YouTube Lead Gen Ads

Video Transcript:

We have lead gen ads in Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, and even add extensions for Google Search. But did you know we can now have lead gen ads for YouTube? That’s right. Advertisers can now add a lead gen form for their TrueView in-stream ads, and it’s going to allow the viewer to actually give you their contact information without making them go to your website. It’s going to keep them on the YouTube platform. So this video is going to show you exactly a step by step instruction on how to set up YouTube lead gen ads. 

Before we go into Google Ads and talk about the actual physical setup of a YouTube lead gen ad, I first want to talk about being eligible to even run these types of ads. First, at the time of recording this video, lead forms for video campaigns are not eligible for every single account. Lead gen forms for video ads are still in a pretty slow rollout for the public. If you’re not seeing any of the lead forms that we’re showing within this video, try and contact your Google Ads rep to get you early access. 

There are some specific eligibility rules to even use lead forms in your video campaigns. The first one has to do with total ad spend looking at lifetime span within your Google Ads account. Your account has to spend more than $50,000, and these are United States dollars, to be eligible to use lead forms for your video campaigns. 

Second, and this is similar if you want to use any customer match within your campaigns, your account has to have a strong history of being compliant with all of Google’s best practice rules. 

And third, you need to be in an eligible vertical. So if you’re in an industry that has adult content, or adult products, or potentially you’re in the medical field, and it’s against the rules to collect users information, you will not be able to use the lead forms for your video campaigns. 

Next, there are just some few other random requirements that you need to know about in order for your video lead gen ads to show. First, the user who could be seeing your ads needs to be logged in into their Google account. If they are using an Android device that will also count as them being logged into a Google account. 

And last, the user must be in one of the eligible countries that are allowed to use lead gen forms. And to see a list of those countries, you can go to that bitly link right there (bit.ly/about-lead-forms) and find out if your country is eligible. Now we’re done with the eligibility part for YouTube lead gen ads. 

Let’s go into the actual setup when creating your campaign. When we’re in Google Ads, click on the blue plus button and select “New campaign.” To use YouTube lead gen ads, you need to set up a TrueView for action campaign. In order to do this, you need to select one of these three campaign goals. It could be sales, it could be leads, or you can select website traffic. And I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but hopefully it’s clear in order to set up a TrueView for action campaign, you also have to have conversion tracking already set up within your account. 

So for this video, I’m going to choose leads. And then we’re talking about YouTube ads here, so the obvious selection for a campaign type would be video. Then scrolling down, we just want to click continue. I’m going to name my campaign and then the next step after entering your name is to start creating the lead form. Let’s click on that button first entering your business name and then enter what you want the call to action for the lead gen form to be. You can see in the preview off to the right hand side the business name and the call to action has updated. 

I’ll click continue, and now we can start filling out a headline and the description. These two elements of your lead form are going to help your company explain why your users should fill out the form. After you have those elements in place, you can start looking at what components or fields you want to add to your YouTube lead gen form. And if we look at this section right here, it’s important to know which information you really want to include in the form before you save it. Because after you save the campaign, you can’t edit the form. You will have to create a new one if you need to change anything. 

So by default, we see that the full name and an email is added to your lead gen form. You can unclick the name, if you want to have just an email. This can be a really good top of funnel approach. Keep in mind the user is on YouTube. They are there to watch videos. So if you’re making the form as simple as possible for users to just click “Submit,” including just the email could be a really good way to just get a quantity of users into your pipeline. If I click “Name” again, you can separate out first name and last name. This can be important for when you’re exporting the data, or you can leave full name in one field.

You can then also add a phone number and a zip code. And then if you need to get more specific (and these are some of the fields that are pretty beneficial for some of my lead gen clients) including the company name. You can uncheck the first email option and then just choose work email. You can ask for a job title. If you don’t want their personal phone number, you can add the work phone number instead. Then options to ask for the user’s city, the state or province and then the country that they live in. 

If we scroll down on the preview, we can see these elements have been added to our form. Now it’s a longer form, but if I’m looking for quality instead of quantity, making the user fill in these fields manually shows that the user is more interested in whatever product or service you’re trying to sell. So just keep that in mind depending on what industry you’re in, or what you’re trying to achieve with these lead gen forms. 

If your sales team needs more information to really qualify leads that are coming in, you can add additional questions. Now unlike some of the other lead gen forms or some of the other channels, you can’t create your own question. There are default options in here that you can search for either by specific industry. If I click on “Auto,” get information about what car users are looking for certain things like that. Options are to click on business, what is your company size, sales volume? What is your role to get more clarification on who was filling out the form, and I’m not going to go over every single one of these.

Hopping down a little bit for real estate, what type of property you’re looking for? Price range? I’ll do one more. Let’s check out retail. Now I know some people think it’s odd that retail is in here. But look at the questions that are involved in why a retail company would want to use these forms. This could be another way to get users to sign up for your email list. Understand what the user is actually interested in to be able to better market to these users later on. I’m going to go back up and click company size, because that’s what I use a lot for my clients.

Now that we have chosen our question, we will then want to select how the user can answer that question. We see there’s multiple choice right here. So I can do something along the lines of first option is one to fifty people. Second option could be 51 to 100, and so on and so on. I don’t want to use multiple choice. You can choose the short answer, and then let the user fill in what information they want to. 

If we’re looking at the preview, we can see that the question that we add is added to the top of the form. So it’s definitely going to be a qualifier for the user filling out the form. And it may be the reason why you may or may not use the lead gen form for your video campaigns if you think it’s going to add too much friction to the user experience. And before we can move on, we have to add the privacy policy. If the initial form looks good, we can click “Continue.” 

Next, you’ll be able to fill out the information a user will see if they fill out a form. Think of this as like a little teeny, tiny thank you page. So we get another headline, and then a smaller description. And you can use this space to set the proper expectations of what the user can expect next. So it’s probably important to confirm with the user that you have received their information. And then for this example, I’m just letting them know, “Hey, you signed up for our demo, we’ll be in touch within 48 hours” to keep the process moving. In this case, it’s a clear confirmation of what to expect. Next, I just have to make sure on my team internally that I live up to what I’m promising, and we have a good internal process in place to get back within 48 hours. 

If we click Continue, we can then choose which lead form type we want this lead form to be. It’s another layer to qualify what type of user you want Google to put this form in front of, and the names of these types are pretty straightforward. The higher intent option is going to give you less leads overall, but potentially a higher quality. Use a higher intent to convert with whatever product or service you’re trying to sell. If you’re looking for quantity, you may want to select the more volume option, you’re just looking to fill your pipeline with as many users as possible. And this is going to be a much more top of funnel approach. 

Next, we see information of how you can collect the leads that you get from your YouTube lead gen ads. After we have the form finished, I’m going to show you where you can go within Google Ads to download those leads. But as you can see, a lead is only going to be available within Google Ads for 30 days. So it’s important that you remember or set a reminder to check back continuously to make sure you’re not missing any leads that are out there. 

If you’re looking for a more automated approach, you can get your leads delivered by a web hook. This is an API feature that’s going to automatically send these leads directly to your CRM in real time. I’m not going to go over the full web hook integration process. But if you’re interested in setting that up for your YouTube lead gen ads, here’s the link on how you can do that (bit.ly/youtube-webhook). And this is from Google support. If we scroll down a little bit more, we get the terms for the lead form, as well as the web hook if you decide to use it, but if everything looks good, you can add this form to your campaign. 

Now, remember, our campaign is not saved yet, so I could click on the pencil button and edit the campaign if I want to. Or if you’re completely unsatisfied with it, you could trash it. But let’s keep on going. Since this is a TrueView for action campaign, the only bid strategies that we get are going to be maximize conversions or target CPA. If we choose target CPA, we’ll then have to enter what we actually want for the target CPA, and you can enter your daily budget. 

Next, look at your networks on where your video ads will show. We cannot target YouTube search results. That is a feature only available for TrueView discovery campaigns. The only option we have to update for TrueView for action is to say if we want to include it on video partners within the Display Network. It’s definitely going to broaden your reach. So if again, you still want to keep it as focused as possible, I would unselect this option. 

Next we have locations and languages. I’m just going to skip past that. Right now there’s the typical content exclusions. Then this is also a pretty cool feature for TrueView for action. And something that’s not really typical for video campaigns within Google Ads is that we can add up to four sitelink extensions to our video ads. This can give your ad much more visibility. But if you really want to focus on just the lead form, you may decide not to include them.

I’m going to skip the additional settings. And if we scroll down, now we’re getting to the part where we can create our ad group. There’s a lot of targeting options that you have for video ads. We have another video about that with my favorite targeting options that you can check out later on. But for this video, I’m going to quickly just like one of my remarketing audiences, and then we can move on. 

And the last step before launching your ad and saving the campaign is to create your video ad. You can search for your video. I find it easier to just find it on YouTube. Then copy and paste the URL right in there. And then you have an option to add your YouTube call to action extensions. This is an optional element, but we do recommend adding this just in case you get a user who is not logged in to their Google account. They may not see the lead gen form, but they could still see this YouTube call to action extension.

So enter in your final URL, the call to action, which is going to be in the blue button, and then your headline. This is a pretend ad and campaign here. I do not and have never worked for Zoho. It’s just the first one I thought of. And then if everything looks good you can click Create campaign, and then you’re done. 

We’re back in the main interface. I just have my campaign set up. No stats are showing right now when the ads are running for a little bit. I want to talk about how the metrics work. When you launch one of these YouTube lead gen ads, anytime one of your lead forms is opened, that is going to count as a click within your columns. If someone actually submits the lead form, that’s going to count as a conversion. And remember, your lead form may not show up all the time, so your campaign can still get additional conversions. If you are using the call to action extension and driving users to a website or landing page, you’ll be able to see the difference if you segment out your campaigns by the conversion action that took place. 

And last I want to talk about how you can download the leads you get from your YouTube lead gen forms for video campaigns. Your leads forms are not considered to be an ad extension like you would if you set up the lead gen form extension for your Search campaigns. This is because for search campaigns, you get your lead gen form downloads by going into the ads and extensions area within Google Ads. 

For video campaigns, you can look at your downloads by going into the campaign settings. So I’ll click on the campaign that we just set up, and then I immediately went into settings. Within settings, you’re gonna see one row that’s called lead collection. And if you click on that option, here’s where you can download the leads. Since we just set up the form, there’s nothing for us to download. But once we start collecting some leads, you’ll be able to download a CSV, and it’s going to be a different column for each of the fields that you have added to the lead gen form. 

So if you’re looking for new ways to try to get more conversions from all of your efforts using YouTube Ads, look at potentially creating a TrueView for action campaign and adding this lead form to your campaign. If you can get access early enough, it may take a little bit for you to find the perfect combination of which form fields a user wants to fill out alongside all the different targeting options that we get with YouTube before we actually figure out what works best for your target audience. But hopefully this video helped make that process a lot easier. 

The form setup is really that straightforward, but you always have to remember that the reason people go to YouTube is to be entertained and watch videos. So you still have to make sure your creative is enticing. It’s entertaining. It’s engaging, and that it’s gonna want to make the user sign up from your YouTube ad without clicking skip, and going on and watching the video that they originally tended on watching. You pair that up with a form that is shorter, it’s gonna be easier for the user to understand, and you can have a great combination of engagement and conversions for your YouTube video campaigns.

Written by Joe Martinez