YouTube has traditionally been a platform that advertisers have used in their digital marketing strategies to drive brand awareness. They could leverage the platform’s broad targeting and wide reach across its billions of users to get their brand in front of as many eyes as possible. The caveat was that it proved difficult to turn these viewers into customers. However, this is no longer the case with the new TrueView for action ad format on YouTube.
YouTube’s new TrueView for action format
TrueView for action ads, also known as YouTube for performance, are a new ad format that helps to drive more leads and conversions from YouTube, with similar efficiency and quality to those users coming from paid search ads. Advertisers can now leverage these ads and increase viewer engagement by including a strong CTA and headline overlay on their video ads. These new features drive more users to the advertiser’s website, and also increase conversions at a manageable CPA (cost per action).
When using TrueView for action ads in conjunction with YouTube’s various audience targeting capabilities such as custom intent audiences, advertisers can reach users when they have a higher level of intent to purchase.
While the ability to drive more leads and conversions through YouTube is great, this strategy would be useless without the proper conversion tracking in place. While Google ads provides some useful performance tracking without any extra setup, tracking conversions is what will allow advertisers to prove the value of their YouTube campaigns.
Tracking your YouTube conversions
Tracking conversions allows companies to calculate the exact ROI of their YouTube advertising efforts. This is necessary when making strategic decisions about which channels to leverage, and how much budget to dedicate to each. Never fear, setting up conversion tracking isn’t difficult! Google also has some useful features that allow marketers to dive into deeper analyses.
Google allows advertisers to track conversions through a variety of methods such as:
- Cross device measurement
- Cross YouTube, web, and app measurement
- Measuring view-through conversions
Cross device measurement
Google is constantly making updates, and its latest attribution model updates have made it a lot easier for YouTube advertisers to monitor their cross device conversions. This is more important with video than with other ad formats, because a user may conduct follow-up research via search after seeing a video ad, and convert through a search ad. Luckily, if conversion tracking is already in place, it’s as simple as selecting this option as a column within the Google ads interface.
This is also where view-through conversions can be selected, which don’t require any additional setup.
Cross-environment conversion tracking
When measuring conversions across different platforms such as YouTube, search, or mobile apps, users can leverage cross-environment conversion tracking. This is, once again, a useful strategy to more accurately determine performance metrics such as CPA or ROI for YouTube campaigns. Setting up cross-environment conversion tracking can be complex, but some of the experts at Seer would be happy to help!
Track performance across larger paid ecosystem
All of these different attribution models help to credit YouTube ads with the appropriate conversions, even if a user doesn’t convert directly after seeing or interacting with an ad. This is another reason why proper conversion tracking is so important. It allows advertisers to track the performance of their YouTube campaigns amidst their entire ecosystem of Google advertising initiatives.
If you have any questions about TrueView for action ads or conversion tracking on YouTube, reach out to the Seer team!
