Analyze YouTube campaign performance

Analyze YouTube campaign performance

1. Define the main goal of your YouTube video marketing campaign, such as leads generated on a landing page or increased brand awareness.

2. Match your main goal to a specific YouTube KPI that indicates goal success. Awareness, consideration, and action KPIs are often appropriate.

Awareness: Views, impressions, or unique users. Consideration: View-through rate or watch time. Action: Clicks, calls, signups, or sales.

3. In Google Ads, go to Tools & Settings > Linked Accounts > Add Channel to link your Google Ads account with your YouTube account.

Alternatively, use a shared conversion pixel if you are analyzing a YouTube channel you don’t own, or if you have separate accounts and want to keep them separate.

4. Go to Measurement > Attribution to opt in to non-last click attribution for YouTube campaigns, a new conversion reporting option released in Summer 2021.

5. Go to Tools > Lift Measurement and activate Brand Lift to track ad recall, awareness, consideration, favorability and purchase intent.

Brand Lift is an analytical tool that automatically surveys the sentiments of people who watch your YouTube videos. Brand Lift is not available for all Google Ads accounts. To use Brand Lift, contact your Google account representative. If you don’t have a Google account representative, you won’t be able to use Brand Lift in your account.

6. Review your Brand Lift report to identify YouTube campaigns that have a higher number of lifted users at a lower CPM.

These campaigns are more effective and favorably received by your audience.

7. Generate a report of your YouTube campaigns' core performance by going to All campaigns > Video campaigns.

8. Review your previously identified KPIs and identify campaigns that are trending upwards. Identify campaigns that are stagnant or trend downwards and either turn them off or improve their targeting.

9. View your Top Paths, Path Metrics, and Model Comparison reports to see the exact paths that users took from your YouTube video to your website. Identify campaigns that lead to higher conversion numbers.

10. Save and schedule your reports to get regular YouTube campaign performance updates. Increase spending on high-performing campaigns and turn off or reduce spending on low-performing campaigns.