Hey everyone!
Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And in this YouTube ad strategy guide, you're going to get a copy paste template for creating
your very own lead generation campaign using YouTube ads.
Make sure you check out the helpful links in the description to other videos to help
you set up the rest of your lead generation funnel.
Along with a comprehensive YouTube tutorial, that actually goes through my personal YouTube
ads formula, along with a timestamp table of contents in the description.
And if you want to dive straight into the YouTube ads interface, you're not interested
in all the fundamentals that go behind structuring your campaigns, then here's the timestamp
(00:09:18) that you can jump ahead in this video, where I actually walked through setting
up this campaign template.
So with that, let's go ahead.
Dive right in the very first step, is deciding what you're going to offer people, in order
to collect their name and email.
Now we have three main choices.
Of course you can be more creative and go outside of these, but these are the most common
three.
The first one is doing a free call or free strategy session.
This is where you essentially book a free consultation, where you provide some value
and then you offer your service on the call.
It's pretty standard.
The second one, which is what I'm going to focus on in this particular video, it's very
common, is offering some sort of lead magnet in exchange for a name or email, then you
send some follow-up emails and either try to get them on the phone or put them into
a sales sequence or webinar or something to that effect.
And then the final one is some sort of doorbuster free offer.
And this can be a free plus shipping offer.
This can be a product that people normally purchase the first time, or it could be something
like a free book funnel offer, which is something that's very popular as well.
So if you're not quite sure what to offer, here are a couple of ideas.
You can offer a free deep dive video training.
You can offer a PDF that has a diagram or outline of a particular process.
You can just do an audio of maybe you had a client case study or testimonial, that would
actually be valuable.
You could just do a plain old PDF that always works, or you could do some sort of Excel
sheet that helps them track their progress, or does some math or calculations for them.
If you're not quite sure what a lead magnet should look like link in the description,
to a playlist that shows you how to put together a lead magnet very quickly, using a free software
called Canva.
You can actually make some great looking PDFs in less than 20 minutes using Canva.
So I highly encourage you to check that out, if you're not quite sure what to offer.
So at this point you probably have some, hopefully you have, probably, hopefully you have some
idea of what you're going to offer to collect your leads information.
Now it's time to actually talk about the structure of the YouTube ads campaign.
Make sure you drop a comment in the comment section below, if you have any questions while
I'm going through this process.
So at the very top, we've talked about our campaign and our campaign is always going
to be focused on one offer.
We don't want to mix offers inside of our campaigns.
We're going to be very granular here and OCD.
So we keep our data nice and clean.
Underneath that, is going to be your ad groups.
And you can have pretty much as many ad groups as you want.
We're going to be making five to 10 different ad groups, per campaign in this particular
template.
And those ad groups are where you're going to be testing all of your targeting, right?
There's two variables.
And the next variable is messaging, and messaging is going to be your actual video ads.
Now, something you'll notice about this diagram, is we have one ad group and one video ad.
This is very, very important.
In the past, I've tried to run experiments and had more basic structures, but at the
end of the day, we found that this is the best way to go.
Even if you're a beginner, it takes a little bit longer, but you're going to get much better
results doing it this way.
And something you'll notice with this, this particular diagram is all the videos are the
exact same.
So we don't want it to look something like this, where we're changing different videos.
We want one video across our entire campaign, when we're doing lead generation.
I know you may have seen some other videos on my channel, where I talk about having multiple
videos.
That's not something we're doing here.
This is a template specifically for lead generation, one ad group, one video inside the ad group.
And the same video needs to be across all the ad groups in one campaign.
I know that's a little OCD, but I promise you're going to be very happy you did it when
you start spinning your cash.
So now let's go ahead and talk about the first variable of success when it comes to your
advertising.
And that is your ad groups AKA your messaging.
And this is where we're asking the question “who”, who are we targeting?
We're looking for your ideal customer.
So we're looking at the ad group level is “who” and then your ads are all the creative
and messaging trying to connect to your ideal customer.
So very simply all we need to do here is make a list of 5, 10, or even 15 channels, that
are related to our particular product or service, that we think our ideal customers are already
watching.
And it's very important, we do channels.
I know there's a lot of other targeting options here.
I'm whittling it down for you.
I'm giving you a copy paste template, because I don't want you to waste your time.
Trying all these other things when you're just getting started.
We're not doing videos.
We're not doing in-market audiences, no affinity audiences.
If you have remarketing, great, you can do that.
If you don't know what remarketing is, just ignore it, right?
So we're just going to do 5 to 10 to 15 channels.
And that's all we need for our targeting phase of structuring our YouTube ad campaign.
So now that we have the targeting, we're ready to go to the lowest level.
And that is the messaging.
Now with your messaging, we're actually going to keep this variable constant.
You're always going to be testing either your targeting who you're looking at, or what you're
saying.
When you're just starting, we're going to test who and we're going to leave what for
a later training and just a later campaign.
So here, what you want to do, is if you're not quite sure what your YouTube ad should
look like, here's a quick screenshot of my personal ad template.
And if you're looking for a deeper dive on how to structure your ad and what to say inside
of your 90 seconds to two minute ad, you can check out the link in the description to a
video that actually walks through this ad formula.
So here, what I want to do, is point out two very important things we need to do to our
actual YouTube video once it's uploaded.
So once you've chosen your YouTube ad or the video, that's going to be your YouTube ad
for this initial test, you'll upload it as an unlisted video.
You can go and give it a name.
You don't really need to do tags or anything else special with the video.
And then inside of your settings, there's two things we need to do.
Number one, we need to remove everything from our description and only have your call to
action link there.
You can even put like, grab your free copy now, or get your free lead magnet or book
your free sales call, whatever it is, go ahead and just have your link and your call to action
there.
Nothing else should be in your description.
We don't want any distraction from what you want your ideal customer to do, to come to
your site and actually enter their name and email or give you their phone number, right?
And then the second thing we need to do, is add our calls to action in the cards.
And this is important because we want to make it very easy for people who see your ad on
mobile to click through to your website.
So I typically recommend doing this whenever you have a call to action.
So whenever inside of your ad, you say, “Hey, click top right on mobile, bottom left on
desktop”, or just every 30 to 45 seconds have that card pop up.
So once you've done those two things, your ad is ready.
And when we dive into the YouTube ads interface, your ad will be ready to go for discovery
ads.
And so this is something where it's very important when you're just starting.
You're actually going to use discovery ads, instead of in-stream ads as your lead generation.
And this is counter to a lot of the other YouTube advice that's out there.
And bear with me here, because it's going to make a whole lot of sense.
We just wanna be practical and efficient with your budget.
Because in-stream ads cost a lot more than discovery ads.
But what we found in our testing and testing for clients, is that running discovery ads
that show up as a suggested video or at the top of search results, as opposed to paying
a premium, to show up as a skippable video ad.
Well, we're actually able to figure out which one of those channels gives us the best result.
And then guess what, when we get into the advanced split testing, where we just have
one ad group and one video per entire campaign, we can then pay a premium for the in-stream
ad, because we know that, that targeting works.
It doesn't make sense right now, to pay a premium for in-stream ads across these channels,
because we don't know which channels going to make the most sense.
We don't know which channel is going to give you the best result.
And so doing it this way, you can get a lot more views and a lot more impressions.
You can get to statistical relevance very quickly and you can figure out which channel
probably is going to work and which channel is definitely not going to work.
And then when we get to optimize, you'll see how you can use this data, to then go ahead
and do in-stream ads.
So that's why the link in the description, and the cards is so important, because we're
going to be running everything here as in-stream ads.
And that actually does it for the five steps of this YouTube lead generation templates.
So what I'd like to do now, is take all the information we just learned and apply it to
an actual live campaign.
So I'm going to dive into my laptop here, and I will walk you through everything you
need to know, to set up this lead-generation YouTube ads campaign.
Now I'm inside my Google ads account right here.
And the first thing we'll want to do, is go ahead and click on campaigns, so we can get
this big, beautiful, blue plus button.
We'll click plus, and click the new campaign.
Now on this page, you have a couple of options in terms of your goals.
I don't recommend clicking any one of these, because all this does is tell Google that
you don't really know what you want to be doing, and Google will make decisions for
you.
And what's also really frustrating is, it will lock in some settings, so you won't actually
be able to change them in the future.
So I highly recommend just coming in here, create a campaign without a goal.
And of course we are doing videos.
So we'll go ahead and click video and we'll do a standard campaign.
We'll leave ad sequencing for a different tutorial.
And ad sequencing is just telling Google ads, you want this video, then this video, then
this video to show.
So you can kind of go show a series of video ads.
It's pretty cool.
So I'll go ahead and give this campaign a name we're doing lead generation.
So I give my funnel, put my funnel code in there, the daily budget, let's just do $5
a day.
Just getting started.
Start date, I'll set the start date for a few days out, just so I have some time to
go over the campaign settings, make sure everything is good to go and test my funnel.
Of course, you don't want to be driving traffic to a funnel that's not working right.
And then select the end date, we'll give it a couple of weeks to run.
And I definitely recommend setting an end date just in case, you know, life happens.
Google will keep spending your money.
They don't care that you broke your leg and you were stuck in the hospital for a month.
So just set an end date.
For bidding strategy, we're going to leave it at maximum cost per view.
And then for networks, we actually want to uncheck video search partners.
We just want to be on YouTube.
Something that's pretty Ninja is you can actually split test search results and YouTube videos,
but I definitely recommend waiting until you're in that optimized phase, where you have one
campaign for your ad group and ad, that's working.
And when it comes to languages, you can actually just leave it alone, because we're doing channel
targeting and we're going to be doing location targeting.
That's more important than languages.
The more restrictive you are with your targeting, the more you're likely going to have to pay.
So with locations, you can go ahead and just choose your country, you know, state, region
or province.
So if you're a local based business, this is where you're going to want to do neighborhoods
and zip codes and major cities.
But if you're doing anything, that's not location dependent, then I recommend just going ahead
and leaving it at your country.
We don't want to get over complicated here, with the targeting our first campaign.
So we could come down here to inventory type.
Now, personally, I'm a big fan of going to expanded inventory because it's just content,
that big brands are scared of.
And I think as a smaller advertiser is really not something you should care about.
I personally don't judge my potential subscribers or clients or customers based on what they
watch.
So I really don't think you should either.
And so we'll go ahead and scroll down here two excluded content.
Nope, that's going to go away.
So you can just leave that alone.
And excluded label, will do not embedded videos, live streams or games.
So I will add the little asterisks that if you're doing anything with gaming, then you
can leave games on.
But typically I don't want to try and collect a lead or get someone to leave YouTube, when
they're just in kind of leisure mode, watching a game or a live stream.
Additional settings here, frequency capping.
I've seen some people do this.
Typically, unless you're spending a lot of money, this isn't going to be an issue.
And you'll be able to see inside of your campaign, whether or not your ads are showing up too
much.
But with this test campaign, it's very unlikely that you're going to get a group of people
who keep seeing your ad over and over and over again.
Because once you find something that's working, you're going to splinter it out into its own
campaign.
So ad schedule, we'll just go ahead and leave alone.
And this is all there is to it, to creating your campaign.
So I actually recommend skipping the ad group creation for now.
We'll skip the ad group creation and we'll go ahead and just have the campaign save and
continue.
We'll click, continue to campaign.
Now we will create our ad group.
I'm going to go ahead and pause this, while we're putting things together.
So I'll click the big blue plus button.
Now we'll give our ad group a name, and then the name of the channel.
Demographics, since we're going for lead generation, I'm just going to uncheck 18 to 24.
But that's typically the only thing I uncheck here, you know, Google doesn't always know
exactly who's watching, but if they know for a fact, they're under 24 years old, then I'll
just go ahead and leave them alone.
So audience here is, this is where you'd be able to select other targeting styles, which
are great for other types of campaigns.
We're doing lead generation.
We don't need that.
We're going to go directly to placements and we're going to click on YouTube channels.
So here you can either search for YouTube channels or you can type, copy paste the URLs.
Since I know that the name of the YouTube channels, I'm going to be doing for this example,
I'm just going to go ahead and type it in and click on video creators, you only want
one channel.
And then our maximum cost per bid, we're going to start at 10 cents.
So you can start between 10 and 20 cents is a good place to start.
And then you have the option to create your ad.
I'm gonna skip ad creation.
And once I skipped, it's going to ask me if this is going to be a discovery or in-stream
ad, we need to click discovery ads.
So we'll collect discovery and save the format.
And now that we have our ad group, we can click on it and create our ad.
So we'll go ahead and click create ad.
I have the video that I'm gonna maybe using right here, so I can go ahead and copy it.
It's the same video we talked about earlier.
So you can see that it has the link at the top of the description.
And if we go over to the cards, you'll see that there are three separate cards for calls
to action, throughout the short video, that people can easily click on to go to the landing
page.
This particular video is about YouTube channel growth.
So that's why we're targeting video creators.
So we'll go ahead and drop that in there.
So as a video discovery ad, now we get to give our video a headline, a quick description,
and then of course, give your ad a name.
So it's easy to remember which video ad is which, and we can go ahead and click save
and continue.
Now, the reason I went through and clicked through all of these processes, instead of
doing everything in one fell swoop, is now that you have a really good understanding
of how to navigate inside of your campaigns.
So we can go back up to the campaign level and click on ad groups.
So there's our ad group and our ad.
So we can come up here to the blue plus button and I will make one more.
So you're going to do this, for all 10 to 5, 10 or 15.
Just use 10, right?
For all 10 of the channels that you want.
So I'm just gonna go Chan again.
We'll do Derral Eves this time.
Is another great creator.
And then we'll come down here to placements we'll type in Derral Eves, click on his channel
there, and then we can set our maximum bid to 10 cents again.
And we're going to skip it ad creation again, we can go ahead and click, skip, save, and
continue, and we'll select discovery ad, save format.
And now what we can actually do, is go into our video creators campaign, ad group and
copy it.
So control C or command C you know, Macker or a windows.
And then we can go back up to our campaign or ad group or campaign level and click on
the new one that we just made.
And when we do, we'll be able to paste it.
So you can click this paste button right here and pause after pasting.
We don't need to do that.
We'll just go ahead and click paste.
And what's really nice is now you have the exact same video with the exact same headline,
the exact same description, which is so important.
If you remember our diagram, where we have our ad groups, we're changing out all of the
targeting.
So we have video creators and Derral Eves, and we'd probably have three or four other
channels, that are also about YouTube, but the same video ad is in all of our ad groups.
Now, as you run your ads, you might be curious how people are engaging with your particular
ad.
And so what you can do is, click on videos and then you can click on the one video that
you will have here and oh, starting play.
Don't want that.
And it will give you some basic information about how the video's performing and you can
also do it, it will also show you organic data as well.
Of course, since you're doing this for lead generation, there probably won't be that much
organic data.
But that's just an easy way to kind of see your views and your clicks.
And it's more visual than the typical columns you get inside of Google ads.
So with that, we've set up our lead generation campaign.
So just as a quick overview here, we started with choosing one offer.
And that particular offer in this example was just a landing page that has a webinar
offer.
And then we went ahead and chose 10 channels, that we were going to target.
And we created an individual ad group, for each one of those channels.
And inside of those ad groups, we had one video ad and of course, we made sure we optimized
it for discovery by putting a link in the very top of the description, with nothing
else and making sure all three cards were filled in, in addition to uploading the video
as unlisted.
So if you have any YouTube advertising questions, go ahead and drop them in the comment section
below, I do read a reply to every single one and make sure you take advantage of that timestamp
table of contents.
So you can skip around this video when you're coming back to it, when you're creating your
own campaigns to make sure that you don't miss any of the details.
I wish you the best of success with your YouTube advertising campaign.
If you got some value out of this video, go ahead and hit that like button, subscribe.
And until next time, keep building the business you love.