Hey everyone!
Jason here, digital marketing consultant, and in this YouTube ads guide, you're going
to discover the top five biggest mistakes, new YouTube advertisers make when it comes
to setting up and optimizing their campaigns.
So if you're having any trouble with your YouTube ads, hopefully one of these will help
you fix them.
So time set, table of contents in the description, along with some other helpful click-by-click
tutorials on how to actually set up your campaigns.
Here, we're just going to focus on common mistakes and how you can avoid them.
And the very first mistake or problem that I get in the comments section of other tutorials
is, my campaigns have no impressions.
If your campaign has no impressions after a couple of days, it just sits there saying
it's eligible, it's eligible.
All your ads are approved and you're just sitting there like “why on earth won't you
take my money, Google?”
Well, it's probably because you're targeting is too narrow or is there are some conflicting
settings.
So when it comes to narrow targeting, sometimes when you're trying to target specific videos
or specific channels, or if you're limiting your campaign based upon a language or a particular
geographical area.
There just might not be enough people for YouTube to actually show your ads to.
And so what you'd have to do is expand your targeting or expand your geo area.
When it comes to conflicting settings, sometimes when you're setting up your campaign, the
settings in your campaign can actually directly conflict with the settings in your ad groups.
So for example, if during you're setting up your campaign, you decided to select that
you only wanted to show up on YouTube search or suggested, then that might actually get
in the way of your in-stream ads actually showing up.
Also, you might find that sometimes when you try and use specific types of targeting with
your in-stream or discovery ads, you winds up not working.
So sometimes you'll try to run an instream ad and you'll be using a particular video
channel.
And then you'll just get no impressions.
So maybe if you switch it to a discovery ad, it might start working.
So there's a lot of settings that you need to tweak in terms of what placements or targeting
are you using and what type of ad are you using.
So if you're not getting any impressions and it’s in-stream, try discovery with the exact
same settings.
If you're not getting any impressions with your discovery, try instream with the exact
same settings, and then you'll be able to start troubleshooting.
There is not going to be much help from Google support on this one.
Now the second big mistake that you want to avoid is driving traffic to organic videos.
This is something that I think confuses a lot of people.
So I'm going to show you the data behind why you don't want to do this.
And then we'll walk through how to actually properly structure your campaign.
So you don't kill any videos on your channel, that you've worked so hard to make.
And this first example is a video where we ran in-stream and discovery ad.
So, looking at the blue line that is organic and looking at the orange line, that's going
to be discovered in the middle pink line is in-stream.
Although that's not statistically significant enough for it to really matter, cause there
was less than a hundred views on this particular video.
But as you can see here, their percentages just 47 seconds in, we already see only nine
percent of the discovery ad people are still watching.
That is absolutely terrible.
And of course, as we go down, you see the percentages just get worse and worse.
And this isn't the only video.
We'll go to another video here, same topic.
You'll see that discovery just drops.
And then here it looks like only one person kept watching.
And the same is true for this last video.
Again, don't worry about the skippable in-stream ads because these particular video campaigns
only had a couple hundred views on those.
And once we tried to scale up the in-stream ads, the audience retention actually dropped
below organic.
Now the reason this matters so much, is because when you're trying to rank a video, you're
trying to get a video to bring you in more views and subscribers.
YouTube algorithm is going to look at the total audience retention and watch time.
It doesn't care if some of the, those bad audience retentions, came from ads, it's going
to take the entire average and then just going to look at your video and go, wow! that's
really terrible watch time.
Look at it all those people dropping off just within 90 seconds of the video starting.
Well, this video sucks.
Let’s try another one.
And that's what happens is your suggested in your search ranking is just going to plummet
to the floor.
So what you need to do, if you want to promote an organic video, if you find an organic video
is doing really well, bringing in new likes views subscribers, you need to modify it and
then re upload it.
So what you don't want to do is create a campaign and then just put the video ads as the videos
that are already posted and then start running traffic.
You don't want to do that.
What you need to do is take those videos that are working, edit them a little bit, so you
don't get dinged by YouTube for uploading duplicate content, and then create a new campaign
with those new videos uploaded.
You can upload them as unlisted.
So it doesn't look like you have two of the same video.
And then run traffic to those duplicated re uploaded videos.
That way, you know, that you're paying for videos that do a good job, bringing in the
right type of subscribers and views, but you're not hurting and jeopardizing your good organic
standing and ranking.
Now the third biggest mistake you need to avoid at all costs.
If you want your YouTube ads to be able to be readable and optimizable at all, is not
mixing multiple channels and targeting or multiple any type of targeting inside of your
ad group.
So if you take a look at this diagram, you'll see that you just want one audience per ad
group.
And I even go so far as to say only have one actual video per entire campaign, and then
just have multiple headlines or split testing, the same video inside your ad groups of really
one audience per ad group.
And the reason you need to do this is because if you don't, you're actually not going to
be able to see inside of your analytics, which audience performs the best.
Now that doesn't make sense.
That's okay.
Let's jump into my screen and I'll show you a campaign or ad group that set up incorrectly.
When I first got started and an ad group that is set up correctly.
So you can see the difference and how you can actually analyze this one, but not the
first one.
So taking a look here, this is the first campaign we're going to go through and I'm going to
click on this top ad group.
Now and inside this ad group under placements, you can see that we're targeting five channels.
Now I've said it to all time.
And what's interesting here is you can see that there's about 780,000 impressions, but
they're only telling us about 753 of them.
So if we're only targeting five channels and we're looking at placements and it's only
telling us about 750 of them, where's the other, I don't know, 700,000 views or impression
not views, impressions coming from.
Well, the way we would find out is we'd go to the next section in our placements, looking
at where ads are shown.
But when we click on where ads are shown, we have our two blurred out channels and then
779,000 impressions from youtube.com.
Okay, that's great.
I know we're running traffic on YouTube, but how do you know which one of those five channels
support is responsible for which part of those impressions?
The short answer is you don't.
Because multiple channels or multiple targeting options inside of one ad group results in
things like this, where you're just not going to know which audience actually performed
the best.
So what you need to do, is make sure that you only have one targeting per ad group.
So now let's go to a newer campaign that we set up here.
So each one of these ad groups that you're looking at, there four ad groups and each
one of them only has one audience targeting in them or one channel targeting in them.
So if we went ahead and clicked on placements at the campaign level, you'd see that even
though it's blurred out, there are only four channels.
So we see that there's 68,000 impressions, but each channel that's being targeted is
showing up as a zero.
So if all of these were in the same ad group, as in with the previous example, we'd have
no idea which channels performing the best, but good thing, because we made one ad group
for each channel.
If we go and click on where ads are shown, all of a sudden we can see a complete breakdown.
Now you'll see placement.
It just says youtube.com.
And even though the ad groups are blurred out, because there's only one audience targeting
inside of that ad group, we know for sure that all 512 views or a hundred thousand impressions
came from that one channel.
Because that's the only thing inside the ad group.
So you can see the difference here.
We're easily able to see which ad group is responsible for what number of impressions
and views.
But if we go back to our old ad group, we see that because we didn't segment all of
our audience targeting YouTube, just telling us we got 700,000 impressions and who knows
which audience targeting it actually applies to.
And so that's why it's really important that you're very, very specific with how you set
up your campaigns.
Now, number four, for YouTube ads mistakes comes to not looking right at your competitive
metrics, not getting feedback from Google on how you are doing.
Now.
There are two things you want to be looking at.
You want to be looking at budget lost and rank lost.
And this is in addition to the typical columns you have of views, impressions, clicks, conversions.
Well, that's all great, fine and dandy.
And then maybe you're looking at the percentage of viewed video viewed, but these two are
actually going to be direct feedback from Google telling you how much, how far your
dollars are going and how good or bad they think your ad is.
Now jumping back over to my screen here, you can see, I have display lost is, and then
I have display lost is budget.
Sorry.
It’s rank and budget.
And the way you can add these is you can click on columns and then just come up here to modify
columns.
And then you'll come down to competitive metrics.
Up, there we go.
And make sure you click on these.
You can also click on some of these other ones, but these work best for when you're
looking at your YouTube statistics, those are much, the other ones are much better if
you're doing like search and display campaigns.
But in this particular instance, what display lost is going to be telling us is essentially
of all the times we could have showed up.
What's the percentage that our ad didn't show up because Google doesn't think it's relevant.
And the higher this number, the worst Google thinks your ad is.
The lower this number, the better Google thinks you're ad is, or put another way.
The higher, this number, the worse you're targeting, the more off your targeting is,
and the lower your number, the more dialed in your targeting is, and this is going to
help you understand whether or not your video is relevant to whoever you're trying to show
it to.
And the lower, this number is the lower you can expect to pay.
So if you're getting a low display rank lost, that means you could probably up the budget
and be able to cut your cost per view, which I'll go through in a second.
Now with your display rank loss to budget, that's essentially telling you what percentage
of the time didn't you show up because you just didn't have enough money to spend.
Now, remember YouTube is a gigantic site, right?
So if Google is telling you that you're when you're spending, I don't know, five or 10
dollars a day, and only 50% of the time, you don't show up because of your budget.
That's telling you that there's not a lot of room to scale, so you could increase your
budget, but there will be times where your budget rank last is going to be under 30 to
10 percent.
That's telling you that you pretty much maxing out how many times you can show up.
So you either need to make a new ad that's more relevant.
So your display rank goes down.
So you'll actually get more chances to show up, or you just need to find a new audience.
And that's just a brief overview of display, rank lost and display budgets lost.
You can always click on Google's documentation to learn a little bit more about how they
actually calculate these metrics and numbers.
But generally you want your rank to get as low as possible because that's Google telling
you you're doing a good job with your messaging and your targeting.
Now the final one, number five is more of a mindset thing.
And while it's the most important out of these four, it's the least hands on.
So all of those other ones were tactical and this one's pretty much going to apply no matter
what type of advertising that you're doing.
And this is approaching advertising as an experiment.
So you're just trying things out over and over and over again.
It's like testing hypothesis.
You're going into a lab and testing all of your assumptions about your messaging, your
market, your ideal viewer, your ideal customer.
It's not, I put money in and then I get what I need out.
It's not an ATM machine.
You don't just stick in your credit card and then views and subscribers start coming back
at you.
It's an experiment where it's going to take five to 10 and sometimes even 20 campaigns
to get the results that you're looking for.
So no matter what videos you watch, no matter what courses you buy or take, no matter what
guru you listen to or experts you hire, advertising is at the end of the day experimentation.
And so it's where you have to just take, check your ego at the door and go in with no assumptions
and say, “I don't know anything.
I just need to test and let the data, tell me what is working and what isn't.”
And I think that's the hardest thing, because especially, so if you're on a tight budget,
you know, you're watching a video like this and essentially saying, “Yeah, you know
what?
You might spend $5,000” not get the results that you're looking for in terms of your cost
per view, we've had clients who've had to spend 10, 20,000 dollars before their funnels
started breaking even, or before the cost per new subscriber or cost per view in terms
of what they needed to do.
And the overarching view of their entire business actually started to make sense.
So it's an investment because you have to build your own machine.
Eventually yes, you can just say, “I turn on this campaign and get the money and subscribers
that I'm looking for.”
That's awesome.
But that doesn't happen within week one or two, not let alone month, you know, three
or four sometimes.
So there's a tremendous amount of patience that's required to be successful with any
type of advertising.
So just remember that when you go into advertising, it's an experiment and you're just testing
everything, everything.
You never want to go into an ad campaign saying, “you know what?
I know this is the best ad” or, “You know what I know, that's my audience.
And this is who we should be targeting.”
No, you want to say, “I think this audience is going to work, but I'm going to test these
other three that I don't think are going to work just so that the data is driving our
campaigns, not my assumptions.”
So thank you so much for watching.
I sincerely hope you got some value out of this video.
And one of these five is going to help you save some time, energy, and most importantly
money when it comes to optimizing your YouTube ads campaigns, make sure you check out the
links in the description to how to set up your campaigns, click by click and comment
below if you have any questions.
So go ahead and hit that like button and subscribe for more YouTube advertising tutorials, just
like this one.
And until the next keep building the business you love.