How to Promote YouTube Shorts with Google Ads

Thinking about using Google Ads to get more eyes on your YouTube Shorts? You're in the right place. It's one of the fastest ways to break through the noise and get your short-form videos in front of an audience that's ready to watch. This guide walks you through everything, step-by-step, showing you how to set up your first ad campaign, choose the right audience, and measure your results without wasting your budget.

Why Promote YouTube Shorts with Google Ads?

Organic reach is fantastic, but it can be slow and unpredictable. Running paid ads for your YouTube Shorts gives you control, speed, and precision. It's less about "going viral" by luck and more about strategically reaching your ideal viewers.

Here's why it's a smart move:

• Reach Beyond Your Subscribers: Your organic Shorts primarily reach your subscribers and viewers that the algorithm thinks might like your content. Ads let you jump that line and introduce your channel to thousands of new people who fit your exact target demographic.
• Hyper-Targeted Audience Selection: Google's ad platform has incredibly detailed targeting options. You can target people based on what they search for, what types of videos they watch, their age, location, interests, and even if they've visited your website. This means you're spending money on viewers who are more likely to care about your content.
• Speed Up Channel Growth: A successful Shorts ad campaign doesn't just get views on one video, it drives what YouTube calls "earned actions." These are the organic subscribers, likes, and shares you get as a direct result of your ad. It's like pouring gasoline on a fire to accelerate your channel's momentum.
• Get Immediate Data and Feedback: Instead of waiting weeks to see if a Short catches on, an ad campaign gives you performance data in a matter of days. You can quickly see what resonates with your target audience - what hooks them, what titles get clicks - and use that feedback to improve your future content.

Before You Launch: Preparing for a Winning Campaign

Jumping straight into Google Ads without a plan is a quick way to spend money with little to return. A little prep work goes a long way. Before you even open the Google Ads dashboard, take care of these three things.

1. Pick the Right Short to Promote

Not all Shorts are created equal, and you don't want to waste your budget promoting a dud. The best candidates for promotion are your "proven performers." Look through your YouTube analytics and find a Short that already has good organic performance.

Specifically, look for:

• High Audience Retention: Find a Short where a high percentage of viewers watch all the way to the end. If people are organically sticking around, it's a strong sign the content is engaging and a paid audience will enjoy it, too.
• Good Engagement Rate: Shorts with a healthy number of organic likes, comments, and shares are prime candidates. This social proof shows the content is compelling enough to make people act.
• A Clear Call-to-Action (CTA): The best Shorts to promote have a goal. Does it ask viewers to subscribe? Check out another video? Visit your website? A video with a clear purpose is much easier to measure and benefit from when you put money behind it. Don't promote a video with no clear next step for the viewer.

2. Define Your Single Goal

What do you really want to achieve with this ad? Being clear about your primary objective will influence every other decision you make in the campaign setup. Trying to do everything at once will dilute your results.

Here are some common goals for a Shorts campaign:

• Channel Growth: The main goal is to gain more subscribers and increase overall channel awareness. Your key metric will be "earned subscribers."
• Drive Views to a Long-Form Video: Use a Short as a "trailer" to get people interested in a longer, more detailed video on your channel. Your CTA would direct them to that video.
• Promote a Product or Service: If you have a business, you might use a Short to drive traffic to a landing page or product page. Here, you'll be tracking website clicks and conversions.

Decide on one main goal per campaign. This focus is important for how you set up and measure the ad.

3. Link Your Google Ads and YouTube Accounts

This is a quick but necessary technical step. For Google Ads to run ads on your YouTube channel and track all the awesome results (like earned subscribers), the two accounts must be linked.

Here's how to do it:

1. In your Google Ads account, go to Tools & Settings > Linked Accounts.
2. Find YouTube in the list and click Details.
3. Click Add Channel and search for your YouTube channel.
4. Once you find it, select it and confirm that you own the channel. Google Ads will send a request to your YouTube Studio.
5. Go to your YouTube Studio, click Settings > Channel > Advanced Settings > Link Account, and approve the request. That's it!

With this done, you're ready to build your campaign.

Setting Up Your Google Ads Campaign: Step-by-Step

Now for the fun part. We're going to create the campaign from scratch. The Google Ads interface can feel intimidating, but just follow these steps one by one.

Step 1: Create a New Campaign

In your Google Ads dashboard, click the big blue "+" button and select "New campaign."

Step 2: Choose Your Campaign Objective

Google will ask you what you want to achieve. Based on the goal you just defined, you have a few good choices.
- If your goal is to grow your channel and get general visibility, choose Brand awareness and reach or Product and brand consideration. This tells Google to show your ad to as many relevant people as possible.
- If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, choose Website traffic.

For most YouTubers just starting out, Product and brand consideration is an excellent starting point because it optimizes for views.

Step 3: Select Your Campaign Type

This one's easy. Choose Video.

Next, Google will ask for a campaign subtype. Here, you'll likely want to stick with Video reach campaign (if you chose brand awareness) or Get views (if you chose consideration). Both work well for Shorts.

Step 4: Configure Your Budget and Bidding

Now you tell Google how much you're willing to spend.

• Budget: Start with a modest daily budget, something like $5 or $10 per day. You can always increase it later once you see strong results. Select "Daily" for the budget type.
• Bidding: This determines how you pay. The simplest and most common strategy is Maximum CPV (Cost-Per-View). This means you set the maximum amount you're willing to pay for a single view. Or, you can choose Target CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions), where you pay per 1,000 times your ad is shown. For beginners, Maximum CPV is usually more straightforward. A good starting bid might be around $0.03 - $0.05 per view.

Step 5: Define Your Targeting

This is where the magic happens. Who do you want to see your Short? Be as specific as possible without making your audience too small. Find the "Audiences" section and start layering your targeting.

Audience Segments

This is your primary tool. You can target people based on:

• Affinity Audiences: Broad interests like "Cooking Enthusiasts," "Beauty Mavens," or "Fitness Buffs." This is great for top-of-funnel brand awareness.
• In-Market Audiences: People actively researching or planning to buy something, like "Home Gym Equipment" or "Vegan Meal Kits." This is highly effective if your content aligns with a product or service.
• Custom Audiences: This is powerful. You can create an audience of people who recently searched for specific terms on Google (e.g., "how to bake sourdough bread") or people who watch videos from specific competing channels.

Demographics

Narrow your audience down by age, gender, location, parental status, and household income. If you know your ideal viewer is a 25-34 year old in Toronto, here's where you make sure your ad only shows to them.

Step 6: Choose Placements

Placements tell Google where you want your ads to appear. While you can't target the Shorts feed exclusively, your video ads are automatically eligible to show there. In the "Content" section, you can choose specific YouTube channels, videos, or websites where you'd like your ad to run. For example, if you run a gaming channel, you could have your ad appear on videos from channels like IGN or GameSpot.

Step 7: Create Your Video Ad

Finally, it's time to add your Short.
1. In the ad creation section, paste the URL of the YouTube Short you want to promote.
2. Google Ads will automatically fetch it. It will then ask you to select the ad format. For Shorts displaying in the Shorts feed, your ad will typically run as a Skippable in-stream ad (an ad that plays before or during another video that the viewer can skip) or an In-feed video ad (an ad that appears as a thumbnail in recommendation feeds, and the user must click to watch).
3. For an in-feed ad, you'll need to write a catchy Headline and Description. Make them engaging and relevant to the video. Let viewers know exactly what they're about to see.
4. You can also add a CTA button that links to your channel or website, depending on your campaign goal.

Once you're happy with how it looks, click "Create Campaign." That's it! Your ad will go into review and should start running within a few hours.

Measuring Success: Know What's Working

Launching the campaign is just the first step. The real growth comes from analyzing the data and tweaking your campaign.

Check your campaign performance after it has run for 2-3 days. Here are the key metrics to watch:

• Views: The total number of times your ad was viewed.
• View Rate (VTR): The percentage of people who saw your ad and watched it. A high VTR means your ad creative is hooking people effectively.
• Cost-Per-View (CPV): How much you're paying per view. Your goal is to get this as low as possible while still reaching your target audience.
• Clicks and Click-Through-Rate (CTR): The number of people who clicked your CTA or headline. A high CTR suggests your offer and copy are compelling.
• Earned Actions: This is a goldmine of data. It shows you how many people subscribed, liked the video, or shared your video after seeing the ad. This is the ROI that grows your channel directly. It separates a good campaign from a great one.

How to Optimize Your Campaign

Don't be afraid to make changes based on what you see.
- If your view rate is low, maybe the first 3 seconds of your Short aren't engaging enough. Try promoting a different Short.
- If your CPV is too high, your targeting might be too narrow or competitive. Try broadening your audience slightly.
- If nobody is subscribing, add a clear verbal or text call-to-action in your Short encouraging them to hit the subscribe button.

Final Thoughts

Promoting your YouTube Shorts with Google Ads is a powerful strategy to take control of your channel's growth, allowing you to connect directly with your target audience and get valuable feedback fast. By preparing properly, setting up a focused campaign, and continually measuring your results, you turn advertising from an expense into a calculated investment in your brand.

While ads give your content an incredible push, running a successful channel still comes down to consistent, quality uploads. Managing that day-to-day work of planning and scheduling can be a major challenge, especially when juggling Shorts, Reels, and TikToks. This is why we built Postbase to simplify things. It was designed from the ground up for today's video-first socials, letting you plan your entire content calendar and schedule videos across all your accounts from one place, reliably and without the clunky workarounds you find in older tools.