Google AdWords and YouTube Video Ads – Unified at Last

Innovations / September 10, 2015

Video campaigns have always seemed like the black sheep of the AdWords family. Although AdWords allowed you to advertise on YouTube, those campaigns were essentially segregated from the rest of AdWords. Video campaigns had to be managed from a separate section within AdWords, which made what should have been simple reports and optimizations into a cumbersome ordeal.

However, this all changed recently, as Google announced that it is migrating all video campaigns to the core AdWords interface

A hint of this came not too long ago, when several new columns popped up in the AdWords interface. These metrics, Interactions, Interaction Rate, and Average Cost, allow you to measure clicks and video views with the same metric – they can be thought of as being very similar to Clicks, Click-through Rate, and Average CPC.  As such, AdWords laid the groundwork to allow PPC managers to compare all campaigns under one umbrella.

Migrating your Video campaigns into AdWords is really simple, and you will not lose any of your existing data in the process. When you access your Video campaigns in AdWords, you will see a pop-up prompting you to go to an Upgrade Centre. From within the upgrade centre, you can click a button to automatically upgrade your account. The process should take five minutes, although in our experience, it took a lot less time.

And with this, you should now be able to see your Video campaigns in AdWords. You will now be able to take advantage of the many benefits of a unified AdWords account. Any accounts not manually migrated will start to be automatically migrated from October 12th onwards.

One notable absence is the ability to manage video campaigns in AdWords Editor. Although a new version of AdWords Editor recently came out, functionality for editing video campaigns is nowhere to be found. One can only hope that this functionality is included in the next version to come out.

Do you think these new changes will help you manage your campaigns better? Are there any features Google can add to make managing video campaigns easier? Let us know in the comments below!