YouTube Advertising Campaign Objectives & When to Use Them

So, you’re getting involved in YouTube advertising. Good call! YouTube viewing hours per day, month, and year are so vast it’s hard for our human brains to comprehend.

But there are some factors to this form of marketing you need to figure out along the way, too. Take, for example, campaign objectives.

While campaign objectives are part of setting up ad campaigns on many platforms, YouTube has its own that come with different qualities. Plus, YouTube campaign objectives carry their own implications as to the different ads that should be used with each, and how their video format affects your choice.

Let’s get to it.

First off: What are your different campaign objective options?

When choosing a campaign objective on YouTube, you have five options: Sales, leads, website traffic, brand awareness or reach, and product or brand consideration.

In many ways these are pretty intuitive, but just for clarity’s sake, their purpose is the following:

A screenshot of the campaign objective selections available for YouTube advertising.

• Sales: Increase the sale of a product or line
• Leads: Generate leads by connecting users to a specific part of your site
• Website traffic: Get more visitors to come to your site
• Brand awareness: Increase video impressions
• Product/brand consideration: Lead users to consider your business or product(s) when they’re researching their options online

Because these objectives all have a specific purpose, it’s important when going into a YouTube campaign that you have a clear vision of what your business wants to get from it.

Before we dive more into it, as a reminder, the main YouTube video ad formats are skippable in-stream, non-skippable in-stream, and bumper. We went more in-depth on YouTube ad types in a previous blog post, but these video ads essentially mean:

• Skippable in-stream: Your ad shows before or during the video and users are given the option to skip it after five seconds.
• Non-skippable in-stream: Your ad shows before or during the video and users are not allowed to skip it. These are limited to a maximum of 15 seconds long.
• Bumper: A short five second part of your video ad plays at the start or end of another video.

Think of choosing a campaign objective as setting up a specific path for these ads. The objective is the link between what you want from the campaign and what your ads can do best for you.

Where can different campaign goal ads be shown?

Video ads can play in different places depending on which campaign objective you’ve chosen.

If you choose a sales, leads, or website traffic objective, your ads can play as skippable in-stream ads on YouTube videos and video partners on the Google Display Network. Meanwhile, brand awareness campaigns can play as non-skippable in-stream ads or as “efficient reach” ads — these are skippable in-stream and in-feed videos specifically tailored to this objective.

Lastly, ads in a product or brand consideration campaign can play as skippable in-stream and in-feed ads on YouTube videos and Google Display Network video partners. Ads for these campaigns can also show up in YouTube search results.

Nuances of different objectives and how you benefit from choosing the right one

To begin with, different campaign goals allow you to apply different bid strategies. This is significant in that different bidding approaches lend themselves better to different business goals and, through extension, different campaign goals. For example, bidding based on your target cost-per-view would be a preferred option for an awareness-based campaign versus a campaign focused on increasing leads.

A screenshot of the campaign settings available for YouTube advertising.

Sales, leads, and website traffic goals tend to lead you towards target cost-per-acquisition bidding. Brand awareness goals lead you to target CPM, or cost per thousand impressions. And product and brand consideration encourage maximum cost-per-view bidding.

As all this implies, utilizing Google Ads’ automation capabilities and the corresponding features within YouTube video campaigns really helps put your YouTube marketing efforts on the right track. Choosing the correct campaign goal helps guide you to set everything else up the right way.

Where you can elevate this automation is by testing different goals against each other. We might sound like a broken record with how often we mention the importance of testing variables in your campaigns, but it’s true!

For example, how does a 15 second non-skippable ad perform against a 30 second skippable one? How far will a user play through a 30 second skippable ad versus a 60 second one? And so on.

Obviously, there’s lots of creative human thinking that helps make your campaigns effective, too, but for certain jobs, the scale of data processing from automated features informed by your campaign goal is just beyond human capability. Marrying the two of these together ensures your ad campaigns will give you their best results altogether.