Wednesday, September 02, 2015

The power of video meets the capabilities of AdWords – all TrueView campaigns now in AdWords

You know how you have to go to a special section within AdWords to create and manage your TrueView video campaigns? And jump back and forth when you want to report and optimize across all your campaigns? And you still can’t take advantage of AdWords bulk tools for your video campaigns? Well, good news, friends: those days are now over. TrueView is joining Search, Display, and Shopping campaigns within the core AdWords interface.

With the simplicity of a single interface and a more consistent experience, AdWords makes it easier for you to optimize across campaign types. Plus, you can take advantage of powerful bulk management tools to save time and effort when working on multiple TrueView campaigns. And now that all campaign types share the same structure, we can bring you new features for video, faster than ever before.

Now if you’ll follow us, we’d love to show you around…

In the top left corner, you can find the campaign type selector. This is useful to see only campaigns of a certain type. For instance, selecting “Video” gives you a view of your campaigns that looks similar to AdWords for video – meaning you’ll see only the tabs and columns that are most relevant for managing video campaigns. And best of all, we remember your column preferences whenever you switch among views, so you don’t need to change them around each time you toggle campaign types.

Campaign type selector

We’re also replacing targeting groups with ad groups, the basic building blocks for Search, Display, and Shopping campaigns. Now every ad group will have a single TrueView format, either in-stream or in-display. Though each ad group has only one format, campaigns can have multiple ad groups so you can still run both in-stream and in-display ads in the same campaign. To create a new campaign, just click the +CAMPAIGN button, click the new Video campaign type, and then create new ad groups within each campaign by clicking +AD GROUP.
Ad group creation

Now that TrueView has joined the party in AdWords, you’ll have access to a trove of goodies designed to help you manage, optimize, and report on accounts with lots of campaigns. For instance, bulk UI editing lets you modify information for multiple campaigns at once – directly from the UI, and bulk uploads let you download a snapshot of your campaigns, make changes en masse, and upload the changes live to your account. And report scheduling gives you the ability to set up a schedule for reports to run automatically, and have them emailed regularly to account users.
Bulk edits

Reporting for video campaigns is getting more powerful as well, as you’ll now have the ability to filter your results to isolate things like campaign name, label, cost, and conversions.
Filters

You’ll also see popular video features in familiar places in AdWords. For example, video remarketing is now in the AdWords shared library and YouTube account linking is in the Linked accounts section. Plus you’ll be able to see analytics for your video ads within the new "Videos" tab, and manage your targeting within the "Video targeting" tab.

Creating remarketing lists

Linking YouTube channels
Customers who’ve previewed the new interface found it saves them time and offers more powerful reporting. "As avid users of TrueView, we were eager to beta test the new TrueView in AdWords, and see how the change impacted our most complex campaign setups," said Pixability CTO Andreas Goeldi. "The increased functionality allows for improved workflow, better reporting, and significant time saved."

Whether your goals are to drive direct response or to build your brand, you now have a single, unified tool to address your full range of marketing goals. Starting today, you’ll be able to upgrade your campaigns to the new ad group structure, and say goodbye to those days of going to “All Video Campaigns” to get to your TrueView campaigns. To upgrade, just head to AdWords for video by clicking All video campaigns (once more, for old time’s sake) and click into the Upgrade Center to easily switch over all your campaigns in one fell swoop. And don’t worry – all your historical stats and targeting will carry over (just drill down to the campaign level to see them). If you’d rather not upgrade your campaigns yourself, no problem – we’ll automatically upgrade your campaigns, starting in six weeks.

And if you’re a video type of person (we certainly are!), check out all the content of this blog post in video form here.

For more information, check out the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by the fka AdWords for video team
Lane Shackleton, Group Product Manager
Ammar Ibrahim, Product Manager
Avi Fein, Product Manager