let's optimize your youtube ads campaigns timestamps below along with some other helpful
videos to being successful with youtube ads including a full-blown tutorial on how we use
discovery ads to create optimized campaigns for driving subscriber growth now there is something
that you probably dealt with like the rest of us and that is having a campaign that gets zero like
zero views zero impressions obviously zero subscribers because there's no impressions and
you just look at it and go i followed this youtube tutorial maybe it was ours or somebody else and
you go why on earth am i getting no impressions well the good news is it's totally not your fault
the bad news is there's only a couple things you could do before you have to completely redo the
campaign so before you go crazy pulling out your hair out trying to figure out what's going on
just double your bid so if your bid's at five cents take it to ten if it's at ten cents take
it to twenty and if you really wanna go crazy you're like i just wanna know if it's the bid
then just up all of your bids to like 25 or 30 cents give it 48 hours and if it still
isn't working you're still getting zero impressions then try something else that
we're about to discuss but please just double your bids before you start going crazy making changes
right because sometimes it's just your bids aren't high enough to actually be a part of the auction
right so once you have some impressions hopefully it's time to actually start looking at the data
deciding what our key performance indicators are going to be and then of course optimizing
our campaigns so here's a quick rundown of the columns that i recommend you use because
if you haven't set up your custom columns yet then you probably can't see the information that
you actually want so at the campaign level here is what i recommend for columns if you
are focused on getting subscribers and if or if you're focused on getting leads and sales
and all you need to do is go up to the top right hand side of your campaigns table
and click on that little columns icon and when you do you'll be able to just decide oh my gosh
you'll be able to decide what columns show up and what columns don't so again here's the list
depending upon what your campaign goal is and you can actually save these as presets so something i
do is i save some presets for our search campaigns our display campaigns on the google ads display
network and then of course i save also a view where i just have all of the metrics which is
what you're seeing here which makes it so big you probably can't even read the individual columns
but i like that's one of the reasons i like having a large screen is because i can see all of the
metrics at once and then once you get into the ad group level here other columns that you're going
to want to use again you can timestamps below you can always come back to these and what's great is
you can actually add the earn subscribers column so you can actually see approximately how many
subscribers you get now until a campaign or ad group gets a hundred subscribers it's going to
give you a range there's nothing wrong with your account way back in like late 2017 early 2018
google decided that we weren't going to be able to see exact subscriber counts anymore
until something was over a hundred so when you see a range in that column it's totally okay
it's still working you just have to wait till you get 100 before they actually tell you the
exact number which is incredibly frustrating but that's just something we have to deal with
so now that you have your columns maybe you've had to double your bids let's go ahead and dive into
one of the first things that you want to optimize and that's going to be your call to action inside
of your campaigns because whatever you want to do with your video ads you want to make sure that all
of your ad groups and your ads have one goal i always do this have one goal but i'm holding
up two fingers right so one goal so if you're trying to get people to join your email list
have all of those ads in one campaign if you're trying to make sales have all those ads in another
campaign if you're trying to grow subscribers have all those ads in one campaign right so
you never want to have an ad group that's trying to get you subscribers next to an ad group that
is trying to generate some sales or drive traffic to your website so that is the very first thing
you can do to optimize all of your campaigns is make sure that everything is segment segmented
and you're going to see this as a theme where we are just segmenting the heck out of everything
so it's really easy to read our data now speaking of data when it comes to beginning to
optimize your campaigns we need to make sure that we are at statistical significance so
if you don't have a thousand impressions on a campaign don't touch it if you don't have a thou
at least 100 views on an ad group don't touch it so that's a general rule of thumb because the
last thing you want to do is go into your campaign you're freaking out right you're
spending all this money and you go oh i only i have 50 views here and this one has 30 views so
maybe this 50 view one is going to do better but for all you know all of your subscribers
are going to come in the next 50 views that you would have gotten if you just waited until you
at least got 100 views or a thousand impressions so statistical significance is very important here
obviously if you have a bigger budget you want to wait till you have a thousand views on something
sure go for it most of us don't have that kind of money to burn though so we're going to wait
until a thousand impressions or at least 100 views before we start making optimizations and i want
you to think of your metrics as a ladder so at the very top you have conversions or subscribers right
and then right beneath that you have the question of how many people are actually watching my video
and then if you're doing discovery ads which we're talking about subscribers so we're doing
discovery ads how many people actually clicked on my thumbnail and then we're talk and then we go
all the way to the bottom which is how many people actually saw my thumbnail so they could click on
it now obviously if you're doing in-stream ads this pyramid or reverse pyramid looks a little
different but as a general rule of thumb if you don't already have a campaign that's gotten you
100 subscribers or a thousand subscribers then the next logical thing is to say okay well i
don't know which one's going to get me the most subscribers but maybe i could make a decision
based upon how many views i've gotten or how many impressions or my impression click-through rate
so even though you really care about subscribers it doesn't make sense to wait until google starts
telling you how many subscribers you're actually getting so looking at one of these other metrics
like view rate or average view duration or looking at the percentage viewed or your
impression click-through rate makes a lot more sense to do even though we care about subscribers
google's just not giving us that information yet so we have to use these other metrics
now when it comes to using these other metrics let's go ahead and go through
five things you can look at in your campaign settings if you're not happy with your current
rates and of course we'll get to some benchmarks in a moment and these are five things you can do
to answer that first question of are people the right people actually seeing our ad i'm adding the
right people now but are people actually seeing your advertisement are you getting impressions
are you getting impressions in front of the right people in the right locations which is number one
so the first thing you want to do to optimize your campaigns once you've gone through everything else
and you're statistically significant is to go into the campaign that you're looking at and
then go to locations and look at the individual locations that are showing up now this example
everything's zero right but let's just say for instance the united states had a hundred views and
then australia and one of the other countries had three right well it would be obvious that
we aren't getting our ads in front of the people in the other countries because the united states
seems to be sucking up all the budget so an optimization here would be to
just copy the campaign exact same settings and then with the new campaign turn off united states
so that the other two countries have a chance to run remember that you set the budget at the
campaign level so that means your ad groups your ads your locations your placements
everything under the sun is competing for the same budget and so you're going to have ads
that suck up budget you're going to have targeting that sucks up budget in this particular instance
you will find that if you have multiple countries one country is going to suck up more of the budget
and the other countries aren't going to get any so what you have to do
is separate them so you tell google okay you know campaign one is the united states campaign two
is everything else that didn't work when it was inside the same campaign as the united states
so that's number one optimization number two in your campaign settings is making sure you have
one audience per ad group this could be a video rant in and of itself long story short if you have
more than one keyword if you have more than one channel you have more than one audience
inside of an individual ad group you're not going to know which one of those is performing the best
because some of the metrics specifically how many subscribers something got only shows up
at the ad group level so let's say you have your ad group and you have three audiences underneath
well the problem is all the metrics are at the ad group level so you don't actually know which
specific audience targeting is getting you the best results because everything's been
summarized and aggregated at this ad group level whereas if you split them out so you have one ad
group one one audience one ad group one audience one ad group one audience all of a sudden even
though everything is only reported at the ad group level it doesn't matter because you know
it has to be the one thing that is in there now if that sounds like a lot of work and super ocd
yeah it totally is it's super super annoying and it makes running youtube ads incredibly incredibly
long and arduous at times however that's one of the ways that you're going to be able to make sure
that you know the exact targeting that is actually contributing to getting more leads getting more
subscribers and of course customers now number three is going to be a real quick one here
if you are running an in-stream ad i know we're talking about growing channels but real quick
if for whatever reason you're running an in-stream ad trying to grow your youtube channel i recommend
in-stream ads for lead generation driving traffic off youtube for sure but if you are using an
in-stream ad don't use channels as targeting 9.9 out of the 10 campaigns we run for ourselves and
clients never get any impressions ever it doesn't matter how much you raise that bid the targeting
combination just doesn't seem to work anymore and the last time i had a successful campaign that did
that was like late 2019 and that was one client account out of many it was just it's ridiculous
so if you are running an in-stream ad and you have channel targeting and you're getting no
impressions it's not you for whatever reason that combination doesn't seem to be working anymore
hopefully they bring it back now optimization number four here for your campaign settings is
going to be looking at your targeting itself so if you're targeting individual videos it's probably
and you're getting low impressions just stop because you're probably it's probably not going
to work number two if you're targeting channels and you're still getting low to zero impressions
it just means the channels that are being targeted are too small so you're going to have to look for
channels that have 500 000 subscribers or more now even if you have three or four channels they
all have like 250 300 000 subs and you're sitting there wondering they get plenty of views they get
thousands of views a month why can't i get my ads in front of them and you really really want those
channels for some reason then just like triple or quadruple your bids and you will probably start to
get impressions you will be very unhappy with how much those views cost but at least you'll get the
tar the channels that you want and this is because the more focused and narrow you're targeting
the more you have to pay and you don't really know how narrow or narrow or wide your targeting
is until you start running ads and you don't get any impressions and then all of a sudden you pay
it you put set your bid at a dollar preview and you start getting 76 or 80 cent views on this
one specific channel and you're like i don't know why that channel is so expensive but that's how
much it costs to advertise on that channel and so what i recommend is looking for larger groups of
audiences because the law of averages is going to work in your favor when growing a youtube channel
if you wind up targeting a broader audience that has more people that might not find value in your
content but it keeps your costs low and so unlike when you're running things trying to drive traffic
to a landing page or sales message where you're trying to be very specific and like i want this
customer right there well that's not going to work very well with subscribers you definitely
need to cast a wide net because you need that law of averages to bring down your cost per
view getting your cost per view as low as possible is the key to success when running campaigns for
driving subscriber growth now number five here for your campaign settings is going to be another
quick one and you probably haven't fallen into this trap but use cost per view for your bidding
don't use cpm don't use cpa just use cost per view keep it real simple and straightforward i pay this
much per view and then you can go ahead and try and optimize your metrics from there definitely
don't use cpa don't use cpn cpm when you're just getting started if that makes no sense awesome
then just ignore it and keep using cost per view as your bidding strategy now when it comes to your
audience targeting and evaluating what ad groups are working and what ad groups aren't what you're
going to want to do is look at your view rates and then look at the budget allocations so let's
say we have a campaign it has a couple of ad groups in it but one ad group for some reason
has cost us twenty dollars while all the other ones have only cost four to five bucks well what
you'd want to do is pause that ad group and make a completely new campaign for that ad group and
whatever targeting's in there and then set the budget manually for that new campaign
the reason you want to do this is because if you don't that ad group will keep sucking up
all of the budget and you're never going to find out whether those other ad groups and that
other targeting would actually be successful and again when it comes to looking at your different
ad groups assuming you're following the advice of one targeting per ad group then all you need to do
is look at the view rates you're going to have an ad group that has an awesome view rate
use that as your personal benchmark and try to get your other ad groups to that level and the
best way to get them to that level is to split test your thumbnails now unfortunately you can't
actually split test your thumbnails inside of google ads so what you have to do is you have to
upload two videos do this unlisted please unlisted so youtube doesn't slap you with something so you
need to upload two of the same videos as unlisted and then manually change out the thumbnails to see
which one does better is it it's really really a pain it's such a pain but that is the best way to
test your view rates and then finally or second to last year with your ads themselves the message
craft if you get to that next question if we get to the second to last question our pyramid which
is are people taking action or the last question are people taking action once they've watched our
video ad well if you're not getting a lot of subscribers you're not getting a lot of earned
views then it's the video or the content of the video that has to change and sometimes you're
gonna have to try and be a little spammy every 30 to 90 seconds having some sort of call to action
to hit that subscribe button or click a link in the description or check out the cards and you
wouldn't do this in a normal youtube video right because nobody no normal person would want to
subscribe to a channel that does that all the time but when you're trying to figure out how do i get
people to just subscribe or watch the next video or check something else out you're paying for that
view and people know well most people know now when they're actually clicking on an ad because
it says add when they click on a discovery ad so they've chosen to watch your ad and most of your
viewers will know it's an ad and so you're much less likely to get a lot of hate when it comes to
how spammy you are or how many times you say click the link in the description just subscribe here
or check out this or check out that now don't go crazy with it but you will just need to push your
comfort zone a little bit to drive people to take the action that you are paying for the video to
hopefully get right that was a weird way to say that all right moving on the final one is your
experiment cycle and when it comes to figuring out how often to go into your campaigns make changes
give your campaign changes at least three days to run you want that statistical significance
all over again so if you got a thousand uh 1000 views on an ad group wait until you get 2 000
views total before you start making changes again right so this can be anywhere from three days to
five or even seven right but it is important that you schedule out ahead of time when you're going
to check your campaigns because one of the worst things you can do is obsess over it right make
some changes at 7am log in at 9pm and go oh that's not working i got like 50 terrible views and then
changing something in one day right that's that's something you absolutely want to avoid and it is
it's really hard not to obsess over it because it is you're giving google a lot of money right so
you definitely want to make sure that it's working but you don't want to over correct
so thank you so much for watching sincerely hope you got some value out of this video
most importantly you have some ideas on what to do to to optimize some of your campaigns and and move
forward with correcting them so go ahead hit that like button subscribe for more deep dive marketing
and advertising videos just like this one and until the next keep building the business you love