Video campaign

A Video campaign runs an ad that is a video, on YouTube and across Google's video partners, charged per view or per thousand impressions depending on the format. The video has to exist on YouTube first — uploaded to your channel, which can be as unlisted, so nobody finds it by browsing — and the campaign references it by its video ID. That is the mechanical detail most people trip over: the ad is not uploaded to Google Ads, only pointed at. Skippable in-stream ads charge when someone watches thirty seconds or interacts, so a video that loses people in the first five seconds costs little and does nothing; the first line of the script is most of the campaign.