Video Tag Types
Once you’ve settled on your video creative, you’ll need to communicate it to a publisher’s video player. That’s where video ad tags come in.
Video ad tags contain all the information required for a video ad request, which can include the video files, additional ads, tracking, or interactivity. VAST tags were standardized by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to allow you to quickly serve video ads to multiple publishers’ video players without additional or customized work.
VAST is the most commonly used video tag format in online video advertising. VAST tags package all video serving files, companions, and tracking pixels for delivery into the publisher’s video player.
Video player ad interface definition (VPAID) is a media type within a VAST tag. VPAID is used for ad interactivity in a publisher’s video player. VPAID creatives can pause or mute the video and show additional content or interactivity. Companion creatives are a part of VAST tags that can appear alongside a publisher’s video player. Companions aren’t required. Mobile rich media ad interface definitions (MRAID) are for in-app environments. MRAID creatives can expand, resize, and use device functionalities.
You can use the YouTube VAST QA tool to verify whether your tags meet YouTube’s third-party ad serving specifications. This tool can also be used to preview your third-party-served ad on the YouTube player.
Before you set up an account and create a campaign, it’s important to know the business structure, campaign goals, and ad information. You can create separate child advertisers for two sides of a business under the whole business’ parent advertiser to see their campaign results separately. You can use Site Directory to browse available sites or search for a site to assign to a placement.
What information do VAST tags package together? Companion creatives, video files, tracking pixels.
When setting up your campaign…
- Gather publisher specifications before building your campaign. It’s important to make sure your video assets meet your publisher’s requirements.
- Video assets uploaded to Campaign Manager are transcoded to various sizes and resolutions, but have specific requirements for file size and resolution.
- Two types of video creativity in online advertising are in-stream video and in-banner video. In-stream is served into streaming content using VAST tags, while the in-banner video is served on the page.
- In-stream video is video served before (pre-roll), in the middle of (mid-roll), or after (post-roll) streaming video content. Advertisers serve video ads into content streams using VAST tags.
- In-banner videos, also known as rich-media videos, are served right on the page. In-banner videos can use a JavaScript or iframe tag., also known as rich-media videos, which are served right on the page. In-banner videos can use a JavaScript or iframe tag.
- Video tags such as VAST enable you to package video files, companions, tracking, and interactivity and deliver them to a publisher in a standardized format.
Here are some examples:
Your online surf shop, Surf-N-Board, is divided into two businesses, West Coast and East Coast, but the conversions are on the same website. If you’re setting up Campaign Manager, how should you configure your account? Create a parent advertiser for Surf-N-Board and two child advertisers, for Surf-N-Board West and Surf-N-Board East.
A business called KidApparel wants their ads to direct mobile users to install their app and desktop users to visit their website. How would they accomplish this in Campaign Manager? Traffic two ads under one placement and use targeting to direct each user to the correct ad. Campaign Manager centralizes campaign management, so you can upload creatives, set targeting criteria, and measure performance goals for your campaigns and placements — in one tool.
Here are the steps for setting up a campaign:
- Create advertiser
- Create campaign
- Create placement
- Upload creatives
- Create ads
- Download placement tags
Audience lists allow you to connect relevant messaging to a similar group of people. This is known as remarketing. Advertisers can use Floodlight tags to build audience lists from tracking interactions on their website. For example, if you have Floodlight tracking enabled, you can create an audience list of people who have added an item to their cart but have not yet checked out. Then you can show targeted ads to encourage them to complete their purchase. Default ads contain generic image creatives that serve if no other ad is available due to targeting or other restrictions set in the standard ads. You can think of default ads as your backup plan if no other creatives are available. When you upload a standard image creative, Campaign Manager automatically creates a default ad for you — so you don’t have to do anything. Note: a default ad must be assigned for each placement size in order to download tags for a placement.
The default ad’s creative might show the name of the company. The creatives within default ads should always be generic, so they can show to users in different locations, at different times, and still feel relevant.
- Campaign Manager offers many options when it comes to selecting the right audience to show your ads to.
- Popular targeting options for standard ads include audience lists, geographic, language, technology, and time and day targeting.
- When you upload a standard image creative, Campaign Manager automatically creates a default ad for you. You must assign each placement size to a default ad in order to download tags for a placement.
The global site tag is a site-wide web tagging library that works across Google’s site and conversion measurement products — giving you better control while making implementation easier. The global site tag isn’t only used by Google Marketing Platform advertising products (Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, and Campaign Manager) but also by other Google products, such as Google Ads and Google Analytics. Using the global site tag sets new cookies on your domain. This makes sure that Google Marketing Platform can measure your conversions more accurately. If you’re using iframe or image tags instead of the global site tag, Google Marketing Platform is not able to observe all of your conversions.
To make sure that Campaign Manager can track your conversions effectively, we recommend that you use the global site tag (gtag.js) as the format for your Floodlight activity tags. The global site tag is placed on every page of your site and includes event snippets on pages with events you’re tracking. Get started with the global site tag. If you’re currently using iframe or image tags for Floodlight, we recommend updating your tags to the global site tag. Counter – Unique is the correct choice here. This tag type allows you to count unique site visitors to make sure you’re indeed attracting new — and not just return — visitors.
- Floodlight gives you clear insight into your campaign performance, so you can do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
- Floodlight tags allow you to track conversions — whether your advertising campaign led to valuable customer action — and to create remarketing lists to target groups of users who interacted with your site or app.
- You can use Tag Manager 360 to automatically sync Floodlight tags to your site.
Smartphone users are often pressed for time, and smartphone creatives must be legible on smaller screens. Tablet devices tend to have access to higher bandwidth, and these users are more likely to respond to creatives with animation or rich functionality.
- There are two ways to determine if you’re already serving ads to mobile devices. Under the Summary tab, you can use the Computer System view, or you can run a Standard report in Report Builder that includes any of the dimensions under the Computer System section.
- You can serve separate mobile and desktop ads on the same placement using mobile targeting.
- Key design considerations when building creative for smartphones include using click-to-call landing pages, creatives with action-driven messaging (such as “Download now!”), and shorter video ads.
When a publisher informs you the submitted VAST tag doesn’t meet their specifications, what do you do? Update the placement settings.
- When creating placements, make sure the in-stream video settings option is activated to account for publishers’ different video specifications.
- When using cookie-based targeting, activate the default ad for placements running in these environments, so the campaign always has an eligible ad.
- Remember, once trafficked, problems may arise, so it’s important to test your tags and troubleshoot as needed.
What does a placement specify? The dimensions and run dates of the ad slot. Your campaign uses geographic targeting. How do you make sure your ad always has an eligible ad to serve on mobile devices? Activate the default ad.