About YouTube Engagements goals in Demand Gen

You can now track and optimize certain events on YouTube, like a channel subscription, as Google Ads conversions. When a Google Ads account is linked to a YouTube channel, your Google Ads account will receive a new conversion action that can be used to measure and optimize YouTube channel subscriptions. Grow your YouTube channel audience in Demand Gen, by using the YouTube subscriptions conversion action as your goal.

Before you begin

Before setting up your Demand Gen to track subscriptions as conversions, your Google Ads account needs to be linked with the YouTube channel you're promoting. Learn more about Product Linking: Link YouTube channels and Google Ads accounts.

Note: You can use YouTube channel subscriptions as a measurement-only option, or as a biddable conversion goal in your Demand Gen or Video Action Campaign. If you’re using subscriptions as a “Secondary” metric, you’ll find it in the “All conversions” column as one of the measurement metrics that are available to you. If you’re using it as your “Primary” optimization metric, you’ll find it under the “Conversions” column. To edit this primary or secondary preference, visit the Summary under Conversion Goals, and select “Edit goal” under the “Engagement” conversion action panel.

In the coming months the ability to create new Video Action Campaigns will be removed. We recommend using Demand Gen as an alternative to Video Action Campaigns. Remaining Video Action Campaigns will automatically be upgraded to Demand Gen in Q2 2025. Affected advertisers will be notified as that transition approaches.

Benefits

Google AI allows for ads to be served to the most relevant users who are likely to convert. Optimizing for YouTube subscriptions allows you to serve ads to users who are likely to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

Compared to TrueView video ads that run using CPV bidding strategy, optimizing for Engagements can be more efficient for follow-on video and channel engagement.
You can use either Maximize conversions bidding strategy to maximize the volume of subscriptions for a given spend, or use Target CPA to acquire subscriptions at specific cost per subscription.

How to optimize for YouTube subscriptions

In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon .
Click the Campaigns dropdown in the section menu.
Click Campaigns.
Click the plus icon , then select New campaign.
Choose Awareness & consideration or Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance for your campaign goal.
Select Demand Gen as the campaign type.
Select Continue at the bottom.
Choose Conversions.
Add Engagements (YouTube hosted) as a conversion goal.
At the ad group level, choose the "video" format type.
- Note: The Engagements format is not available in preview yet, and won't serve on Gmail and Discover.
Continue campaign creation as normal.

Note: It's possible to use this feature in the “Video” campaign option. You may continue to do this until the deprecation of VAC, where the VAC campaigns with Engagements as a goal will be auto-migrated to Demand Gen.

Measure results

The most relevant metrics in Google Ads to understand the performance of your engagements are:

Conversions: In this case, a conversion is when a user clicked or viewed your ad and subscribed to your YouTube channel within the attribution period.
Cost per action: This is the cost divided by the number of conversions.
Earned views: Earned views are measured when a YouTube viewer watches subsequent videos on your YouTube channel or Watch pages after viewing your ad. Earned views accumulate whether the same video or another video is watched on your channel.

Best practices

Make sure to follow these best practices to ensure success in implementing subscriptions as your engagement goal in Video action campaigns or Demand Gen:

	Select Maximize Conversions bidding strategy for the first 14 days of the campaign. After 14 days, if you have a sufficient volume of conversions such as 50 conversions, you can change it to Target CPA, and set the desired Cost/Subscriber.
	Make sure to use audience segments relevant to the content of your channel.
	Use video creatives which will attract new viewers to your channel. Use a variety of video lengths and formats (short, long, vertical) to maximize the campaign's reach.
	Use the URL of the YouTube channel or YouTube playlist URL as the landing URL of your Demand Gen campaign.

FAQs

Expand all

I can view the subscription conversion action in my Ads account. Does that mean that the campaigns I run from the account will start attributing subscription conversions?

No. Subscription conversions will only be generated from YouTube channels linked to the account. Other key points to remember include:

This conversion can only be used with Demand Gen or Video action campaigns.
Attribution reports aren't available.
If there are multiple YouTube channels linked to the same account, the subscription conversions from each channel will be attributed to that account, and campaigns can optimize for subscriptions on all the linked channels.

Are there any differences in how campaigns optimizing for subscriptions are served?

Demand Gen or Video Action Campaigns optimizing for subscriptions with the Engagements goal, serves the same way as other Demand Gen or Video Action Campaigns. The notable differences are that the Engagements goal optimizing for subscriptions doesn't serve on Google video partners (GVP) and isn’t served to signed-out YouTube viewers. The reason is that signed-in YouTube viewers are the ones most likely to subscribe.
Engagements ads can also serve with some ad format optimizations to help drive more subscriptions. For example, the call-to-action (CTA) button is replaced with a subscribe button.

From what date is the data for subscription conversions populated?

Data is only available beginning September 14, 2022 or the date when your YouTube channel was linked to your Ads account.

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