Now, there are a couple of things that you have to do before you can create
your first video ad campaign on YouTube. In this lesson, we are going to show
you how to prepare your YouTube channel and your website for YouTube ads,
the right way, step by step.
Linking Your YouTube Channel To A Google Ads Account
You’ll have to link your YouTube channel to a Google Ads account in order to
advertise your videos.All you need is an active Google Ads account to get
started.
First, go to your YouTube channel’s studio from anywhere on YouTube by
clicking on the account icon in the top right corner and then clicking on the
“YouTube Studio” button.
Now click on the “Settings” tab located in the lefthand menu. Now move over to the “other settings” tab and then click on the
“advanced channel settings” link.
Scroll down the new page and locate the “AdWords account linking” section.
Click on the “link an AdWords account” button.
Now you can link this channel with a Google Ads account. First, click on the
“AdWords For Video” link.
You will be redirected to your Google Ads account. Once in your Google Ads
account, you have to locate and copy your “customer ID”.
You will find it in the
top-right corner, right beside the profile icon.
Go back to the YouTube channel tab and paste your “customer ID” in the
“customer ID” box, then click on “next”. Now assign a name for your linked
AdWords account and set permissions for the account.
These permissions
include “view counts and call-to-action”, “remarketing” and “engagement”. We
recommend you leave all permissions checked. Now click on “finish”.
Now your YouTube channel is linked to Google Ads. Next up you have to
approve the linked YouTube account on the Google Ads account.
Start by going
to your connected Google Ads account. Now click on the “tools” tab located in
the top bar menu, then click on the “linked accounts” option under “setup”.
Once on the “linked accounts” page locate the “YouTube” column and click on
“details”. Now check the “link requests” column and click on “view request”.
Now click on “approve”.
Now your YouTube channel is fully linked to Google Ads and you can start
running YouTube Ads campaigns!
Setting Up Conversion Tracking On Your Website
Certain YouTube Ads campaign setups will require you to set up conversion
tracking on your website. If you don’t set up conversion tracking, you won’t be
able to optimize campaigns for generating website traffic or capturing leads.
The good news is that setting up conversion tracking is very easy. Start on your
Google Ads account. You can sign in to Google Ads by going to
“ads.google.com” on your browser while logged in to your Google account.
Please memorize this step, because you will set up all your YouTube Ad
campaigns from your Google Ads dashboard.
Alright, now click on the “tools” tab located in the top bar menu and then click
on the “conversions” option under “measurement”.
On the next page, click on the “plus” button to create a new conversion to
track. On the following page, select “website”.
Next up you have to set up the conversion tag.
A conversion tag is a tracking
code that is optimized to track conversions on your website.
Start by selecting a conversion category. You can track “purchase”, “lead”,
“page view”, “sign-up”, and “other”. For this example, we are going to select
“other” to simply track clicks and activity.
Now enter a name for your conversion
in the “conversion name” field.
Now you have to select a conversion value. Conversion values are used to record
the value of conversion when it happens.
You can “use the same value for
each conversion” if you’re tracking leads or sales of products with the same
price.
You can “use different values for each conversion” if you’re tracking sales of
products with different prices.
For this example, we are going to select “don’t use a value for this conversion”
because we’ll be tracking all conversions in general.
Now select conversion count. You can select how many conversions are
recorded per click.
It is recommended that you select “every” if you want to
track individual conversions when they matter, such as product sales.
It is recommended that you select “one” when it is enough to count a single
conversion after a click, such as when leads sign-up to a newsletter from any of
your several opt-in forms on your website.
Now click on “create and continue”. Congratulations! Now that you’ve set up
your conversion action, you have to add it to your website.
Start by clicking on “install the tag yourself”.
Now locate the “global site tag”
and copy it to the clipboard.
Now you have to add it to your website. To add this code to your website, you
will need administrative access to the website code.
In this example, we are going to add the code to a WordPress website. If you are
using WordPress, you can access the website code through the theme editor.
Start on the WordPress site dashboard, move over to the “appearance” tab, and
click on the “theme editor” option. Now move over to the “theme files” menu and
click on “theme header”.
Now locate the “” and “” tags in the website code.
Paste the
“global site code” in between these tags.
Now go back to the Google Ads page and copy the “event snippet” code. With
this code, you can track conversions on “page load” or “click”. For this example, we are going to track conversions on “click”.
Copy the “event snippet” code, go back to the code editor in WordPress, and
paste this code right under the “global site tag” code. Now click on “update
file”.
Go back to the Google Ads page after updating the site’s code and click on
“next”. Conversion tracking is fully set up now, so you can click on “done”.
Awesome! Now you can start creating YouTube Ads campaigns.