To provide a comprehensive and consolidated view of your Audiences and make audience management and optimization simpler, you’ll find the following improvements in Google Ads:
- New audience reporting
Detailed reporting about audience demographics, segments, and exclusions is now consolidated in one place. Click the Campaigns iconand open the “Audiences, keywords and content” tab and click Audiences. You can also easily manage your Audiences from this report page. Learn more About Audience reporting.
- New terms
We’re using new terms on your audience report and throughout Google Ads. For example, “audience types” (these include custom, in-market, and affinity) are now referred to as audience segments and “remarketing” is now referred to as “your data”. Learn more about the Updates to Audience terms and phrases.
Over time, most music artist channels on YouTube will become “Official Artist Channels” to better consolidate videos belonging to a given artist through a single channel.
If you advertise on YouTube channels of music artists that have become Official Artist Channels, you may have to verify which videos you’re able to target and ensure your data segments are linked to the right channel.
This article explains how targeting works on YouTube Official Artist Channels and how to verify ad placement.
How Official Artist Channels work
Official Artist Channels are YouTube channels owned and managed by a music artist. While a music artist might upload many of their videos on their official channel, there are a number of other channels that might also host their music videos.
In order to better represent the artist’s full body of work, all music artist videos will now appear in the Official Artist Channel, including some owned by these other channels. However, ownership of the videos won’t change, only how they’re presented.
Instructions
Targeting and exclusions
Targeting or excluding an Official Artist Channel (OAC) will only target ads to videos that were originally uploaded on the artist’s official channel.
This means that you may see more videos on the artist’s YouTube channel than the number of videos you can target ads to on Google Ads. Videos that appear on the Official Artist Channel but are not uploaded to the channel belong to non-artist channels. For these videos, you’ll need to target or exclude the non-artist channels separately.
To fully target or exclude all the videos you see on the Official Artist Channel, you must specifically target or exclude the non-artist channels.
See if a channel is an Official Artist Channel:
To confirm if a given channel is an Official Artist Channel, you’ll see a music note icon next to the channel name.
See if a non-artist channel is impacted by an Official Artist Channel:
- Go to the non-artist channel in question.
- Select a video.
- Impacted: Video shows it’s associated with the profile of an Official Artist Channel.
- Not impacted: Video is associated with the non-artist channel.
Targeting or excluding the Official Artist Channel will only apply to videos directly uploaded to the Official Artist Channel.
See which videos were uploaded by the artist:
- Go to the artist’s official channel.
- Click the Videos tab.
- Click Uploads to see which videos were posted by the artist.
Manage your data segments
If your data segments are based on channel subscribes or visits to a non-artist channel, affected by this change, these segments will stop growing. You’ll have to start using the audience segments from the Official Artist Channel to continue growing this segment.
For the channel subscribers segment, members of the non-artist channel list will be automatically added to the subscriber events on the Official Artist Channel.
For the channel visits segment, you may need to use both the non-artist list and the Official Artist Channel list to reach the maximum number of visitors.
Link your account to the Official Artist Channel
You’ll need to follow these steps if you’ve linked your account to a non-artist channel whose videos appear on an Official Artist Channel.
- Go to the non-artist channel. You may need to paste in the channel URL into your browser directly.
- Select a video.
- If the channel info for the video shows the Official Artist Channel:
- Click through to the Official Artist Channel.
- Link to the Official Artist Channel to your account and use the data segments of that channel to show ads to your Channel visitors and video viewers.
- If the channel info for the video shows the non-artist channel, then your data segments should continue to work as before.
