YouTube-Style Analytics Make Their Way to AdWords for Video

Google’s AdWords for video has been revamped to offer a more YouTube Analytics-style performance, bringing a greater focus on video creative to campaign management and optimization.

Up until now, marketers using AdWords for video, have been able to add targeting and budgets to their YouTube videos to make video ad campaigns. But until late last week, should they have needed more information on how their videos performed outside of when they appeared as ads, they needed to jump over to YouTube Analytics for that data.

The new Video Analytics page prominently features a visualization of your video’s views, split by paid and non-paid to give a holistic sense of how your video is doing. The page also brings the audience retention graph to AdWords for video, which was formerly only available in YouTube Analytics. With the audience retention chart, advertisers can fine-tune their creative by visualizing when audience interest waxes and wanes. For example, if advertisers see a steep viewer drop-off at a certain point, the chart alerts them to an opportunity to re-cut their video to hold their interest longer.

The new reporting page also offers a panel that provides a sense of a video’s contribution to overall account performance, letting advertisers see which videos are over- or underperforming across all their campaigns, and more fully depicts how your video creative is helping to build their audience on YouTube.

This may seem like a small stocking stuffer, but this new feature provides more context for your video ad creative, and helps you make ads people choose to watch. And that’s a big gift to advertisers for the holidays.