More control over where your visual ads appear in the Google ecosystem

You can now customize placements separately across YouTube Shorts, Gmail, Discover, and the Google Display Network.

What’s new?

The update enables advertisers to:

• Precisely select platforms for placements, including YouTube Shorts — a format directly competing with TikTok and Instagram Reels for short-form video budgets.
• Access detailed performance data for specific channels: YouTube, Discover, Gmail, or Google Display Network.
• Segment YouTube traffic by ad formats: skippable in-stream, in-feed, and Shorts.

Why does it matter?

With these new features, advertisers gain:

• Creative flexibility — for example, designing vertical videos specifically for Shorts.
• Expansion of social strategy — going beyond traditional social media while accounting for each platform’s format requirements.
• Reporting transparency — more granular data for campaign analysis and optimization.

Where to find the reports?

Channel-level reporting is available at the campaign, ad group, and ad levels. Network segmentation allows you to view the performance of each channel individually.

What’s next?

Despite the ability to manually configure placements for each individual channel, Google strongly recommends most advertisers stick to the automatic “All Google channels” option. This approach enables Google’s algorithms to determine the most effective touchpoints with your audience, ensuring optimal budget usage according to the company. Automation remains a key pillar of Google’s campaign management strategy, especially considering the dynamic nature of user behavior and the fast-paced digital landscape.

That said, manual channel control will be particularly valuable for brands with clear strategic priorities—those looking to test specific platforms or with particular creative and audience targeting needs. For instance, companies heavily investing in short-form video can choose to focus exclusively on YouTube Shorts, avoiding spend on less relevant channels.

Currently, this feature is available only to a limited number of advertisers as part of a beta program, but Google has announced plans to expand access in the coming months. This expansion will include new segmentation types, even more precise reporting, and enhanced content personalization options for each individual channel.

This article available in Ukrainian.