Now your Google text ads can show on YouTube search results, too

SAN JOSE — With the introductions of features such as location extensions and calls-to-action in TrueView for Action Ads, YouTube ads have been gaining performance elements native to traditional Search advertising. Taking this a step further, YouTube announced Wednesday at SMX West in San Jose that Search text ads can now extend onto YouTube.

What is changing? Google is incorporating YouTube into its Search Partners network.

What does this mean? Now, when Search text ad campaigns are opted-into Search Partners, your text ads may appear on YouTube search results pages when users search for keywords relevant to your campaign on the video platform — but solely on mobile. At this point, text ads will only appear in the mobile search feed on YouTube.

Why should you care? YouTube said it’s been testing this option for a few months and has seen that, on average, text ads in YouTube mobile search results perform comparably to Google Search on a cost-per-conversion basis.

“This tells us that, even in a video context, text ads shown to the right person at the right time, matching the right intent, can be really effective at driving conversions,” said Amy Vaduthalakuzhy, Google video ads product manager.

Ad extensions are not currently supported to appear on YouTube mobile search results.

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About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.