With over 2 billion monthly active users and over 1 billion hours of video watched daily, YouTube offers an enormous potential audience for brands to reach. The platform’s global reach, targeting capabilities, and diverse content make it a highly viable ad channel for brands of all sizes and industries.

One of the main benefits of advertising on YouTube is the platform’s advanced targeting options. Brands can reach their desired audience accurately and efficiently with sophisticated targeting features like demographic, location, interest, and custom audience targeting. YouTube allows targeting based on user behavior, including engagement with brand content or similar videos.

While advertising on YouTube offers a wide range of benefits, one of the main challenges is measuring the impact of your campaigns. Unlike traditional forms of advertising, measuring the effectiveness of YouTube Ad campaigns requires a more nuanced approach. It involves tracking a variety of metrics and considering factors such as audience engagement and brand perception. Additionally, the complexity of YouTube’s algorithms and ad targeting options can make it difficult to accurately gauge the success of a campaign. As a result, businesses must take a strategic approach to measuring the impact of their campaigns, leveraging a range of quantitative and qualitative YouTube ad metrics to gain a comprehensive understanding of their performance.

This post will provide guidance on how to set up your YouTube campaigns for success, and explore various measurement frameworks to validate the results based on our experience running hundreds of YouTube campaigns. 

What role does YouTube play in your funnel? 

YouTube advertising provides an array of campaign objectives that cater to diverse marketing goals. Before using YouTube for advertising, the most important decision for any advertiser is to choose whether to leverage the platform for driving top-of-the-funnel brand awareness, bottom-of-the-funnel conversions, or both. Utilizing every stage of the funnel for any growth marketing strategy is key to success and Youtube Ads are no different. 

Using YouTube for top of the funnel campaigns 

Investing in top of the funnel (TOFU) ad campaigns is important for countless reasons.

First, TOFU campaigns focus on building brand awareness and generating interest in your products or services with a specific audience. By focusing on TOFU campaigns, brands can increase website visibility, brand awareness, and organic traffic. This is particularly important for startups or scaleups with a limited customer base.

Secondly, investing in TOFU campaigns can help brands to build a larger retargeting audience for more focused campaigns later on. By capturing the attention of a large number of people with your TOFU ads, you can then retarget those who have shown interest in your brand or products with more specific and targeted messaging. This can lead to higher conversion rates and a better return on investment for your overall ad spend.

It is also important to note that Youtube Ads can be very cost efficient. Average cost per view can be as low as $0.02. This means that you can receive thousands of views with a limited budget, making this a viable platform for all business types. Youtube Ad costs vary between industries, but no matter the business, it is an effective channel at reaching virtually unlimited eyeballs. 

Leveraging YouTube to drive large-scale brand awareness is a worthwhile strategy provided that:

• Your target audience can be effectively reached on the platform through targeting options such as In-Market Audiences, Youtube Video Content, and Remarketing Lists
• You possess high quality video assets that are suitable for YouTube’s format
• You have a well-rounded media mix that complements your YouTube advertising efforts

Using YouTube to drive last-click conversions and view thru conversions 

Investing in bottom of the funnel (BOFU) ad campaigns is important for businesses to drive revenue, build customer loyalty, and gain insights into their customers’ behavior. BOFU campaigns target audiences who are already familiar with your brand and have shown intent to purchase your product or service.

By providing targeted messaging and incentives to those who have already shown interest in your product or service, BOFU campaigns can help push them towards making a purchase and ultimately drive revenue. Targeting audiences who have shown intent to purchase allows businesses to maximize their ROAS and grow their customer base.

This is where Retargeting audiences come in most effective. Users who have been to your site but have not converted yet are a great audience to tap into. They tend to be higher intent, familiar with your brand, and ready to buy! These users also are more likely to be the most cost effective when looking at CPCs, CPM, or CPV. 

In addition to boosting results, BOFU campaigns also help businesses to better understand their customers’ behavior and preferences. By analyzing the data from these campaigns, businesses can gain valuable insights into what drives their customers to convert, what barriers they face in the purchase process, and how to improve the overall customer experience.

Leveraging YouTube Ads to drive conversions can be a viable strategy provided that:

• Your target audience can be effectively reached on the platform through targeting options
• You possess video assets that are suitable for YouTube’s format
• You have other channels actively driving awareness for the brand 
• You can achieve results within you CPA targe
  

Measuring success with different YouTube ad metrics

Once you’ve decided how you want to use YouTube strategically and the role it will play in your media mix, you need a measurement framework that allows you to validate the success of your efforts. Measurement is not a one size fits all approach. There are countless ways to prove the success of your campaigns that do not rely on the standard data available in the Google Ads platform. Let’s take a look at how we do this with different campaign types.

Measuring impact of Brand Awareness campaigns on Youtube

When it comes to measuring the success of a brand campaign, performance can be challenging to hone in on because it involves tracking intangible factors such as brand awareness, perception, and loyalty. However, there are still several metrics and techniques that businesses can use to gauge the impact of their brand campaigns. Here are some methods to consider:

1. Surveys: Conducting customer surveys before and after the campaign can help measure changes in brand awareness and perception. You can use metrics such as aided and unaided recall, brand favorability, and purchase intent to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.
2. Correlation between branded search volume / direct traffic: While brand campaigns are not directly focused on driving sales, an increase in traffic and conversions during the campaign on organic, direct, or paid branded search can indicate its effectiveness in building brand equity and loyalty.
3. Cost per acquisition: Measuring the cost per acquisition of new customers following a brand campaign can provide an indication of its impact on driving customer acquisition.

Ultimately, measuring the success of a brand campaign involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics that track changes in brand awareness, perception, and customer behavior. By utilizing these methods, businesses can effectively gauge the effectiveness of their brand campaigns and validate the success of these efforts. 

Here are two specific ways we’ve measured the success of brand campaigns on YouTube using elements of the framework above. 

Implementing post-purchase surveys with Akko

One way to help prove out the success of a Youtube Ad Campaign is by conducting a post purchase survey. Something that asks “Where did you hear about us?” is the most common version of this type of survey that we’ve all taken while online shopping. This was our strategy for the phone insurance company, Akko. 

We ran Youtube Ads for Akko both before and after this survey was put into place on the site. This made it really easy to measure the success of these campaigns. Sometimes standard attribution doesn’t tell the full story, but flat out asking your customers can! It’s as simple as that. When looking at Youtube CAC numbers for July (before the survey) and then September (using survey results) we were able to see a CAC decrease of over 40%. 

Internal reporting was not telling the full story, but the users were. Overwhelmingly, users chose Youtube as their source of information when prompted post purchase. This seemingly simple metric isn’t available in the standard Google Ads or Analytics reporting. Relying on first person data like this signaled to us and company stakeholders that we could continue to run Youtube Ads for much longer than if we didn’t have this information at our disposal. 

Scaling Branded search volume with Genomelink 

With our partner Genomelink, a DNA service counterpart to the likes of 23andMe, Ancestry, and MyHeritage, we have found Youtube to be one of the most effective channels for all of digital marketing. On a conversion level, we have been able to rival the likes of Search when it comes to CPA, something that is very difficult to do for virtually all industries. CPA has been between $20 – $25 on Youtube and just under $20 for Search. A large win, considering Youtube is focused on Prospecting audiences instead of high intent keywords. 

The main success here for Genomelink is not the fantastic conversion metrics. It’s actually the Brand lift that we have seen since launching our Youtube Ads. As mentioned above, measuring Brand search results is a key way to track performance outside of standard Youtube metrics. Here is a chart showing the amazing correlation between Youtube and Genomelink’s Branded Search volume. Can you guess when we launched Youtube?

We saw IMMEDIATE results as soon as Youtube went live as an ad channel. Search volume rose drastically while we continued to lower CPA. Scale AND efficiency. The name of the game. This one chart shows the importance of approaching Youtube Ads with a zoomed out view point. Google Ads metrics wouldn’t be able to easily show the impact of a Youtube Ad as easy as it is to see it when looking granularly at Branded traffic. A cherry on top for this kind of success is that it can have long term effects on Brand Awareness as a whole. Google favors websites with high quality traffic and lots of search volume. It is only up from here. 

Maximizing direct traffic volume with Youtube Ads for Koji

We love charts and graphs, so we have another one to show off here for our partner Koji, a digital storefront that makes it easy to sell to your audience through social media. Focusing on a Brand Awareness campaign optimized for efficient reach, we wanted low CPMs to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible targeting our Custom Intent audiences we built around keywords and other factors. Here are the results below after just TWO weeks of performance:

When looking at traffic numbers period over period and month over month, we saw some astonishing results. Both New Users and overall Sessions increased by over 40%. Compared to the previous month we drove 70% additional New Users to the site. These are the exact users we were going after and they came to the site in excess. These are users that are not directly coming to the site via the Youtube Ads. That is why this data is so significant. Youtube helped drive thousands of more users to the site via Organic and Direct channels. This is exactly the kind of results we were looking for. 

The buck didn’t stop there. Organic leads saw an 81% increase compared to the average volume for the previous 4 months. We saw both brand lift and conversion lift. Ah conversions! A perfect segway into measuring conversions in Youtube campaigns.

Measuring impact performance campaigns on Youtube

Measuring the success of a conversion campaign is relatively straightforward. Its main goal is to drive specific actions from potential customers, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a service. Here are some ways to measure the effectiveness of a performance focused campaigns, no matter the industry you’re operating in:

1. Conversion rate: The most direct measure of success for a conversion campaign is the conversion rate, which is the percentage of website visitors who complete the desired action. This metric can be tracked using website analytics tools like Google Analytics.
2. Cost per conversion: By calculating the cost per conversion, you can evaluate the efficiency of your campaign and optimize your budget accordingly. This metric is calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of conversions.
3. Return on investment (ROI): Calculating the ROI of your conversion campaign helps you understand how much revenue you generated in relation to the cost of the campaign. To calculate ROI, subtract the cost of the campaign from the revenue generated, then divide that number by the cost of the campaign.
4. Customer lifetime value (CLV): By calculating the CLV of customers who converted through your campaign, you can determine the long-term value of your campaign. This metric takes into account the revenue generated by customers over their lifetime with your brand.

Here are two specific ways we’ve measured the success of conversion campaigns on YouTube using core Youtube ad metrics. 

Turning Youtube into the most successful Performance campaign for Sabio

YouTube is arguably the most important channel for our partner, Sabio that offers a highly regarded coding bootcamp for people looking to break into the tech space.  It drives conversions. High quality conversions that easily compete with every other channel we are active on for Paid Media. Let’s look at the numbers. 

Rather than focusing on brand awareness, we’ve tested Video Action campaigns on a variety of prospecting and retargeting audiences to drive applications from YouTube ads.

On the prospecting side, we leaned into using Custom Segment audiences to target Sabio’s competitors’ brand names. We did this to drive clicks at a much lower cost compared to targeting competitors on search. For example, on search campaigns, clicks on competitor keywords in this industry cost over $20 each. But with Youtube Ads, using a Custom Segment audience made up of the same keywords, we are seeing CPCs of just $2.01 in 2023. A tenth of the cost for the same traffic. That’s hard to beat. 

This has had further ramifications down funnel,  leading to much more affordable CPAs. With a $22 cost per application for 2023, efficiency has drastically improved once shifting additional budgets in Youtube. The average CPA on Google Search for reference is around $100. With drastically cheaper traffic and 1/4th of the cost per application, Youtube continues to dominate for Sabio and there’s no slowing down. 

Splitting conversion metrics out by targeting tactic with TAC 

Tony’s Acoustic Challenge is a web-based guitar instruction platform that provides its users with daily, bite-sized guitar lesson videos. Designed to take the average dabbler and transform them into an actual guitar player with a redesigned instruction format that doesn’t feel like traditional guitar lessons.

The foundation of any sound YouTube strategy is creative, but an equally important part of the equation is targeting. Finding the most effective way of reaching your target audience depending on your goals. These are the building blocks for effective conversion tracking, scaling, and optimizing. 

Historically, Tony’s Acoustic Challenge relied heavily on content keyword targeting, primarily in YouTube Conversion campaigns, which drove a very efficient CPA compared to other campaigns. This accounted for 40% – 50% of the overall conversions coming from this channel. Breaking conversion data down by a targeting tactic is just one key way to measure conversion success on Youtube. Example below:

(all date January – February 2023)

After seeing Google / YouTube discontinue content target for YouTube conversion campaigns in early March 2023, we went back to the drawing board to see what targeting options and campaign types we could use to fill the void left by the removal of content keyword targeting.

Pivoting to YouTube’s in feed video ad type

After testing a handful of different tactics, we began to see traction using the in feed video ad type, which still allows content keyword targeting, but does not allow for an automated, conversion focused bidding strategy. The in-feed video ad serves as a thumbnail on YouTube, It invites users to click to watch the video instead of clicking a Video ad that directs them to an external landing page.

After a brief learning period, we found incredible efficiencies in the ability to target single keywords and to match them up with a thumbnail including that same keyword.  For example, a user searches YouTube for “how to play guitar” and then sees the following thumbnail:

Based on this finding, we developed thumbnails for other high value keywords. Then, we built new campaigns, each with a single keyword and corresponding thumbnail:

So how does this all relate to measuring conversion success? 

After a learning period in March, we saw this tactic explode in April. Conversion volume stemming from these campaigns increased 429% and CPA dropped 29%. This tactic accounted for 67% of all April YouTube conversions. Again, we saw efficiency AND scale here by tackling conversions in a different way than before. Breaking things down by tactic, keyword, or audience type helps us tell the full measurement story while we are reporting. From there we optimize, test, and scale. Constantly moving forward. 

Finding different ways to measure success with YouTube ad metrics

Ultimately, measuring the success of a YouTube ad campaign requires a commitment to data-driven decision making and a willingness to experiment and iterate. With the right focus on key metrics, businesses can successfully measure the impact of their YouTube ad campaigns and achieve their marketing goals.

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post Beyond Views: Understanding the Different Metrics for Measuring YouTube Ad Success appeared first on Tuff.

With every passing year, brands are changing and adapting to the new growth climate. Automation is changing the game for most PPC channels, especially Google Ads. Data-driven creative is increasingly influencing all ends of the marketing mix. Video ads have been a staple for many years at this point, but continue to dominate our screens more and more each day. 

YouTube has gone from an advertising channel that is a “nice to have” a few years ago and has morphed into a channel that is a must. With this opportunity though, comes lots of questions about strategy. What’s the right approach for this behemoth of an ad channel? What stage of the funnel does this play a role in? How is success measured?

We all use YouTube, at least 2.6 Billion of us that is, but here’s how Tuff thinks about YouTube fitting perfectly into every growth marketing strategy we develop. 

YouTube Ads as a 2-Pronged Marketing Strategy

Typically, we utilize YouTube Ad campaigns by having one of two core goals – awareness or performance. Awareness campaigns are optimized to drive as many views and impressions as possible to a targeted audience in order to generate interest in the brand, while performance campaigns are optimized to drive action on the site with users taking a specific conversion action. 

Both of these have their place in an overall Marketing Mix, but depending on the stage of your business, one may be more favorable than the other. Let’s dive in!

YouTube Advertising for Performance Marketing 

Performance is the key word here. When utilizing YouTube Ads for performance marketing, the goal is to drive conversions. These may be leads, sales, or any other specific conversion event configured on your website that you’re looking to drive. 

Choosing a Campaign Type

When launching YouTube campaigns for performance, we recommend using the Video Action campaign type. This campaign type is optimized to drive conversions on site. We would consider this to be the most similar to many Google Search bidding strategies that you may be familiar with: Target CPA, Max Conversions, Target ROAS. 

While this campaign type will typically have higher CPVs than a Brand Awareness campaign, it will provide more conversions and should be measured by CPA and conversion volume. Optimizations should be based on the top performing creative and audience segments which are driving the lowest CPA possible.

Audience testing

So much of a Growth Marketing Strategy hinges on proper Audience testing. During a campaign launch, these should be continuously tested with the core KPI, CPA, being used as the north star when making optimization decisions. A very simple way to go about this is: audiences with the lowest CPA receive larger budgets over time and audiences with the highest CPAs should be removed from campaign targeting.

For performance based campaigns, we recommend choosing audiences that are higher intent and more likely to convert. For example, an Affinity audience for “Avid Investors” may be higher intent for offering financial services than a “Business Interest” audience may be. 

Audiences can include Custom Segments, Affinity, In-Market, Interests, or retargeting lists. Retargeting will usually prove to be the highest intent group since they are familiar with your brand, but this is why testing is so useful. You may be surprised at how powerful some of YouTube’s audiences are. 

Video Marketing

While selecting the correct campaign type is necessary and audience testing is a must, you have to also leverage creative testing to ensure that you are testing various messages that align with each stage of the user journey. The impact of data driven creative cannot be overstated here. It can make or break a campaign of any type, but this is especially true for video ads. 

Conversion optimized campaigns targeting prospecting audiences are introducing the brand to new users. There is still plenty of room to test which message resonates best with this new audience, but the main focus is on introducing your brand or product. We like to test variations that include user generated content, bold animations, or strong explainer videos. These users are unfamiliar with you, so focus on engagement as well as conversion metrics once they are on the site. High engaging ads should get a larger percentage of your budget. 

For retargeting, we can leverage more specific features or even put forth promotional messages that will appeal to users who are already familiar with the brand or product, but are still in the decision making stage.

Creatives should be optimized for specific devices as well. With the introduction of YouTube Shorts, there is another focus besides a standard 9×16 YouTube video ratio. Desktop and Mobile placements will behave differently, so this is important to keep top of mind when optimizing video ads. 

We put together a list of YouTube Ad Examples you can check out here. 

Evaluating Success

There are a few key metrics and KPIs that will be the main focus for a YouTube performance campaign. These are:

• Conversion volume
• CPA
• Conversion Rate

Performance based campaigns are just that, based on performance. This makes measuring success pretty straightforward and tied directly to leads, sales, or revenue. Since these conversion metrics are relevant for any ad channel, these YouTube Ads can be put up side by side to other channels for direct comparison. 

One benefit of running a performance YouTube Ad campaign is that you can lean on CRO to help improve results. Small changes in conversion rate on your landing page can pay huge dividends in a short period of time. We always recommend integrating CRO wherever possible when testing and evaluating KPIs. 

Utilizing YouTube As for Brand Awareness

YouTube truly excels at getting a brand in front of new faces. Remember, 2.6 BILLION active users. Basically endless opportunities to grow your audience. Here is how we tackle a brand play with YouTube Advertising. 

Campaign type

In addition to optimizing YouTube campaigns for direct conversions, you want to leverage YouTube strategically to generate brand awareness. This is done by creating prospecting campaigns optimized for reach. The goal is to drive low CPMs and low CPVs. Traffic, traffic, traffic. 

The two main bidding strategies for a Brand Awareness campaign on YouTube, are Manual CPV or Target CPM. One focusing on Views and the other on Impressions. Even though the main target is different, they are both focused on  driving as many eyeballs to your ads as possible. We tend to start with a Target CPM and test throughout the campaign, but both are incredibly effective at driving views, impressions, and traffic to your site. 

While these campaigns typically do not result in direct click-thru conversions, these campaigns can play a vital role in introducing the brand to as many people as possible. 

What kind of Audiences are available?

In the Google Ads platform we have access to a plethora of prospecting audiences to work with. As mentioned above, these include the likes of Custom Segments, Affinity, In-Market, Interest, and Retargeting lists. The difference between Brand and Performance audiences is that with a Brand campaign, the goal is to go broad. You will want to focus on audiences that drive low CPMs and CPVs. 

As we have continued to hammer home, testing audiences is a major key. Focus on audiences driving the cheapest traffic. Remove the ones that are expensive outliers. Besides the standard volume metrics, we recommend monitoring Time on Site metrics as well once users land on your site. Quality always matters, so remember to optimize towards the users who are the highest engagers. 

For a full list of available audiences, check out this list from Vid Hoarder. 

How is success measured?

Measuring success for a Brand campaign is not as straightforward as Performance campaigns. Brand KPIs are harder to both measure and communicate results. These campaigns are more of a long term play. Data does not necessarily roll in over night, but instead has lasting effects that can potentially affect all marketing channels months down the line. 

When looking at daily and weekly data we monitor some pretty standard volume metrics. Optimizing copy, creative, and audiences lean on the data that comes in using these KPIs. If one creative has a much cheaper CPM then maybe shifting budget to favor that video ad is the right play. Sometimes certain audiences are more likely to click a YouTube Ad. In that case, we may tend to add more focus to those users over others. Here are the metrics in question:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CPC
• CTR
• CPM
• CPV
• View Rate

Now when we are aiming to measure the long term, true impact of a YouTube Brand campaign, we dive a little deeper. Let’s use a financial planning client as an example. 

Search campaigns are driving leads at a $20 CPL. Really efficient and abundant. Now, a YouTube Brand campaign may be only bringing in leads at a $200 CPL. At first look, it would be easy to decide that this campaign is just not working for you. When measuring with ROAS or CPL, the numbers do not lie. 

The problem here is that these campaigns are not meant to be compared to one another. These numbers do not account for the thousands, or potentially millions of eyeballs that are exposed to your brand through a YouTube Brand campaign. Average Cost per View can easily be as low as $0.05. A single $1 can go a long way to reach new users. 

This kind of exposure trickles down to Organic, Direct, and all other sources of traffic when measured over an extended period of time. Measuring lift in these other channels is imperative to evaluating success of a brand campaign. 

During the campaign flight, is there a lift in Branded Search? Are more users coming in through Direct while this campaign is running? Has the percentage of New Users entering your site higher than before the YouTube campaign launched? All of these are questions that can be answered when evaluating your success. One of the best ways to do this is through isolated testing. Queue the next section please! 

Isolated testing

For the cleanest possible measurement, these campaigns can be launched in isolation, meaning there are no additional top of funnel/brand awareness marketing efforts being added shortly before, during, or after the campaign run. Testing in isolation like this will help tremendously when communicating the data that rolls in. 

One of the easiest ways to test in isolation is through specific Geographic targeting. This can be any GEO relevant to your business, but our recommendation is to focus on what we call 2nd tier geos. These are usually cities or states that rank in the top 10 of total users for your business, but are not the absolute highest traffic sources. 

For example, New York might drive the most users on a monthly basis for your website. Instead of testing in your most important market, move down the list to another city, let’s say Chicago. Chicago has more than enough volume to bring in significant results, but is not the highest value market available. Once you find success in a market like Chicago, that gives you the go ahead to test in larger markets such as New York in this example. 

The key here is to focus on a DMA that has significant volume. A smaller city such as Knoxville, won’t be able to provide abundant data nearly as quick as a city such as Chicago. 

Campaigns are isolated, and have been running for 3 months. Now what? This is when you can utilize tools such as Google Analytics to accurately measure the impact of your flights. Focus on three areas of performance:

• KPIs before a campaign launch 
• KPIs during the campaign
• KPIs after the campaign is over

Using data from all three of these timetables will help paint the picture of the effect of your brand YouTube campaign. 

Back to our example of Chicago, if you saw 10,000 new users a month coming through Organic traffic before a campaign flight, and then saw an increase to 15,000 average monthly users coming in from Organic, this is a great sign that your brand efforts have had a positive impact. If now measurable lift is evident, this indicates potential creative or audience issues. Creative may not be resonating with the audiences you are targeting. 

YouTube Advertising is not going anywhere anytime soon. No matter the business objective, hop on the train to get instant access to over 2 billion users. We have found Brand Awareness and Performance campaigns work well across all kinds of industries. It’s all a matter of testing and patience. Find the right mix between the two and great things are bound to happen. 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post Developing A Youtube Ads Strategy for Brand Awareness & Performance appeared first on Tuff.

If your videos are not ranking at the top of search results, you’re likely missing a few key elements in your Youtube SEO strategy. 

We know the Youtube algorithm aims to match users with the most relevant content. So how can you work with the algorithm to get your videos pushed to the top of the search results? 

That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this detailed Youtube SEO checklist.  Let’s get started!

What is Youtube SEO Exactly? 

Much like traditional search engine optimization, Youtube SEO involves a set of practices aimed at helping your content appear high in the search results. By optimizing your title tag, video description, thumbnail and other key elements (more on that below), you can attract the right viewers to your channel. 

How Does Youtube SEO Work?

If you want to rank videos on Youtube, then there’s one thing you need to understand. Yes, you guessed it. It’s The Youtube algorithm (aka the system that determines what videos appear for each user). Simply put, Youtube analyzes multiple factors from user behavior to video data to determine what videos to present to users.

Getting your videos on the results page or on the sweet real estate that is the youtube homepage requires optimizing them. But what exactly do you optimize for?  Find out below!

Optimize for Youtube Ranking Factors 

So, what is important for YouTube SEO? Well, there are multiple factors at play in the complex Youtube algorithm. 

But at the heart of the Youtube algorithm is a simple goal: Youtube aims to present each user with the videos that align with their interests AND get them to keep watching. To do this, the video platform uses multiple data points. Some of these, like what a user has watched in the past, are out of your control. 

However, the seven elements listed below are ones you do have control over. Let’s dive into these important Youtube ranking factors together!  

Titles, Tags and Descriptions

Your video title, description and tags help Youtube determine what the video is about and who to serve it to. Remember, the algorithm is working to match users with videos that are most relevant to them so filling in these details is essential. This is especially important when you first publish a video since YouTube has no data on watch time, click through rate, like to dislike ratio and other metrics. We’ll dive into some juicy title, description and tag SEO tips in the next section. 

TLDR: Youtube uses title and descriptions to determine who to serve your videos to. Keep them interesting and accurate!

Thumbnails

Think of the Youtube results page as a row of stores on a busy street. Each thumbnail is like the storefront window. Based on a quick glance, someone will determine whether to enter the store (click on your video) or walk into another store with a shinier, more enticing display (click on a competing video) . 

TLDR: Your thumbnail needs to stand out to get those clicks!

CTR (Click-Through Rate)

Speaking of clicks, let’s talk CTR. Out of all the people seeing your video in the search results, how many are clicking on it? This percentage is known as your click-through rate. Wondering how your CTR compares to other channels? Youtube shared that half of all channels and videos have an impressions CTR ranging between 2% and 10%. 

TLDR: The more people that click through to your video, the better. So make yours irresistibly clickable.

User Engagement

We’ve all heard our favorite Youtubers cheerfully reminding us to “like, comment and subscribe.” This is because user engagement is a key metric on any Youtube SEO checklist. The more comments, shares and likes your video gets, the higher your engagement rates will be. Plus, this data can help guide future video creation. 

TLDR: Don’t just tell people to share and comment. Make videos that people can’t help but engage with. 

Audience Retention

Once a user clicks on your video, what portion of it do they watch? This percentage is your audience retention rate. It’s no secret that videos with high audience retention rates tend to get prioritized in search results. In fact, Youtube admitted to “adjusting the ranking of videos in YouTube search to reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching”. 

From opening with an interesting hook to adding on-screen graphics, there are lots of ways to boost audience retention. The Youtube SEO checklist below will walk you through data-backed retention strategies.

TLDR: Hold audience interest from beginning to end to get on the Youtube algorithm’s good side. 

Watch Time

Watch time is the total amount of time users have spent watching your video since it went live. Videos with lots of accumulated watch time are more likely to be pushed high in search rankings. Holding viewers’ interest is a key component of increasing your watch time. 

TLDR: Gaining more collective eyes on a video can boost your content in rankings.

Session Time 

Remember that Youtube wants users to stay on the platform for as long as possible. Session time is the amount of time users stay on the platform in one visit. After watching your video, do they exit Youtube? Or do they stay on the platform and watch more videos?  Because Youtube generates revenue via ads, it prefers the latter. Using your current video to encourage viewers to watch others on your channel is a great way to boost session time and watch time for your channel. 

TLDR: After getting people to watch, keep them engaged! It’s a win for you and Youtube.

Youtube SEO Checklist: Before You Shoot Your Video

We’ve covered how Youtube SEO works and the key metrics in Youtube’s search and discovery algorithm. Now, here’s what to do for high ranking videos:

Perform Youtube Keyword Research 

Starting with keyword research is essential for any SEO strategy.  After all, there’s no point in optimizing a video that covers a topic no one is searching for. So how do you uncover an in demand topic in your niche?

• Use Youtube’s auto suggest feature. To learn what people are actually searching for on youtube, go straight to the source. Once you know your main idea, Youtube can help you narrow it down. 

For example, “vegan recipes” is a broad and competitive keyword. But typing the keyword into Youtube’s search bar with the word “for” provides more specific topic ideas. 

• Try Google Trends. To use it, navigate to trends.google.com and type in a topic. Then, hit enter and set the search filter to Youtube search mode. Once here, you can see the relative popularity of the term over time and analyze interest by region. 

Google Trends will even reveal related topics and queries. Sticking with our vegan recipe idea, we can see that vegan casserole, smoothie and low calorie recipes are in demand. 

• Leverage Youtube Keyword Research Tools. We’re big fans of keyword research here at Tuff. And we get by with a little help from our friends, like Tube buddy or Vid IQ. These YouTube SEO tools can help inform your video content strategy. Ahrefs also offers a Youtube search function in its Keyword Explorer tool. 

The tool filters in clickstream data to offer thousands of keyword ideas that you can filter by search volume, average clicks and phrase match. Say I notice that vegan cheese content is getting popular. I can input “vegan recipes” and filter results to include the word cheese. Ahrefs will then display related terms and their respective search volumes. 

You’ve done the work of uncovering a target keyword. Now, weave it into the title, description and content of your video. Read on to learn how to do this with maximum impact!

Create a Captivating Video Intro

Your video intro is a critical part of your Youtube SEO strategy. Here’s why: It’s common for users to click out of a video within the first 30 seconds of watching (yes, we were shocked too). This leads to low audience retention scores and, you guessed it, lower visibility in search results. To enhance your intro:

• Include your hook and value proposition early in the video 
• Tease the best part of the video at  the start 
• Experiment with different intro styles to learn what your audience prefers

In short, you need to convince your audience to continue watching your video once they click on it. 

Script Your Video Body  

Remember our keyword research from step one? This target keyword needs to be in your video. Yes, saying the keyword and related phrases is helpful for Youtube SEO. *Gasp* So Youtube SEO is about more than just placing the keyword in the title? Yup. That’s because Youtube uses speech-recognition technology to learn what your video is about and create closed captions for your viewers.

For a streamlined video that gives the viewer what they came for, write a script before you hit record. This allows you to add structure, remove unneeded information and ensure you deliver on the title.

End with an Optimized Video Outro 

Viewers tend to click away when they know the video is coming to an end. To avoid dips towards, carefully plan your outros. 

First, don’t abruptly end the video. Instead, have a bridge that naturally leads users into the next one. For example, at the end of a vegan cheesecake recipe video, urge viewers to watch your 10 best tools for vegan baking video. 

Next, leverage the end screen. This final card is a great place to promote other videos. Youtube allows you to customize your end screen  so take advantage of this area. A great end screen includes calls to action and links to relevant videos. This is important for increasing session times. 

Youtube SEO Checklist: Before Publishing The Video 

You’ve scripted, filmed and edited. Now it’s time to publish! Use the checklist below to optimize your Youtube video before it’s live.  

Create an Intriguing Video Title 

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of your video title. Youtube uses video titles as a ranking factor. Users decide whether to click on a video based on the title. Here’s how to optimize yours: 

• Include the target keyword in the title, preferably at the start
• Avoid confusing language or industry jargon that users may not know
• Ensure the title aligns with the video content (no clickbait)
• Look at titles of top performing videos and create similar ones
• Add interest to your titles power words, numbers and related keywords

Let’s compare two titles for the term “cook a vegan cake”.

This title is straightforward and aligns with user intent. But it’s not very interesting.

This title incorporates multiple related keywords that someone searching for a vegan cake may look up. A superlative like Best and a fun emoji make this title enticing to the user. 

Craft an Optimized Description 

The description box lets Youtube understand what the video is about so the algorithm can serve it to the correct users. It’s also a great place to encourage users to engage with you and your content. For a strong description: 

• Create a summary on what the video is about, including your focus keyword
• Link to any resources you mention in the video
• Include partial matches and variations of the focus keyword 
• Add timecodes  that covers the structure of the videos to improve video SEO

While the start of each description should be unique, you can end each description with a templatized blurb about your channel and links to your social media. 

Create a Captivating Thumbnail 

Remember our storefront analogy from earlier? Your thumbnail is the visual representation of your video that users can either click on (yay 🥳)  or scroll past (sigh) as they look at video options. A great thumbnail should:

• Visually complement your title
• Stand out from other top videos on the results page
• Be image focused rather than word-focused 

Let’s compare two thumbnails for the term “vegan dessert recipe”. 

This thumbnail does display the focal point of the video but it lacks any messaging around why a user should click. There are no overlays, fun fonts, or contrasting colors to add interest.

This thumbnail contains bolded words that emphasize what the user will get when they click into the video. In addition to the dessert, the human element of the men baking adds interest.

Add closed captions 

Closed captions might not spring to mind when you think of video optimization. But this feature can increase engagement among viewers, especially on mobile. Plus, having high-quality closed captions expands reach among non native speakers and those who are hard of hearing.

Youtube automatically generates captions for your videos. But these Auto Speech Recognition (ASR) captions are not always accurate. To produce the best captions, you can edit the captions or use a captioning tool. 

Post Publishing: Youtube SEO Tips 

Oh, you thought our SEO strategy was complete? Creating quality video content is essential. But there’s more you can do to give your videos a boost in Youtube search results. 

Promote Your Video

After your video goes live, it’s time for a little good old fashioned promotion. To encourage current subscribers to watch, create a community post on Youtube highlighting the new video. Repeat the process on your other social media platforms. Be sure to include an interesting angle to avoid coming off as too self-promotional. 

In this community post, Vegan focused Youtube channel Pick Up Limes promotes a new video and lets users know the value they will receive.

Use Youtube Analytics for Insights

Youtube Analytics is a treasure trove of data that you can leverage to accelerate your channel growth. In the tool, you can dive into your audience demographics to tailor your content to better serve them. You’ll also be able to analyze the key moments for audience retention to know when people are interested and when they click out of your videos.

As you can tell, there are a lot of moving parts at play when it comes to Youtube SEO. The Tuff team has the tools expertise you need to create and execute a holistic SEO strategy that engages the right users to grow your business.

The post Youtube SEO Checklist to Skyrocket Your Visibility appeared first on Tuff.

Author’s Note: We’ve given this blog post a refresh on November 2, 2023, complete with fresh information, new links, relevant data, and more.

Youtube Advertising can be an incredibly effective and efficient way to reach your brand’s target audience while diversifying your digital marketing spend. As the world’s 2nd most popular website, YouTube ads combine endless inventory opportunities with advanced targeting capabilities that enable you to reach your target audience at any stage of the funnel. Remember, this is a pool of over 2 Billion users. The opportunities are truly endless.

In this blog, we’ll look at how our team at Tuff, a YouTube Ads Agency, builds a successful YouTube marketing strategy from scratch, from audience identification to video ad campaign subtype selection, even if you’ve never managed YouTube ads before.

‘Start With Why’

A successful YouTube ad strategy begins with identifying the goals of your campaign. What are you hoping to achieve with your YouTube ad campaigns?

Put simply, a YouTube strategy can be broken down into two primary objectives:

1. Introduce the brand to targeted top of funnel audiences and optimize for low cost per views and high watch rates.
2. Retarget to a variety of audiences based on length of time since last site visit and/or site interactions, as well as YouTube video viewers while optimizing for traffic to the site & conversions. 

Maybe you want to do a bit of both – prospecting and retargeting – and this would be encouraged as YouTube ads provide the capability to efficiently target top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel audiences. With YouTube ads, a truly successful strategy requires a lot of testing, across various audience types and campaign subtypes.

Identify Your Audience Segments

Once you’ve decided on your primary campaign objectives, begin identifying the intended audience you want to reach.

To keep track of all of the audience segments you are testing, and to help visualize the full funnel of your audience targeting approach, a simple spreadsheet like the one below can help.

Here, we’ve mapped out the audience types that we want to target at each stage of the funnel, the source of the audiences, the demographics, location, campaign objective, and ad type. More than anything, putting your structure ‘on paper’ helps to keep track of all of the audiences tested and their objectives.

In Market Audiences for Youtube Videos

As mentioned earlier, the YouTube platform provides many targeting options, which makes it so effective and efficient to use. We won’t go into every single available audience or targeting option in this blog (we’ll let Google handle that), but ultimately, what works best for you and your brand will only be discovered through efficient testing.

A few ideal targeting options for testing at the brand awareness level include affinity, in-market, and custom affinity audiences. Additionally, In short, affinity audiences are Google-created interest-based audiences similar to interest targeting on social ad platforms, while in-market audiences are audiences identified by Google as having purchase intent, or being “in-market,” for a specific product or service.

Content or Placement Targeting on a Youtube Channel

Another great option that can be used for both prospecting and retargeting objectives is the ability to target users based on the content they’re browsing – keyword targeting, placement targeting and even targeting specific YouTube channels or specific YouTube videos are all great options. These can allow you to serve static ads in the YouTube search results page or video ads before, during, or after any video content the user then engages with.

This is an excellent opportunity to put a brand-focused video in front of an audience that you know has actively been searching for your targeted keywords on Google. In our extensive testing of YouTube ads, we have consistently found custom segment audiences to be an effective audience type. 

If you’re looking to re-engage an existing audience of site visitors, YouTube ads provide an attractive opportunity to expand beyond the Google Display Network and social media by staying in front of your retargeting audiences with video ads.

Generally, we think of building retargeting segments of site visitor audiences in Google Analytics and importing them into Google Ads as the recommended way of creating segmented retargeting audiences due to the advanced audience creation filters available in Google Analytics that are not available in Google Ads. However, using Google Ad’s audience creation tool gives us the ability to target recent YouTube video viewers as a retargeting audience, building further on a YouTube advertising strategy and funnel that begins with brand awareness ads at the top.

In the sheet above, you can see that we have chosen segmented audiences to test both types of retargeting audiences – site visitors and ad viewers. Further segmentation of these audiences by the length of time since visit can also help you identify how often and for how long you should be retargeting to audiences.

Beyond simplistic ‘site visitor’ audiences lies the opportunity to get more creative with retargeting. For example, consider retargeting to product viewers and/or abandoned cart users if you are advertising for an eCommerce brand. These audiences are now a lot ‘warmer’ than someone who visited the site and bounced after a page or two.

Choosing The Right Campaign Types & Measuring For Success:

After establishing your goals and identifying the audiences you want to target, the real fun of campaign creation begins. 

In line with your campaign goals and audiences, you want to choose the right YouTube campaign subtype to give yourself the best chance of success. There are lots of ways to go about this. Many different combinations and campaigns can be used to reach your business goals.

For Example, If you are looking to drive awareness and introduce your brand at a low cost per view, consider pairing some of those top of funnel audiences we discussed earlier with non-skippable in-stream ads, outstream ads, or a custom video campaign with skippable in-stream ads and bumper ads. These campaign subtypes give you the best opportunity to introduce your brand at affordable costs, while also building your retargeting lists for future campaigns.

Some of these campaign types are brand new that you may be unfamiliar with. YouTube’s explanations of each provide a good reference point for which is best to select when, but we will dive a little deeper into each as well.

Video Views

One of YouTube’s new toys is the Video Views campaign type. Video Views simplify the buying experience. You can set an average bid that you’re willing to pay for a view and Google will automatically find as many views as we can using in-feed video ads, skippable in-stream video ads, and Shorts ads. More information here from Google.

When to use: Lean into the full capability of automation with this campaign subtype.

Efficient Reach

This is somewhat of a catchall campaign type which allows you to serve ads in multiple different formats including bumper ads, skippable in-stream ads, or a mix of both ad types.

When to use: If you want to have a mix of strategies within one campaign to target both skippable and non-skippable content. Effective at reaching unique users at a low cost.

Target Frequency

One of the newest campaign types and also one of our favorites! A Target Frequency YouTube campaign is focused on making sure your potential customers see your ads more than once. You are able to set a Target Frequency, up to 4 impressions a week, and allow the campaign to optimize to this number instead of impressions, clicks, or conversions. This is a really effective campaign at reaching a top of funnel audience effectively. The more often your brand shows up in front of users, the more likely they are to remember you!

When to use: Use this campaign type for Top of Funnel Audiences when you may have a limited budget.

Non-Skippable In-Stream

These ads show up in the middle of videos and cannot be skipped. All of us who have been active on YouTube have watched countless versions of these before. This may be one of the older ways to Advertise on YouTube. It has been around for years and continues to be an effective placement in the Youtube ecosystem.

When to use: If you have a high quality 15 second video, this is an effective placement. Establish your brand within the first few seconds and use a strong CTA.

Drive Conversions

Driving conversions is nothing new when it comes to Google Ads. This is the main goal of many campaigns from all sorts of industries. YouTube is yet another channel, similar to Google Search or Social channels, that can effectively drive conversions. At a campaign level, with this campaign type, you can set which conversion action you want your Youtube Ads to focus on.

When to use: If you are looking for incremental leads or sales, this conversion campaign is for you. Strong creative is a key driver, especially in this campaign type.

Ad Sequence

As the name suggests, you can use this campaign type to show your ads in a specific sequence. This helps you reinforce your message as a brand. It is really effective in a large scale to build your brand awareness.

When to use: If you have a video series to explain your brand or tell your story, this may be the campaign subtype for you.

Audio

Audio ads are on YouTube as well! Obviously, YouTube is mainly video and will continue to dominate the video ad format for years to come, but there is also an Audio capability to take advantage of. This campaign type allows you to tap into users who are listening to podcasts, music, and other YouTube content.

When to use: When your brand has a strong call to action that can be integrated into an audio format, this campaign is effective.

Finding What Campaign Types Work for You On YouTube

Regardless of the campaign subtype you’ve selected, it’s important to identify and stick with a handful of KPIs for each level of the funnel. 

For campaigns that are awareness focused, it is best to measure your performance based on awareness metrics, such as cost per view, cost per thousand impressions, average watch times, video play-thru metrics, and cost per clicks. Remember, as we are introducing the brand, it is critical to measure success based on the interactions we would expect from someone who has never heard of your brand before. 

As you look to target further down the funnel with warmer retargeting audiences, your measurement KPIs should change and you should begin to monitor your conversion rates, view-thru conversions, and cost per conversions from your conversion-optimized campaigns more closely.

The Types of YouTube Video Ads

Google and YouTube are constantly introducing new ad types to improve the user experience for viewers and to give advertisers different ways to engage with their target audience.

Current YouTube ad types include non-skippable 6-second bumper ads, 15 second skippable ads, non skippable ads, video discovery ads, responsive video ads, audio ads, and outstream ads. Another newer placement for Youtube video ads is on Youtube Shorts. No matter the youtube ad type, you can find positive results with the right targeting, campaign creative, and testing approach that we go over here.

In order to maximize the likelihood of driving success on the YouTube advertising platform, it’s important to always be testing the newest ad types, as it’s impossible to predict what could take advantage of YouTube’s algorithm.

Optimize & Test Your Campaigns

Once you have identified some positive traction within your YouTube ads, it’s important to try to identify which factor is having the largest contribution to its’ success – is it the audience, the campaign sub-type, or the type of ad being run on YouTube? Maybe a bumper ad is serving the prospecting audience targeting very well while the responsive video ad is performing better in a retargeting campaign.

Review placements where your video ads are serving and exclude any that don’t fit your target audience. Check your audience’s demographics and how they are performing against one another, as you may be able to find more actionable insights in terms of how your audience engaged with your video ads and you can prioritize video marketing.

Your ad spend on YouTube matters! This is a helpful way to make the most of it. 

YouTube Testing Framework

Having a testing strategy for any type of digital media is incredibly important. Why put all this effort budget into your campaigns if you are not going to appropriately test certain elements of them? A proper testing framework can help answer a plethora of important questions. Which Audience performs the best? Is my video ad spend serving on the most efficient placements? How about creative! Creative testing is another key part to any video strategy. Let’s look at a really simple framework you can apply to any and all campaigns in the future to help isolate specific areas of improvement.

Classic A/B Tests

When we launch a new creative for Youtube, or want to test our new audience, we like to set up two campaigns with the exact same structure. We will keep them both at the same daily budget, the same location setting, and everything else in between. The only change will be the variable you are looking to isolate. The most common would be the video creative.

The reason it is important to set this test up in two different campaigns is for budget control. Google only allows you to control budgets at a campaign level. An a/b test needs to have the same amount of spend going to both variations for a true split.

A/B Testing Example

In this simple example from above, we can see one of Tuff’s current A/B tests at play. With the exact same spend, we are able to see some performance differences, albeit small. This is set up to test two variations of creative with different messaging. In this case, Test B is slightly more expensive than Test A. Data changes like this are indicators we can lean on when developing additional creative in the future or testing new audiences.

Planning for The Future of Youtube Advertising

Though I mentioned that Google Ads and YouTube Ads are constantly adding new ad types while making adjustments to how campaigns can be set up, it is not uncommon for them to remove an options that advertisers had found success with in the past, and it’s important to have multiple campaign sub-types, ad types, and targeting options being tested in order to maintain flexibility or the ability to pivot.

A current example of this would be the removal of content targeting options from the Responsive Video Ad type, which includes keywords, topics, and placements. We’ve found success with YouTube ads on a hefty handful of our partners here at Tuff, and targeting by keyword was always among our first targeting tests due to the amount of keyword-level data available in the Google Ads Account via search campaigns or by 3rd-party tools such as SEMrush.

Maybe the most frustrating part is that YouTube doesn’t offer a clear timeline of when this powerful targeting option will be removed, instead offering a very vague warning: “You can no longer add content targeting to video campaigns that drive conversions because it can limit campaign performance”

This is all to say that just when you think you may have cracked the code and finally perfected your one, successful youtube ad campaign, you may be thrown a curveball with an unclear timeline and be left scrambling!

In order to mitigate this as much as possible, it’s beneficial to have multiple YouTube ads campaign and ad live or being tested so that you aren’t kicked back to square one.

Your Youtube Ads Strategy Matters

YouTube’s advertisement engine is highly efficient and can be modified to make your ads more effective and more appealing. You have access to over 2 billion potential customers. The opportunity here is endless, regardless of the industry. However, your video ads’ success will also depend upon how effectively they reach the target audience.

Although we didn’t touch on creative in this blog post – an obvious key component to finding success as a YouTube Ads Agency – you can dive deeper into this blog post regarding channel specific ad creative best practices from Tuff’s genius Creative Strategist, Elle Ossello, to get insight on how to develop successful, high-performance ad creative.

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post How To Build a YouTube Ad Strategy From Scratch [Updated] appeared first on Tuff.

It’s no secret that YouTube Ads are extremely effective if done right. The perfect combination of quality video creative with strong targeting can help a business achieve its online marketing goals, whether that is to increase brand awareness or increase on-site conversions. 

While placement targeting options such as channel, video, and topic targeting are all great options to reach your specific target on YouTube, YouTube audience targeting is also incredibly effective. But, going beyond Google, creating affinity and in-market audiences, and leveraging powerful Custom Audiences may help you achieve your best results – and, potentially save some money on expensive search terms. 

What are Custom Audiences?

Custom Audiences on Google can be created using recent keyword searches. However, only campaign types with placements entirely on Google-owned properties, such as YouTube campaigns, have the availability to create Custom Audiences that are created with people using keywords recently searched on Google. On non-Google owned properties, such as websites opted into the Google Display Network that your ad may show on, the Custom Audience is created with people with any of the search term interests or purchase intentions. 

When creating audiences using keywords, you have two options: create an audience using your branded keywords, or create an audience using non-branded keywords. 

When To Try Custom Audience Targeting on YouTube

With the ability to target the people who are searching for your targeted keywords in a potentially more cost-effective way, Custom Audience targeting is an exciting and effective audience type, particularly for industries with high search CPCs. This is often the case with non-branded keywords. 

Imagine, you are getting your best performance out of your non-branded search campaigns, but CPCs continue to rise. How else can you continue to get in front of people actively searching for your keywords if you don’t want to pay for ever-increasing search campaigns CPC prices? By creating a Custom Audience out of your non-branded keyword targets, and targeting this audience on YouTube, of course!

Additionally, if you already have video assets, this strategy is a no-brainer. To prove it, check out this example from a test we recently ran for our partner, Team Bootcamp. Team Bootcamp had already been highly successful at advertising their ‘Anatomy Bootcamp’ all-in-one online study tool with YouTube by targeting a list of highly matched YouTube channels. 

When looking to scale this success on YouTube and increase the volume of free trial sign ups, I knew that we would have to look for additional targeting options available. At the same time, we also had been testing a non-branded search campaign on Google that was yielding very promising conversion rates, but high CPCs, resulting in a cost per conversion that was higher than we were comfortable paying for. Enter our non-branded Custom Audience test!

To target those same keywords that we had proven to convert with search, we created a Custom Audience of non-branded keywords using the keywords that delivered the best results from our search campaign. 

Here is what the audience creation process looks like. As you can see, you simply plug in your keywords and Google will also provide audience insights on the right hand side.

(Although Google recommends creating a Custom Audience using 50 or more search terms, I have actually seen better results when creating the audience using 5 terms or less.).

Before even spending $100, we saw excellent results, with a cost per conversion of less than a third of the cost from the search campaign. The combination of winning video creative with a highly targeted audience was producing great results. This signaled to us it was time to invest a greater percentage of our monthly ad budget in the YouTube campaign.

What If You Don’t Have Video Assets?

If you don’t have video assets but would like to try out a Custom Intent audience made up of actual search terms and not just “purchase interests,” you can still achieve this through using a campaign type with placements only on Google-owned properties, such as Gmail or Discovery. In fact, running a Google Discovery Ads campaign will also get you placements on YouTube mobile, without even needing a video ad.

This is a strategy we leveraged for Tuff partner, Dial + Bezel. When helping Dial + Bezel launch their brand new website and watch auction platform, we wanted to attract an engaged audience, but after testing a non-branded search campaign, we knew it wouldn’t be sustainable for this start-up to pay a premium on search CPC clicks. 

Instead, we again leveraged a non-branded Custom Audience and used it to target people searching for the keywords we tried paying for on search. Not only did we see CPCs of one-tenth of search, we saw on-site performance that was nearly identical, indicating that we were hitting the targeted audience that we wanted to hit, without having to pay for search CPCs.

Even if you don’t have video assets and therefore can’t advertise on YouTube, you can still find your audience, and good results, using Custom Audiences on Discovery.

Conclusion

As the competition continues to increase year-over-year for placements in the top 4 results of Google Search ads, costs continue to rise for clicks across multiple industries. Although search campaigns have the highest intent targeting available, they also often have the highest costs. Utilizing Google’s Custom Audiences on Google-owned properties such as YouTube can give you the ability to reach your desired audience without breaking the bank.

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post Non-Branded Custom Intent Targeting on YouTube: Cut Your CPCs by 50% appeared first on Tuff.