product-specific videos that speak to the audience's interests, you can  provide YouTube viewers with the exact content that will most likely to build a relationship and end up in sales or a conversion


Basic requirements


Before you set up a TrueView for shopping campaign, first link your AdWords account to your Google Merchant Center account. You should also be familiar with TrueView in-stream ads. Also, You'll need to have access to your product data in Merchant Center and be willing to add custom label attributes to your products (if you want to use custom filters for products)

Availability


Currently it is available only in the countries where the Google Merchant centre works. A complete list of the countries can be found here.


Technology used

The cards can use the same technology as dynamic remarketing, or advertisers can set filters to pull relevant products from their Merchant Feed. This means product cards are dynamically generated for that video ad's particular impression, and work seamlessly to incorporate an e-commerce element for consumers. Working across mobile, tablet, and desktop, the cards can help increase viewer engagement while helping brands reach potential customers, even in unexpected demographics.

How is it useful for you-as a retailer?

• Increase audience engagement around branded video content
• Drive revenue, conversions, and sales

How does it look like- Lets have a look


Below is how it looks like.. Example 1

Example 2

The products on the video can now be seamlessly integrated into the videos. You can have maximum of 6 cards in a single video. 

How to select the products range to appear in Video?


If you have specific products in mind from your Merchant Center account that you’d like to use in your campaign, select the Choose specific products option. You can then search for products by title, by item ID, or by the URL of the item in your online store that was uploaded to Merchant Center.

Note:- You can even select items that are out of stock, however they won’t show until they’re back in stock -- so there’s no need to adjust your campaign as products go in and out of stock.

Campaign Set up Process

Step by Step guide- New Adwords console- Source

Other Things to remember

• Product is Selected at the Campaign Level and NOT at Ad group level
• Dynamic Remarketing Is Available for YouTube Shopping
• If you do not have any specific products to show or the video is very generic, you can make use of retargeting strategy to show the products to different segments based on your remarketing lists. 

You have three options when selecting your products:

1. Choose all products available in your chosen feed
2. Select specific products by searching for titles, URLs or product IDs
3. Create custom filters (one example seen below)

Using Custom Filters option

Status and Troubleshooting


As mentioned above, you can choose specific products to appear in the video. If you can ahead and select this option, you might see various messages as status, below is a brief on how to tackle them

1. Ready to serve: The item is approved and eligible to run on shopping cards on your video ad.
2. Not approved: The item is disapproved in your Merchant Center account. You can check the status in Merchant Center to understand why the item is disapproved. Automated systems identify items that violate our policies and the Products Feed Specification. If you use the item in your campaign anyway, we’ll request an additional manual review, which takes one to three working days. Note that an item can only be manually reviewed once.
3. Out of stock: The item is out of stock. You provide an item’s availability using the “availability” attribute in your product data. If the availability is set to “out of stock” for a country, then the item won't serve in that country. You can still select it for your campaign, and it will start appearing when it becomes available again.

Thanks for reading!!!

Sarang
 .

2018- A step by Step Guide to YouTube Advertising- By Sarang Kinjavdekar

This is a Step Guide to YouTube Advertising for 2018. You will learn the basics of YouTube advertising, creation of Ads, campaign, targeting options , setting up the creatives and every other thing needed to launch your campaign from scratch.

Before we start, an Important note. This guide does not covers the CPD (Cost per Day) model or in other words YouTube Roadblock campaigns which you buy directly from your YouTube Account Manager. 

Please note that YouTube keeps on changing the formats, names etc frequently. So you might find that some of the ads names, format etc might change in future. But one thing for sure, the basic underlying advertising principles remains the same.


Cheatsheet

Here you Go!!!!!

Latest Addition- Outstream ads

Google has just launched Outstream ads, before we dig deeper into the previously available format. lets first have a look at Outstream ads.

NOTE: Outstream videos are mobile-only ads that appear on partner sites and apps on the Google Display Network. This ad format isn’t available on YouTube yet.


What is an Outstream Ad?


An ‘outstream’ video ad unit, also commonly referred to as ‘in-read’ or ‘native video’, is a new video advertising unit that autoplays in a large format player whenever a user navigates to it within text content (typically an article), even if the publisher doesn’t have their own video content. It’s called outstream because the video ad exists outside of online video content – also known as instream video content — where the ad plays either before (pre-roll), during (mid-roll), or after (post-roll) the publisher’s video content.

 What is different ?

Unlike TrueView in-stream ads or Bumper ads, the new Outstream Video Ads won’t require placement within a YouTube video. This is a fundamental change, as it gives advertisers the ability to reach an audience when a YouTube video isn’t present. The videos will appear in banners for mobile web placements and as banners, interstitials, in-feed and native for apps (both portrait and landscape.)The videos will run without sound once they come into view, and a tap from a user will turn the sound on. The user will also be able to restart the video.

 How can you buy and what are the placements available ?

Outstream Ads can be purchased on a viewable CPM basis, and the ads will only show on Google video partner sites or apps (for now). Google will enhance the look with a message, logo and link, similar to Responsive ads.




Following is needed to set up 

• 
  
• Video.
• Logo.
• Headline.
• Description.
• Final URL.
• Thumbnail (optional).

How does the set up Process looks like?

To set up an Outstream video ads campaign, advertisers will create a new video campaign (using the goal of ‘brand awareness and reach’ and choose ‘Outstream’ as the campaign subtype

Example of an Outstream ad

Types of YouTube Ads


Following are the options available for YouTube ads

There are six types of YouTube ads:

• Skippable video ads (a.k.a. TrueView ads)
• Non-skippable video ads
• Bumper ads
• Overlay ads
• Display ads
• Sponsored cards

TrueView Ads (skippable)


TrueView skippable ads can be skipped after five seconds—so it’s important make those first five count. Unless you’re optimizing based on action or reach, you only have to pay for these ads when the viewer watches 30 seconds or more, so this is help to save your advertising $. This is the ad format you’re probably most familiar with. When most people think about YouTube advertising, they think of TrueView in-stream ads. In-stream ads are the ads that pop up right before the video you want to watch starts playing.


There are 2 types of TrueView ads (i) In-stream (ii)Discovery


TrueView In-stream example

In-stream Specifications and placements


Ad location: YouTube videos, apps, games, videos in Google’s Display Network
Video length: 3 minutes, max (> 30 seconds recommended)
Copy length: None
Clicks go to: Your website


Discovery Ads


TrueView Video Discovery Ads were previously Named In-Display Ads. They are not as common as the TrueView In-stream. If you’ve ever searched for a video on YouTube, you’ve probably seen a video discovery ad like the below one at the top of your search results or on the right hand side

Top location

Right hand side location

Discovery Ads- Specifications and placements

Ad location: YouTube videos & search results (including mobile), YouTube app homepage, “related videos,” and video overlays
Video length: No limit!
Headline: 25 characters max
Body copy: 2 lines, each 35 characters max
Clicks go to: your website (overlay banner) or your video (video thumbnail)



TrueView Ads (Non- skippable)

These ads are Non-skippable, but it comes with a risk. If you do not have FCAP (frequency capping) in place and if your frequency of showing ad is very high (say higher than 3), you might end up in annoying your audiences. As they do not have the option to skip it, they have to anyway see your ad, however , it might have a very negative impact on your brand. So , use it very cautiously. They are paid on CPM basis. 

Update- Keeping  the above mentioned factor in mind, YouTube has taken off the old 30 seconds non-skippable format. Now you can have videos between 15-20 seconds.

Example of non skippable Ad

Secondly, you can also create a mid roll non skippable trueview- this means you can put your video ad in another video mid way when it is playing (applicable to the video inventory which has more than 10 minutes of length -minimum)

See example below

Bumper Ads

This is a new format introduced by YouTube some time ago.It is a non skippable format as well, however, the video length is restricted to 6 seconds.


Like non-skippable ads, bumpers are paid for on a CPM basis. Their short length makes them ideal for mobile. A common approach is to use bumper ads to compliment your longer, non-skippable ads.

Overlay Ads


They can appear either as text or as an image over the YouTube Videos.


As Text

As Image

Display Ads




Display ads appear above the video suggestions list.  Display ads on YouTube can be managed from within AdWords, allowing you to double up with the Display Network for maximum reach.

Cards & Sponsored Cards Ads

Cards are small CTA pop-ups you can set to appear within the YouTube playerThey add interactivity to your videos on desktop or mobile. Cards are effective because they’re unobtrusive. They only expand to their full size when they’re clicked (i.e., when the viewer is interested).

Sponsored cards display content that may be relevant to your video, such as products featured in the video. Viewers will see a teaser for the card for a few seconds. They can also click the icon in the top right corner of the video to browse the cards.

YouTube cards are the solution for driving actionable results from your video content. They let you add more visual components with underlying objectives to your YouTube videos instead of just annotations, making your videos more interactive.The cards can appear at any point in your video, and can include images, outside links, and even content that’s downloaded when viewers click.

You can add five different types of YouTube cards to your videos:

1. Video or playlist: Promote your video content.
2. Channel: Promote another channel.
3. Donation: Feature a nonprofit or cause of your choice and encourage donations.
4. Poll: Encourage viewers to engage in a multiple-choice poll.
5. Link: Link to an approved website off of YouTube.

Once they’re set up, a small rectangular box, or teaser, will appear in the top right corner of the video to give your fans a preview of the message. If viewers tap or click the teaser, the card associated with the video appears along the right side of your video (or below the player on mobile in portrait mode). Cards work well when they are placed in conjunction with scripted calls to action or when they are relevant to your video content. For example, if you mention a specific video or a piece of merchandise, you could try adding a card at that exact moment. Cards are convenient because they give the viewer an option to click, and if they don’t, it disappears from their view. 

Lets see cards in action

Sponsored cards appear as a small information icon (circled below), sometimes accompanied by a text CTA that appears upon mouseover.

After clicking, the “i” expands to reveal ads that redirect to your sales pages: in this case, photography guides.

YouTube Video Campaign Creation- Step by Step


Here is everything you need to know to set up the YouTube campaign from scratch in Adwords

Step by Step -Campaign creation in Google Adwords

1. Click Campaigns on the main toolbar.
2. Click the +Campaign button , then New campaign.
3. Select Video as your campaign type.
4. Establish your campaign goal and subtype.
5. Name your campaign.
6. Enter your budget.
7. Enter the locations and networks where you want your ad to appear, as well as the locations and networks you’d like to exclude.
8. Enter your target audience’s language.
9. Name your ad group.
10. Establish your bid amounts.
11. Select audiences for targeting.
12. Select the YouTube video you’ve uploaded for this campaign.
13. Select your ad format (In-Stream or Discovery).
14. Click Save and Continue.
15. Once you’ve completed these steps, you’re ready to roll with your first TrueView campaign. Setting up a bumper ads campaign pretty much follows the same steps, only you’ll want to click the “Bumper ads: 6-second video ads” option, rather than In-Stream or Discovery.

Video Campaign goals and sub types

Working on the creatives

Video Requirements -Valid for all the formats

TrueView, non-skippable and bumper ads


Video Codec: H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4
Audio Codec: AAC, MP3
Resolution: 640×360 (19:9 aspect ratio) or 480×360 (4:3 aspect ratio)
Frame Rate: 30 FPS

File Size: 1 GB max

Overlay ad dimensions and specs


Dimensions: 480 px by 70 px
File type: PNG, JPG, GIF (static or animated)
File size: 150 KB max

Display ad specs

Display ads can be animated (GIF format), but YouTube stipulates that any animations must be 30 seconds or less. 

Dimensions: 300px by 250 px
File type: PNG, JPG, GIF (can be animated)
File size: 150 KB max

Sponsored cards dimensions and specs


Image dimension

Dimensions: variable (1:1 aspect ratio)
File type: PNG, JPG, GIF (can be animated)
File size: 2MB max

Other Add ons


Companion Banners:

 These ads are optional. They aren’t solo running ads, as they must follow alongside a video ad. Their benefit is that they increase the overall clickable real estate on screen

Reporting in Adwords
AdWords reports:

Data available in AdWords YouTube Reports includes:

• Impressions (thumbnail impressions are when the thumbnail is displayed  and the user can click to play it – this isn’t necessarily when the video was played)
• Video impressions are only for in-stream ads.
• Views: number of times video was actually viewed (these also count towards your public YouTube video count)
• Video Website Clicks are free of charge because you’re paying for the view anyway
• Video Played To is a measure of what percentage of your video the user watched (eg 25%)

A really handy feature within AdWords is that you can segment the data by ad format, and decide which kind of YouTube ad format is producing the most engagement (such as Video Played To) and then increase spend and resources for this format.

You can also segment by targeting type, and see which kind of targeting works best for your campaign. Segmentation by devices is also available, so you can see whether it is worth increasing or decreasing your spend on mobile devices.

Reporting and Youtube Analytics

Data available includes:

1. How they found your video (where is was played, if it was an ad or if they searched for it etc)
2. Which parts of the video are engaging people (you can then improve yoru videos accordingly)
3. Demographic data
4. Viewer trends (did video views go up after advertising – line views, map views etc)
5. Compare views by individual videos
6. Traffic sources: if ads are being showed on GDN sites elsewhere you could then target them as managed placements for other display advertising
7. Track videos which are driving subscriptions to your YouTube channel
8. Analyse likes, dislikes, comments, shares etc and create more ad creative similar to the ones which achieve high levels of social engagement
9. You can even analyse videos you don’t own to see what works well – find your competitors videos and analyse them to see where their audiences are and then target them yourself

Other Relevant Information

Source

Thanks for Reading

Sarang