In Creative Insights on Rich Media (visit doubleclick.com to download a PDF), Sally Cole, Business Marketing Manager at Google, points out that advertisers get the best ad campaign results when they set measurable goals up front.
For example, with one VideoAd, an advertiser might set a goal of beating the industry interaction rate benchmark. In another instance, the focus might be to compare two versions of the same VideoAd to see which produces a higher complete rate.
As you work with advertisers over time, you’re likely to build up a significant number of VideoAds in each advertiser’s account. Unless you put an organizational system in place, you can easily lose track of when and why various VideoAds were published.
Fortunately, you have a couple of simple tools at your disposal that help you keep track of the VideoAds you publish:
VideoAd title
As you know, the VideoAds you create in a single account appear in the vertical, scrolling Your VideoAds list that occupies the left side of the Dashboard.
Your VideoAds list
VideoAd order in the list is determined by editing. The VideoAd you edited most recently, in other words, appears at the top, and the order is always changing.
This arrangement is convenient because the VideoAds you’re currently working on are the easiest to access. It does, however, highlight the importance of being able to quickly identify VideoAds by scrolling through their titles.
To ensure that VideoAd titles are as effective and scrollable as possible, make them unique and meaningful, and put the unique information up front (the length limit for titles is 100 characters).
Why front load titles? In the Your VideoAds list, titles are truncated at 37 characters. If several titles begin exactly the same way, you won’t be able to distinguish one from another.
Obviously, you have to develop an approach to VideoAd titles that makes sense for your organization but here are some examples of informative titles that might work:
mixpocorp_Jan09_CreateVideoAds (AdvertiserName_monthyear_VideoAdSubject)
mixpocorp_Jan09_CreateVideoAds.mov
(AdvertiserName_monthyear_UploadedFilename)
OptimizeVideoAds_200812_mixpocorp
(VideoAdSubject_yearmonth_AdvertiserName)
Tip When you’re performance testing different versions of a VideoAd, the word “Rotating” is automatically added to the title of the ad you use to set up ad rotation.
How do I assign a title to a VideoAd?
Descriptive notes
It’s impossible for even a meaningful title to carry all of the important information about a VideoAd. That’s why we added the Notes feature.
Notes allow you to supplement VideoAd titles by recording:
- The date a VideoAd was published.
- The date you began ad rotation to compare the performance of a VideoAd’s versions.
- What aspect of a VideoAd you’re performance testing.
- The advertiser’s goals for the VideoAd.
To annotate a VideoAd, click the Notes button associated with the VideoAd in the Your VideoAds list.
Clicking the Notes button
Then in the Notes editing window that opens, annotate the VideoAd in any way that will help you (and the advertiser) remember exactly when it was created and what goal motivated its creation.
Edit VideoAd Notes window