Hey everyone.
Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And in this YouTube ads guide, you're going to learn five actionable tips and best practices
to make sure your campaigns run smoothly.
And most importantly, you don't waste your hard earned money on a bad campaign, timestamp
table of contents in the description, along with a full in depth tutorial, click by click,
exactly how to build your campaigns from scratch.
So let's go ahead and dive right in, tip number one I have for you deals with your bid.
So if you're just getting started or you're already pulling your hair out because you're
experiencing this, when it comes to your bids, you want to start anywhere from 5 to 10 cents.
And you're always going to have a campaign that gets zero impressions.
So as you can see in this example here, looking through the campaigns, we have, we have a
couple of campaigns that have no impressions.
And then we have some campaigns that have very few impressions.
Now, the problem with this of course is when you don't get impressions, you don't get it
views.
You don't get clicks, which means you don't get any data.
Which means you can't improve your advertising or your channel content or sales funnel.
So the big thing we want to do here is simply increase your bid.
So when you're seeing you have a very low impression count or a zero impression, count
8 out of 10 times, it's not foolproof, but 8 out of 10 times, it's going to be, you're
just bidding too low.
So if you started at 5 cents, take it up to 10 or 15.
And if you're already at 10 cents, then take it up to 30 or 40.
Because as we move into 2020, we're gradually starting to see the YouTube ads costs come
back up.
The YouTube ads, apocalypse is slowly ending, ad costs are creeping back up.
And so the days of the one and two cents views are probably limited at this point, but you
definitely want to capitalize on YouTube ads while they're still incredibly inexpensive.
And the reason that you want to start at 5 cents is because you don't want to bid too
low because you're going to get zero impressions, even though one and 2 cent bids are still
cost per views, are still possible, but you need to start at that 5 to 10 cent Mark.
And that will just make sure that your bid is high enough.
So you can find those opportunities.
And then it's not so high that you're paying excessively for ad placements that aren't
actually optimized.
So that 5 to 10 cent range to start.
And then if you're having experiences like this, where you just don't have any impressions
or very low impressions, then start increasing your bid.
That should be the very first thing you try before you start just say, Oh, this YouTube
ads thing doesn't work.
And you know, all those tutorials are Bunkin.
I should just try something else.
So number two on the list is going to be your targeting.
And this is specifically how you structure your campaigns.
Now, if you've watched any of my tutorials, this is going to be a bit repetitive, but
it's so important.
I'm going to repeat it in any way, you need one targeting option per ad group.
And this is why it's so important.
So go ahead and take a look at this campaign inside of our campaign, looking at the ad
group level, we can see impressions in view rates, number of views, all that fun stuff,
the percentage watched, but we can also see competitive metrics, like impression share
lost, budget lost.
And most importantly, if you're growing a YouTube channel, the number of earned views
and earned subscribers, the ad group level is the lowest.
You can see this information out.
Why does that matter?
Why is that so important?
Well, let's say for example, you went ahead and took three different types of audiences
and put them into one ad group.
Well, when you're looking at your earned subscribers, your earned views and your competitive metrics
of display lost and budget lost, well, it's going to lump all three of these together,
but if we made ad group one, two and three, one for each one, all of a sudden, we're going
to be able to see those metrics for each one of those audiences.
Now, another big advantage here is when it comes to placements, if you're going to start
running a lot of traffic, placements are always lumped together in ad groups.
So the real importance here is just making sure that you have one audience for one ad
group, because things are going to get aggregated together inside your ad group metrics.
And unless you only have one targeting option in there, you won't know which targeting option
is the one that got you the subscribers or the display rank, or the number of views that
you were actually looking for.
Even the view data is a little jumbled.
So you definitely want to make sure that you're segmenting everything.
If that was confusing or that still doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I'll link up in the description to the full blown tutorial that walks you, click by click,
exactly how to set up these campaigns.
Now the third tip I have for your best practice is going to come to your budget.
And this is where Google loves to spend your money.
They will spend your money until the end of time.
And so, especially if you're new to advertising, there's one thing you need to do with your
budget.
And that is set an end date, please set an end date, because there's nothing worse than
opening up your ad account and realizing that there was a campaign you forgot about and
it just kept running.
So every once in a while, I see this in the comments and it's just really disheartening
because you're not going to get your money back from Google.
And if you try those chargebacks things, then Google's just going to ban your account altogether.
So what you really want to do, please do this is just add an end date.
All you have to do is click on your campaign, go into settings and then set an end date
for two to three weeks out.
You can do a month or two, if you have a larger budget.
And of course you can approximate based upon what your daily ad spend is and how many days
you're letting the campaign run to see what your approximate total cost will be.
But this will just ensure that number one, Google is not going to run away with your
money because they will and you won't get it back.
And number two, it will actually force you to go back into your account and analyze what's
working.
So if you have a two to three week cycle on your budget, you're looking at least every
two to three weeks at your campaigns.
And you're making sure that you're continuing to spend money on the ones that are working,
as opposed to just doing a set ad and forget it.
That's definitely not the way to approach YouTube ads at all.
Now tip number four deals with watch time.
And this is probably where get the second most number of questions behind why are my
campaigns getting absolutely no impressions?
And that is your ads are going to get terrible watch time.
It just seems to be a rule of YouTube advertising.
If you compare the watch time you get on YouTube ads versus the watch time you get on normal
search suggested or the home feed, whatever the YouTube algorithm is doing, the YouTube
algorithm is always going to get you better watch time than what's on your ads.
So what does this mean for you as a new advertiser?
Well, number one, it means that if you have a content video that's doing really well organically,
don't run YouTube ads to it.
It will hurt your watch time.
And then all of a sudden your video that was doing great, starts slipping.
So that's number one.
Number two, what you want to do is actually make sure that with the videos you are running
traffic with that it's within 5 to 7% or a couple, at least a minute or two of the watch
time.
So let's go through an actual example.
So here's a video I'm going to go into creator studio here.
Here's a video that I've been running YouTube ads on for a couple of months.
So you're going to want to go into your analytics.
You're going to click on view more, so you can get some greater details here.
And then we're going to click on traffic source and then we're going to segment our traffic
by view duration.
I'm going to go ahead and change this chart to a bar chart.
I'm going to make sure that I'm looking at all of the previous year, 2019.
So I get a nice, huge chunk of data.
And then I'm going to go ahead and sort by number of views, because I need the traffic
sources we're looking at to be statistically significant.
And now, as you can see here, you can clearly see what your average view duration is for
your search and your suggested, and what's normally going on versus your YouTube ads.
Now, this is actually a really good example, because we got our watch time on YouTube ads
to be very close to what it was organically.
And this should be your goal when you're promoting organic content to try and grow your channel,
you really want to keep an eye on this.
You don't want to be using that 25, 50 and 75% or a hundred percent viewed inside of
Google ads.
That's not really great, because you need to see your average view duration for YouTube
ads and the context of what it looks like against your organic.
So in this particular instance, if we were getting a two-minute average watch time on
our ads, that would tell us that we did a terrible job with our advertising, and we
need to go back to the drawing board, but here we're within 5 to 7% of what we would
see organically.
So we're going to keep running these ads and we're going to keep testing to try and continue
to expand our reach.
And of course, make sure that the watch time doesn't drop true too dramatically.
So this is a great tool that YouTube creator studio has actually added, this wasn't possible
in the past.
So it's really good to keep an eye on your watch time.
Now, finally, number five comes to some settings and these are settings that I every once in
a while and find some controversy with.
But I think that when it comes to running your YouTube ads, your number one priority
is figuring out where your audience is and then giving them what they want.
So we'll jump back into our ads account here, and we're going to click on a campaign that
we'd like to scale and lower our cost per view.
And then we'll immediately go over to settings, instead of looking at start and end dates
this time though, we'll go ahead and click on the network.
And here we want to uncheck display partners, because this is essentially you giving Google
and YouTube, the ability to have your videos across the web on sites other than YouTube,
we really don't want that.
We want all of our ads to show up on YouTube itself.
And once you've unchecked display partners, you can optionally check on search, if it's
not already showing up, that will just give you more opportunities to show up on YouTube.
And then you'll also want to go down to inventory types.
Now, this is where the YouTube ad pocalypse actually started, because large corporations
who were very concerned about their branding saw that their video ads were running on videos
that were not in line with their values, their brand, or the type of content they wanted
to be associated with.
So this was Google's solution is to create different brackets, essentially showing big
advertisers.
Hey, if you're really uncomfortable with certain types of content, you can pay more to show
up on what we consider clean content.
Now the actual guidelines for what's clean and limited versus expanded is really nebulous.
But as a small advertiser, just go ahead and click on expanded, because essentially what
you're doing is you're saying of all the opportunities I could show up.
I'm going to click on expanded while all the big advertisers are clicking on limited, which
means you're going to be able to have your ads play on videos that the big budget advertisers
aren't interested in, which means your costs are going to be a lot lower.
And with that, those are the five tips and best practices for improving and optimizing
your ads account.
And of course, making sure that Google doesn't run away with your hard earned cash.
So go ahead and comment below, if you have any questions about running YouTube ads, check
out that link to the full blown tutorial, to actually set up your campaign from scratch.
Whether you're looking to grow your channel or you're looking to drive traffic and leads
and buyers off of YouTube, that tutorial has two different campaign types that covers both
of those objectives.
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And until the next, keep building the business you love.