Best Practices for Discovery and Youtube Ads 

Introduction


Discovery Ads are a visual ad format that runs across the Google Discover Feed. It is shown on the homepage of the Google app or the Google.com homepage on mobile, YouTube home feed, and also Gmail.


YouTube Video ads place your brand or product alongside YouTube content that is likely to be viewed by your audience. The ads can appear in the YouTube Home feed, Watch feed, and Search feed.


Campaign Level


  • Good to go ahead with Youtube and Discovery campaigns when you are in the process of scaling up.

  • Generate separate campaigns for Engage and Prospect to get optimal performance.

  • While setting up Youtube/Discovery campaigns, begin with Prospecting campaigns before Remarketing.

  • Make sure to turn off audience expansion while creating new Youtube/Discovery Prospect campaigns.

  • Ensure to have one Youtube and one Discovery Engage campaign for all category - specific ads.

  • Do not add new ad groups to an already running YouTube/ Discovery campaign with stable spends and performance, as the campaign might go into “composition learning” and spends may be affected. Create a new campaign instead.

  • Create product/category specific Prospect campaigns to scale Youtube/Discovery budgets. For this, either replicate the Facebook Conversion Prospect category-based campaign structure or identify the top performing category from the Catalog categories view.


Bid Strategy and Budget Level


  • Bottom level  budget for the Youtube /Discovery campaigns should be 1k per day.

  • Youtube/Discovery Engage campaign budget should not be more than 25% of all prospect budgets.

  • Keep in existence a 70:30 budget split on Prospect and Engage Campaigns respectively.

  • Discovery/YouTube Prospect campaigns to be started with Maximize conversions as Bid strategy.  Engage campaigns can be started with TCPA as a bid strategy.

  • Once the campaign starts spending and to optimize it towards performance, add TCPA at the campaign level. TCPA should be 1.5x Fb prospect campaign’s CPA.

  • Ensure to set lower TCPA for Engage campaigns compared to Prospect campaigns.

  • Scale Up - Start increasing the campaign budget and then gradually increase the TCPA by 20% at the campaign level.

  • Scale Down - Reduce the campaign budget and then decrease the TCPA.

Audience Level

  • Prospect includes In-market, Affinity, Custom-Intent  & other prospecting audiences. Engage includes remarketing audiences.

  • Separate Custom Intent Audiences Should be Created on the basis of Brand keyword, Functionality or Generic keywords, and competitor keyword.

  • For Custom intent, use 10-15 of the highest converting keywords from your Search campaigns. Also, use top-performing keywords in Amazon/catalog from the client if the products are listed in Amazon.

  • If the Estimated audience size is Zero for custom intent, should remove the keywords due to which estimates are not populating & add some more potential keywords in the audience.

  • Use In-market audiences from Audience sights (high index & size) or from Google Analytics (based on page views, bounce rate, ecomm conversions)

  • Fortnightly replace the non-performing In-market audience with new audiences.

  • Ensure not to run the same set of prospect audiences across the prospect campaigns.

  • If the ad account is eligible for a customer match list, can add the customer match list and target it via Engage campaign.

  • Always ensure to turn off the expansion in ad group level for the Engage campaigns.

  • Every Prospect campaign should have separate ad groups for In-market & Custom Intent Audience types. It’s recommended not to add an Affinity audience in the prospecting campaign, since it's top-funnel audiences with a wide audience base.

  • Start only with Adwords Optimized List audience in the Engage campaigns.

Ad Level


Category to be promoted:



  • Categories to be promoted as ads in both Discovery and YouTube campaigns should be selected on the basis of Category level CRR. 
  • One can see the CRR data in "orders view" in "Categories" section under "Catalog" in Adyogi platform 
  • Lower the CRR better the potential
  • Smart ads, custom carousel and single image newsfeed ads can be promoted in Discovery campaigns while only video ads in YouTube



Youtube Ads

  • Price should be added in Headline and Descriptions.

  • Cross verify prices in Ads and landing pages. Make sure to communicate the correct/updated product price in Ads

  • At least run 4-5 video ads in an ad group and the recommended maximum number of video ads is 8-10 in an ad group.

  • Recommended video length for the YouTube Ads - 18 to 40 seconds.

  • Alighting users on the relevant landing page is essential.

  • The landing page for category specific youtube ads should either be the category page or the core product page.

  • For product specific ads, the respective product page variant page or high value variant page should be the landing page.

  • The recommended landing page for brand generic ads is the home or the collection page.

 

  • Change the display URL to anything attractive and short

  • Never use a capital case in the ad text, for headlines or descriptions. For example- It should never be AYURVED but Ayurved.

  • Refresh the YouTube video ads if it's CTR & conversions (including view-through conversions) dropped/ the videos are running for a long time.


    • Use FB custom ads for best-performing products for Discovery for better ROAS.

    • Run Discovery Carousel Ads(Minimum 2 - Maximum 10 cards)

    • Mention Prices and Product Name in the Headline(Caption).

    • Highlight price and offer details on the creative. Use the sale/festive overlay or frames in the images. Communicate the Active Sale/Offer in the website through headlines & adtexts of discovery ads.

    • The ads should be product ads landing on product pages. Cross verify prices in Ads and landing pages. Make sure to communicate the correct/updated product price in Ads.

    • Avoid using newsfeed ads with multiple product images in the same ad. Create the newsfeed ad for a single product and use the product page as the landing page.

    • Recommended to mention USP/benefits of the product in the discovery image for health & wellness clients.

    • Pause the non-performing discovery ads (based on CTR, spends, CPA & Roas) and update new ads.

    • If any particular discovery ad isn’t taking spends, the cards in the ad might have disapproved which we won’t be notified in ad status. Check the same and remove/update the disapproved card.


Performance Max – Optimisation

Performance Max is a campaign to derive machine learning-based conversions across Google Search, GDN, YouTube, Discover, YouTube, and Gmail, while also generating keyword suggestions for Search campaigns.  The impact is to strengthen Google campaigns by having image, text, video, and catalog assets work in parallel to generate revenues.

Starting a new Performance Max campaign can be challenging and it gets very important to understand the levers we can push in this campaign type as a major share of it is automated by Google. Here we are looking at the key levers that drive and we can adjust to diagnose or set up a performance max campaign.

Levers in Performance Max campaign

  • Category Level Analysis: 

  1. Identify Hero Categories for your Brand.
  2. Go to Catalog ----> Categories ----> Orders view. Analyze the top selling categories on the website.
  3. Now Go to Performance view ----> Google tab and cross check whether we are focusing on right categories in performance max campaigns
  4. If we are not spending on the right categories, start pushing the categories in seperate Performance Max campaigns
  5. Pmax structure: 

              Hero categories - Individual category wise Pmax campaigns

              All other categories - as one campaign

    

  • Audience signal:

       Retargeting lists and customer data are the best audience signals that we can send in a Performance Max campaign. We can also set up custom intent audiences for brand and competitors' keywords. Since this is just a soft signal we are sending the idea is to try and keep it as relevant and niche as possible.

 

  • Listing groups:

         Try avoiding an overlap of products in different asset groups, at least 30 SKUs per asset group is recommended.

 

  • Product title optimization:

         Bulk update product titles for Google by stuffing keywords. Keep a check for search impression share, this exercise will help increasing the same.

 

  • Bid strategy and budget:

       Start the campaign at maximize conversions, once the campaign starts spending the allocated budget, can try different bid strategies and budget combinations.

 

  • Creative and Ad copies:

        Update creative and ad copies as per the category in the asset group. Mapping should be taken care of here. For creative requirements, please visit Creative Requirements for Performance Max Campaign