Complete YouTube Ads Strategy to Grow Your Channel ($43K Spent)

Complete YouTube Ads Strategy to Grow Your Channel ($43K Spent)

Over the past couple of years, we spent over $43,000 on YouTube ads. Now, if you've ever tried advertising on YouTube, then you know that they usually result in very low engagement and very low watch times. Basically, everything the YouTube algorithm hates and a surefire way not to grow your channel. But ads don't have to result in low-engagement views. After spending countless hours and thousands of dollars, we've finally come up with an effective strategy that leads to everything YouTube loves.

High watch times and engaged subscribers, which ultimately leads to channel growth. And the best part is that it'll only cost around $5 per day. So if you want to learn how to use this YouTube ads to grow your YouTube channel and business, then stay tuned. If you're a beginner to YouTube ads, there are two main types of ads you can create.

Discovery ads, which are the ones that show in YouTube search, suggested, and on Google's display network.

And then there's in-stream ads, which are the ones that play before or during a video you're watching. Now, the strategy that we'll be talking about is just for discovery ads. And that's because in-stream ads are more for brand awareness and lead generation. Now, the reason why this strategy excites the heck out of me is because these are what typical YouTube discovery campaigns look like. Tons of views, for pennies on the dollar with an extremely small percentage of viewers actually sticking around to watch.

And if we look at the stats for this video, these views resulted in an average view duration of 56 seconds on a nearly 20-minute video.

And the separation between organic vs. paid views is just sad. Compare that to our YouTube search views, and you'll see that our average view duration was nearly 9 minutes, and suggested was around 5 and a half. So our goal was plain and simple.

Get highly engaged views for pennies on the dollar. Fast forward one year of testing and you'll see that most paid views we get have a similar audience retention rate and average view durations as organic views. Now, let's look at the data on a few of our English ad campaigns from 2020. So in 2020, we spent just under 2,700 Singapore dollars, which is around $2,000 US dollars at today's currency exchange rate. From the two grand, we got just under 30,000 paid views or roughly $0.

07 per view. Not bad. But there's so much more. 544 people liked at least one of our videos, 994 people added one of these videos to a playlist, 577 people subscribed to our channel, and get this… 9,999 people watched at least one other video on our channel - free. To top it off, over 45% of views watched at least 25% of our videos.

And our videos aren't exactly short. Meaning, we paid $0.05 for one engaged view, which is just crazy! Now, if you're thinking, well, views are views and they mean nothing. Then wait until you hear this.

For the seven videos we were advertising, there was a total of 2,514.8 hours watched. That means, we paid 2 cents per minute of watch time where our content showcases how our products work to solve the viewers' problems. It gets me every time but that's crazy. Now, YouTubers often chase subscribers, likes, and views.

But these are all vanity metrics if no one is actually consuming your content. YouTube is an attention platform. And while you can pay for clicks, you can't force them to keep watching. Bottom line: views mean nothing if people aren't watching, engaging, and ultimately doing something that leads to a profitable action. Unless of course you make money through YouTube ads or your goal is brand awareness.

Now, before we get into the ad strategy, it's important that you understand a few key metrics in YouTube ads that will validate or invalidate whether the strategy is working for you or not.

So let's define what an engaged view is. For me, an engaged paid view is one where the average view duration will be similar to an organic view. After all, if people aren't watching your videos, then they're not going to like your videos, subscribe, watch other videos, or buy your products. Now, beyond average view duration, Google's ad platform shows you a category of metrics called "earned actions." And these include things like earned likes, playlist add-ons, shares, subscribers, and views. And an earned action is counted when someone performs one of these actions within seven days of viewing your ad.

For example, if Sally clicks on our video ad, then watches another video on our channel three days later, and then subscribes, then that's an earned view and an earned subscriber. Now, because our goal is to get engaged views, "earned views" paired with overall high retention was the #1 KPI I used to measure and modify our ads strategy. So the last thing we need to talk about before we get into the strategy are the targeting options available in YouTube ads.

I promise, I'm not trying to delay getting to the strategy, but you need to understand all of these things in order to execute successfully.

Alright, so with YouTube ads, there are three main targeting options: keywords, audiences, and placements. Keyword targeting works in the same way as Google ads. You enter a list of keywords and when someone searches for that word or phrase, your ads can be shown. Audience targeting is based on what Google thinks people are interested in.

So that can be anything from SEO services, to advertising and marketing etc. You can also target custom audiences like your subscribers, people who watched a video in the last 30 days, or even your website visitors. And finally are placement ads. This is when you choose specific videos and/or channels where you want your ads to appear. Alright, now let's talk about how this strategy works at a high level.

This entire YouTube advertising strategy is based around intent targeting.

Meaning, you only show your ads to people who are showing interest in your video's topic right then and there. Which is why the two targeting methods we use for this strategy are keywords and placements. Let me show an example of why these two targeting methods work for engaged views and audience targeting doesn't. And we've tested this a lot.

So let's say Google knows that you're interested in golf. But it's 11am and you're at work researching videos about search engine optimization. They got the interest right, but they got the timing wrong. As a result, you might click on the golf video ad, but you don't have time to watch it or consume the creator's content. So you bounce and they likely wasted some money Now rewind.

If you're watching the same video on SEO and you see a suggestion in the sidebar for a complementary video to the one you're watching, then you might click it, watch it, watch other videos on that channel, and subscribe.

The time and place is right. This is possible with placement targeting. Now, keyword targeting is the easiest way to match the intent of the viewer. They're literally searching for what they want to see, and you're just paying for one of the top spots in the search results.

For example, if you search for something in YouTube like "affiliate marketing," and you see this guy holding some Amazon plaque, yea...you might be interested in watching. Why?

Because the ad is meeting you in the right place at the right time. In fact, this video is a tutorial on affiliate marketing for beginners. And so are the rest of the organic results. Now, this might all seem simple, and it really is, but you need two things in order to get great results from this strategy. First, you need a video that has a high audience retention rate or average view duration, whichever serves your needs best.

 

Because there is no magic trick that'll get people to watch your videos for a good amount of time if it sucks. So to find potential videos worth advertising, log in to your YouTube analytics and look at the video tab.

Make sure you've added the "Average percentage viewed" and "Average view duration" columns to the table. Then, export your list into Google Sheets. From here, you can sort the table by average percentage viewed or average view duration to find your best performing videos.

Now, an additional thing I recommend doing is to set a filter on the number of views. The more views the video has, the more reliable your data will be. And second, there needs to be either a) search demand around that video's topic, or b) other similar or complementary videos that are getting a good number of views at the time of advertising.

To find average search volumes, you can use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. Just set the tab to "YouTube" and enter a search query.

And as you can see, there are around 10,000 monthly searches in the US and 98,000 globally for the query "digital marketing." And to further expand your list of keyword ideas, hit the Phrase match report. From here, you can skim through the list and add additional keywords to your YouTube ads campaign if it's relevant to your video. Now, if you want to run placement ads, then search volume doesn't directly help because videos that get a ton of views are usually from other traffic sources like browse features and Suggested.

So you need to find videos that get a lot of views - ideally, on a consistent basis.

And the best way to find these videos is to use VidIQ's VPH metric, which stands for "views per hour." There are a few places you can find videos with high view velocity. First is in YouTube's search results. With the VidIQ extension installed, search for a query related to your topic. So let's say we're creating a makeup tutorial for beginners.

Now, if we scroll down a bit, you should see a section called "Trending videos for this search term." Here, you'll see popular videos, the number of views they have, and the video's VPH. Again, because our ads strategy is based on intent targeting, you want to focus on relevant videos. So before adding one of these videos to your placements list, you need to ask yourself If someone was watching one of these videos, would they want to watch my video on If the answer is yes, and the video has a high VPH, then you have a good chance at getting a ton of impressions and hopefully engaged views.

Another place to look for placement videos is by checking the top-ranking videos VPH metric. Just click on one of the videos, and you'll see the views per hour metric in the sidebar. You can also click on the historical icon to see that video's views and views per hour over time. Finally, look at relevant and popular YouTube channels' trending videos. So if we look at this channel, and go to the Trending tab, you'll see some of their top videos based on view velocity.

Now, one thing I want to note here is to look at the date the videos were published. As you can see, this one was published around a year ago, yet it's VPH is still quite high. So by running placements ads on this video, you should be able to get a consistent number of impressions from your ads.

Now, it's important to note that placement ads only work on videos that are monetized, but from my experience, there's no point in checking if it's actually monetized before adding it to your campaign. Basically, if it's not, your ad won't run.

Now, in terms of what a good VPH number is, this will vary from niche to niche. Makeup is obviously a much more popular topic on YouTube than SEO. So as you research videos, you'll get a better idea of what makes sense for your niche. Alright, the final things you should know about are some campaign settings worth considering. So for our YouTube search ads, we've set the network to just YouTube search results.

Whereas for our placement ads, we've set it to just YouTube videos. And these are created as separate campaigns. Now, one thing you probably noticed is that we've opted out of advertising on Google's Display Networks. Reason being, the engagement metrics were pretty garbage to say the least so it wasn't exactly fulfilling our goals.

Now, as for demographic targeting, like age and gender, we're targeting people that are like our other YouTube subscribers.

And the way you can find this information is to use Google's Audience Insights tool. So go to Tools & Settings, Shared Library, and then Audience Manager. Next, click on the + button and select YouTube users. Now, the important part here is to select the Subscribed to a channel option. Now, after you've created your list and Google has populated the numbers in the table, you can head on over to the Audience insights tool.

Then select your audience from the dropdown and you'll see information on gender, age, and parental status to name a few. Now, if you don't have subscribers, this obviously won't work for you.

But you can do this with web traffic as well if you have Google's Pixel on your site. Now, to prove that this strategy doesn't just work for established channels, we've been testing it on our translated channels too. If we look at our Spanish channel's analytics, you'll see that both the subscriber growth, and number of views are going up and to the right - just as a typical organic channel would.

Also, because we're satisfying YouTube with all of the right things like solid real engagement, in-video optimizations, and on-page optimizations, you'll see that our YouTube search traffic is now starting to grow month over month.

More importantly, we're reaching new audiences who are choosing to subscribe because they actually like the content they're watching. Now, while this strategy works really well to get engaged views and real subscribers who actually care about your content, a major downside is that it's not very scalable - at least in low-volume niches like SEO. They're great to use for evergreen type campaigns as we have, but if you want to reach larger audiences specifically with ads, you have to go with audience targeting or use in-stream ads.

And we're experimenting with both of these types of ads and we'll share our learnings and results on our channel as we refine the process.

So if you enjoyed the video, then make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more marketing tutorials like this one. And if you have a question or want us to test some marketing strategies, let me know in the comments below. I'll see you in the next tutorial..

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