Are You Hurting Your YouTube Ads?

When you run YouTube ads this way, they will succeed.

So YouTube is a very expensive network.

It's one of the most expensive networks when you're talking about, , the

time it takes to achieve a goal.

However, when it gets up and running, it is a powerhouse.

Google, if you're listening, I'm basically an influencer now.

So if you'd like to gimme some free ad spend, I would love that.

Uh, when you're talking.

Short snippets in getting a top of funnel offer or top of funnel product to an

audience, and then you can actually start to measure successes in different ways.

So this thing was growing from 37 to 369 without it being touched.

Hey everyone.

John Moran here, and today we're discussing YouTube ads and YouTube shorts.

Some things to look for to achieve success, how long you should give

it before you should start measuring it, and what are some best practices

in order to make sure that you have the best chance to achieve the goal.

So we're gonna dive right in and Google, if you're listening, I'm basically an

influencer now, so if you'd like to gimme some free ad spend, I would love that.

So first thing that we were gonna be discussing is cost.

So YouTube is a very expensive network.

It's one of the most expensive networks when you're talking about, , the

time it takes to achieve a goal.

However, when it gets up and running, it is a powerhouse.

Now what you'll see here on the screen is one example that we ran from

October, , through still running it today.

This is a YouTube shorts campaign actually.

, there's gonna be some things hidden here on the screen that I can't share

with you just because it's a, , client's actual account, but YouTube short.

Run very, very well.

, when you're talking about short snippets in getting a top of funnel offer or top of

funnel product to an audience and that you can actually start to measure successes

in different ways, what do I mean by that?

Well, first thing that you're gonna wanna do is make sure that

your conversion action is set up for engaged view conversion.

Now, what is an engaged view conversion you may ask?

Well, great question and I'm happy to answer that.

Sorry, I get kind of nerdy here by myself in my room.

, but the Engage view conversion window, I usually like to have this set two 30 days.

And what this does is it allows you to see the people who have

watched an ad for longer than 10 seconds, but that not click on it.

but still converted within the conversion window, which is for me 30 days.

I like long attribution.

I use also, many different ways to measure attribution.

I use Google, I use GA four.

I use still ua, I use Nor Beam.

There's a lot of different ways you can measure attribution.

However, the more attribution you give Google, the more it

sees, the more it can optimize.

There's no reason to not give.

A long conversion window for it in order to, or for it to see

that it's, it's paramount to the success of any campaign in Google.

It's a self-learning algorithm.

This is what's helping teach it.

So an engage view conversion window of 30 days is great to start with.

You can later on move it down if you want to get more tactical.

I don't have a reason for it.

, again, because I measure attribution in different ways.

But here's something that's really interesting is, , October 1st through.

The 13th just cuz of latent conversions.

And so you'll see that the costs stay the same.

Now when I say expensive, it is fairly expensive.

We started at $500 , a day.

We've actually just moved this up to a thousand dollars a day.

You can scale this up pretty hard and pretty quickly when in by

doubling the Aspen when has achieved this success and this line of.

You'll see the red line of conversions start to increase.

But I'll share with you some, some quick tips too that, that I think

is really, really interesting.

And then I have another account that I'm gonna share with you that

actually shows a latent conversion in a very easy to view window.

And what that means is start to see when the conversions have originally started to

occur versus when they actually occurred.

So it's almost like the clicks versus time attribution.

But here's the $500 a day.

The $500 a day, when you start off, it is going to hemorrhage cash.

Now, it's not actually hemorrhaging cash, it's warming up the audience.

But in order for you to start to see those conversions, you need to

spend that money for long enough to be able to warm them up, get them

to convert, and then identify, aha.

It may have taken.

You know, let's say one or two or even three weeks to get these conversions.

When Google, starts to see those conversions is when it will then

identify the audiences that it is working with and start to narrow down.

Now, from October through January 13th, we spent 47,000 and made

116 k, well, for a 2.53 ro, and this is a cold traffic audience.

These audiences, for example, go in here.

Just kind give you, give you a quick.

again, the, the client name is hidden, so it's not something that we're going

to be, , gonna , violating anything.

But what you'll see is there's a lot of custom segments here.

So these custom segments are converting keywords, an AdWords

optimized list, a shampoo and conditioner, like converting keywords.

, there's a bunch of things here that we can actually identify as a custom mix.

Now, I usually like to use custom mixes or even.

The InMarket Infinities.

If you don't have a custom mix, those do work very well.

Sometimes they're just a little bit slower to converse because

they're a really cold audience that has a little bit less direction.

So custom mixes work very well.

The more signals, I guess you would say, kind of talking in pmax terms that you

can give a YouTube campaign, the better.

However, you don't necessarily have to have, 10 or 15 ever changing ads.

That's the.

I see most agencies make is it'll take five ads.

They'll run it for a week, and then they'll change it again.

That's wrong.

Don't do that.

You're, what you're doing is you're resetting the learning of that algorithm.

Think of it like a child going to school in second grade and learning math, and

then after two weeks you switch it.

Schools and you switch, , now to science and be like, why aren't you learning?

, it's needs time to grow.

It needs time to identify those audience, see those conversions,

and then start to retarget more, not retarget, start to optimize the

targeting of those audiences and move in.

, I'm gonna share with you something that's, really interesting

here is, this is what I mean by touching it less and less and less.

If I look at this campaign here and I look at the change history, the change

history in this campaign here, you'll see that I made, I started my campaigns, I

made a couple changes on the fourth and from the 25th on what you'll see here,

, October 25th, from October 25th on.

I made zero changes.

So you see zero changes and it's gonna grow from 37 conversions, fifty one,

a hundred fifty, and , now December 50, even after, , black Friday, summer

Monday, the first week of January.

Now this is the January 9th, so it doesn't ha it hasn't, . Been accumulated

just yet because of latent convergence.

But even after Black Friday, summer Monday, Christmas, all the good

stuff, Annika and Closet, all of the gift giving, it's now at 369.

So this thing was growing from 37 to 369 without it being touched.

This is what it mean by a self-learning algorithm.

don't judge your Google Ads team based on did they go in and start pressing

random buttons just for the sake of going in and pressing random buttons.

You will lose.

You're gonna, , win the day because, Charging by the

hour or whatever it may be.

But just make sure that there's very specific reasons why we

don't touch things on purpose.

So just I wanted to share that with you.

It's a self-learning algorithm.

You need to set up correctly first time, then give it time you don't wanna

change the daily ad spend too much.

, if you can, you need to just simply give it time.

You'll notice here there's a, cost here.

This cost has stayed the same all the way from three conversions up to 74.

Why is this important?

Is because if you start to reduce costs or start to increase cost, you're

asking it to learn slower or faster.

Any YouTube campaign, even if I pull up this one over here, any

YouTube campaign is going to start off slow and then build up time.

If you keep the cost consistent, you will get consistent results.

Again, this, this one here, , if I just look at the, the change history,

just to kind of prove that it's not just, hey, like you got a random fluke.

This is a very, , I so this one here, I started it, I made,

, four, , targeting changes here.

I just removed a couple audiences that were working

very well and just gave it time.

Now, what you'll see here is what I'm talking about with the latent conversions.

It looks like I have 24 conversions on August 5th.

. Now check this out here.

This is really, really, really interesting to see and I think that

this is something that, , is a really good indicator of why you give it time.

There's two ways to measure Google conversions and

conversion by conversion time.

Conversion by conversion time means when do they actually

convert conversions means.

What was the action taken that ultimately led to a conversion, but given back

to the last point of the action.

So if it takes seven days to convert means on day one, I clicked on an ad.

Day seven I bought conversions.

We'll give it back to day one, conversion back to time, we'll give it day seven.

So what this means is when you're looking at here, for example,, I had 24

conversions that ultimately converted after the fifth that started on the.

That's why there's 24 conversions.

But at the time when I'm watching my campaigns, I only had five

conversions, so I'm doing five times.

On the second day that what I can measure or see, I just couldn't do

that until I give it enough time.

You'll see the conversion by conversion type starts to grow, but what this

means is that day one, or sorry, let's say day two, these conversions,

these 24 may have happened on, you know, the ninth and then the.

15th and then the 20th, and then the 26th and then the 30th.

You'll actually see that this has worked right since day one, which is why I don't

touch things cuz we set things up fairly well from the beginning and I just have

to have faith that it's going to work and we give it enough time and Aspen in

order to give, in order for this to work.

Now we're, we're spending a good amount.

I think we're spending like $2,000 a day.

Again, it's expensive, but this one is actually learning faster

because it's four times more expensive than the other campaign.

Spending $500 a.

Why is that happening?

Well, Google is going to optimize the same amount for the same activity

over a given period of time, but the speed is dependent upon Aspen.

So if I spend $500 a day or $2,000 a day, , it's still gonna basically take me the

same amount of, you know, views, clicks, and conversions in order for to optimize.

It's just gonna happen four times slower.

We're at $500 a day rather than $2,000 a day.

It's going to optimize the same.

It's just, you have to choose how long do you want to, how long do you want to.

So when we're looking at this conversions here, we know that we

were successful right off the bat.

We just needed to wait like two weeks in, quote unquote hemorrhage cash

in order for us to prove this model.

Now, check this out.

Let's say we look at the August 4th, the first, , week from the

fourth through the 10th, and the fourth through the 10th here.

And I know it might be blurry and it's gonna be a little bit hard to identify

here, but you'll see a row as of 10% and a cost per conversion of 725.

That looks.

Now let's fast forward to the last week.

, I think it was, let's just do it like this here.

725 goes down to 115.

That's a big jump.

A $700 cost per conversion to 115.

And this is YouTube attribution, which is not that great, and a is a 85%

now in cold traffic YouTube campaigns to get a close to a one x return.

I don't even know what the next.

How long we, we did it for last, , last, last week?

Yeah.

It, it jumped down here.

Um, $23 conversion, 388, whereas, uh, we stopped that on a second.

So lemme just do, , lemme do a fair view of 27 to the second.

That should be a full week.

, but then now we're getting close to, close to one x return for last week at $95.

So $700 down to 95.

What did I do?

Nothing.

Gave it time.

I gave it time and I gave it the right audiences and , I left it to, to its own.

Now the other part too, again, I can't share with you the actual ad, but

the learnings there, you'll see here.

, when I look at what worked and I give it enough time when I'm

talking about the, you know, many times the, the gurus out there that

says like, Hey, start with 15 ads.

Make sure they're all, , at least 45 seconds with it.

Yeah, , that helps.

It's about 10 to 15% of the overall goal, though 85% is actually optimization

and targeting that you give it at a time That and the ad spend that you

give it in order to achieve success.

I have like 25 of these case studies, so I can go all day.

But this is what I learned, and this is just a really good way to show this.

There's only two videos here.

These are both YouTube shorts.

These YouTube shorts went from two conversions up to 74

conversions just by giving it time.

And I can see that each one of these campaigns, I have

a CPA and a $20 cpa and the.

Let's just say 14 days here.

. Right now I'm spending 7,600 to make, , 29,000.

Great.

That's a really good return.

, that this thing is just crank it.

Cost reviews three pennies, like it's, rock and rolling.

If I was gonna make a change to this, I would simply just add more videos.

I would not actually touch these at all.

Don't touch 'em.

Google found something it likes and it's gonna scale this thing to the moon, which

is why we've taken our clicks and our, our costs so much from 500 to a thousand.

We just ramped it up as of yesterday.

So I wanted to make this video cuz , it's really good to see how this works.

Now let's talk about the type of conversions that you're tracking.

This is the important part.

Remember when I, we first started the video and I talked about

the conversion action, which is the engage view conversion.

That is actually a big factor here.

First thing you want to do to identify what's actually going on is go by

segment and then go into conversions, and then go into the conversion.

You're gonna go into ADD event.

What ad event type is going to share with you is what are the conversions

coming in from clicks, and what are the conversions coming in from?

Engaged views?

Again, engaged views are different than view through engage view means

that they watch it for longer than 10 seconds and did not skip the

ad, and then ultimately within the timeframe window from that attributed.

, attributed campaign or like attributed video convert without clicking on it.

We all know that people watch YouTube videos.

We all know that people watch YouTube shorts.

They're like the new TikTok.

People watch YouTube shorts, but they don't click on it.

I've never clicked on a YouTube short ad.

I don't believe anybody out there in internet land as actually either.

If we're, , kind of just being honest with ourselves.

We've all seen YouTube ads.

We've all seen YouTube shorts.

Rarely do they get clicks, but they work.

It's the modern day tv.

It works.

people haven't changed their buying habits over the last a hundred years.

We just changed the marketing medium as as to which to deliver that message.

This is no different.

It's very, very, very standard.

It's billboard or tv.

We can actually track if someone watch the video and convert it though

much better than TV and billboard.

And that's what I love about this.

But we can't say, well, the roaz is off.

, maybe by 25% of this cut budget, you're not gonna see the halo effect on latent

conversions and also the return traffic through direct, organic, and then brand

and then email signups at ultimately convert water two months later.

So please measure accordingly.

This is what you're going to want to look for when you look and see that

the clicks, I had 66 conversions and $3,200 in conversion value.

Now that doesn't look great for $7,600.

That's okay.

The people that you'll see here engage view conversion, when a user

watches your video for at least 10 seconds and then either installs,

the app, performs a web or in app action within the conversion window.

So is this the, the attributed conversion that this, , the campaign that attributed

the conversion that got the person.

. The good part is too, is when you're using cold traffic audiences,

these are a lot of new customers.

There will be some repeat in there.

Absolutely.

, we're Google's too horrible at, audience targeting in order to remove those users.

, you could block existing customers, but Google's been losing more

and more and more of the ability to actually leverage audiences.

So just know that this is going to be a factor.

Sticking to more cold traffic, non-branded, you know, non remarketing

audience, non cross pollinated office, , audiences like from Facebook or Instagram

or TikTok or you know, whomever.

Is going to put you in the best position for success and

scalability and conversions.

When you start to see those conversions coming that grow and

put those cold traffic, then that's a very good position to be in.

So you see that this Engage view conversion has 611 conversions and you

see that they're actually starting to be split with other conversions, and then

we'll see the 26,000 conversion value.

That's something that we can measure.

And then if you also looked at the engage view conversions on the other

types of campaigns, , see if I.

Let's see if I can show this.

Yeah, it's, I can't show this, but this is the brand campaign here.

That's why it's 14 grand for a hundred K.

It's easy peasy, but we can actually have engage view conversions

that are starting to hear.

What this is, is split conversions of people that watched the YouTube ad for

longer than 10 seconds and then went and googled the brand name and then clicked

on the brand campaign and converted.

This is not going to be all of them again, attribution is horrible inside of Google.

You're gonna have to use, you know, Kind of third party attribution if you

really wanted to dig down into the actual conversion path from click and view.

But notice that there's actually starting to have some overlap between like a Pmax

campaign and overlap between branded.

So some takeaways, give it enough time.

, it's, a three month time period is actually a fairly good test,

especially if you have a lower daily.

When I say lower, I mean two to $300 a day, not like, Don't run this

for under a hundred dollars a day.

If you're gonna, if you're gonna not give us six months

or a year, , it's so finicky.

That it needs to find its own audiences and its own.

And I say, when I say own audience, its own audiences

inside of your targeting settings.

And when that happens and it starts to scale, it works well.

So give it enough time and enough ad spend for it to do its job.

It is self-learning.

You are not in control at all.

Google is.

I don't care if you say, Hey, I've made three different ads.

I swap it on Tuesday.

, you're not gonna win.

Google will will always win.

Market will win.

You need to leverage the assets given to you by Google.

Not try to fight it for the sake of just pressing buttons.

Make sure that you do have a good enough video.

And I, I don't mean like professionally produced, you know,

a hundred million video, just to have something that is pleas.

to the audience that you're gonna share to.

So if you had a person sitting next to you that you know as a target

audience, be like, Hey, check this out.

They'd be like, oh, that's pretty cool.

Nailed it.

You did your job.

Just have to have something interesting length, obviously for YouTube.

Shorts.

Need it under a minute.

Everything else doesn't matter.

it does not matter what the length.

If you find the right audience, they will listen.

They will be interested.

No one's ever said, man, that is an amazing product.

But it's a six minute video.

I'm.

people spend 10 minutes at a store picking an item off the shelf and they're looking

at it . So , don't worry about that.

If you find the right audience, length of time does not matter.

So always look for, , , your sort , , initial key indicators.

Click the rate above half a percent is a really good indicator view.

About 22% is a real good indicator, , that it's gonna start to start to succeed.

But when you run YouTube ads this.

They will succeed.

, but everyone normally stops three feet from gold or they don't understand

us well enough to either try themselves or teach their clients.

I'm John Moran.

If you like this video, please, , leave a, a like or a comment

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, if you're not already a subscriber, I really appreciate it and thank you