If your marketing objective is to influence brand and product consideration and drive video views for deeper consideration with your YouTube Shorts video, you can do so by buying a Video view campaign. In addition, you can promote longer content like Video on Demand (VOD) or a Livestream on YouTube from Shorts using Drive to Long-Form Shorts.
You’ll be charged when a user views your video ads, and the campaign will optimize toward getting as many views as possible with the given budget. The definition of a view for Shorts ads is: To count as a view, users must watch the video ad play for at least 10 seconds or until the end of the ad, if it’s less than 10 seconds.
How YouTube Shorts ads with Video view campaigns look
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How it works
YouTube Shorts ads are available to serve across all devices when bought through Video view campaigns.
Plan your campaign
Reach Planner
Currently Reach Planner only supports forecasts for Video View campaigns with mixed ad format. Support for Shorts ads only with Video View campaign coming soon.
Traffic Estimator
You can find reach and budget utilization estimates for your campaign based on their specific settings during campaign construction on the right hand side of the screen.
Buy your campaign
Buy YouTube Shorts ads with Video view campaigns by checking “YouTube Shorts” in the “Multi-format ads” section. You can find this setting during campaign construction and in campaign settings after the campaign is built. You can change this setting throughout the campaign flight dates.
Best practices
Creatives & Assets
- Use a variety of vertical videos to connect with your audiences.
- Keep it under 10-60 seconds in length with a variety of messaging.
- Use trending music and sound.
- If you’ve a mix of horizontal and vertical assets in your video view campaign or Video view campaign, we’ll prioritize the vertical asset to be shown on YouTube Shorts. However, if you only have horizontal assets in the campaign, we’ll deliver the horizontal assets on YouTube Shorts still.
- You can check how your ads would look like on Shorts, including how text would be displayed and how the Right Hand Side (RHS) Panel would be positioned by using the preview feature in the ads creation panel.
Inventory
- If you’ve additional video assets available, we recommend using both vertical and horizontal videos and select “Skippable in-stream ads” and “In-feed ads” in the “multi-format ads” tab when buying your Video View campaign.
- Adding assets in different orientations and using multi-surface solutions will allow AI to optimize the campaign performance to deliver more views based on the given budget and reach the audience in the most relevant way.
Bids & Budgets
- Plan the bid and budgets by using the planning tools listed above.
- Refer to the Traffic Estimator on the right side panel to find the expected performance and set your bid accordingly.
- Note: The bid recommendations that are suggested when you set your bid during campaign construction may be incorrect for Shorts ads only Video view campaigns (VVC).
Audiences & Targeting
- Broaden targeting to ensure strong reach.
- Use Affinity, In-Market, Custom Segments like Interests, Detailed Demographics, or Life Events to reach new users who might be interested in your brand.
- Custom Search Term Segments & Infinite Taxonomy restrict serving on Shorts-only campaigns are not recommended.
