Welcome to YouTube Ads
You’re running YouTube ads and they’re not working, or you’re thinking of running YouTube ads but before you start dumping in your hard-earned cash, you want to make sure you know what you’re doing reasonably well. We’re going to talk about the top six things that you want to avoid when running YouTube ads.
Benefits of Advertising on YouTube
Advantages of YouTube Ads
There are several advantages to advertising on YouTube, making it a powerful tool whether you’re a one-person show or you’re running a large business. So, what benefits can you expect when running YouTube ads?
High Conversion Rates of YouTube Ads
You’ll be happy to know that a good conversion rate for an e-commerce page when looking at Google Analytics is often 1 to 3%. For a YouTube ad campaign, a good conversion rate is usually over 12%. This is according to LinkedIn, and I think that this speaks a lot to the power that this advertising platform can harness as a business.
Massive Reach and Targeted Advertising of YouTube Ads
Advertising on YouTube can be so beneficial because it allows for massive reach. YouTube has a huge audience with billions of users logging on every month, so it is a great platform to get your business in front of a large audience. But not just any large audience—you can strategically choose who you’ll advertise to with targeted advertising right down to the specific demographics, interests, and even viewing history and the types of videos they typically watch.
Engaged Audience
One thing that I love about YouTube advertising is that, unlike any other platforms, the audience is highly engaged. With other platforms, a user might be multitasking or maybe they’re like mindlessly scrolling, but YouTube’s audience is so dialed in to the point where they’re on the couch with their full attention on the screen. This increases the chances of your ad being seen and remembered.
Tips for Effective YouTube Ads
Tip No. 1: Setting Up Conversion Tracking
We’re going to start off nice and easy, guys. This first tip is a red bell pepper—no spice whatsoever. When you’re setting up your YouTube ads, you want to make sure that your conversion tracking is set up right. Imagine setting this up wrong and not having the right information about how your ads are performing and the ROI. That would not be good. There is money involved here, okay guys, so we want to make sure that we’re setting this up to perfection.
The main things we want to check are that one, we have our Google Tag Manager tags. These conversion tracking pixels log whenever a user completes a desired action, and how Google knows what a desired action is, is through conversion actions. So, number two, you want to make sure that you have these set up. Then Google understands whether you want a purchase or a sign-up or whatever, but make sure sure sure sure that everything is good and in working order before. So, you want to test your work—test your conversion tracking using Google Tag Assistant or simulate conversions to ensure that data is flowing correctly between your website, GTM, and Google Ads. Red bell pepper done, guys.
The other day, I actually realized that red, yellow, and orange bell peppers taste the exact same. I closed my eyes, and they were the exact same. I thought red was my favorite, but all along, it turns out that we’re living in The Matrix. Anyone ever noticed that?
Tip No. 2: Ensuring Sufficient Data
Okay, guys, we’re turning up the heat for this one. This next one is a shishito pepper—one in every 10 are spicy. Did you know that it’s like roulette? Okay, focus, Michelle. The reason that your YouTube ads might not be working is because you might not have enough data. Maybe you run your ads for a little while, and then you’re like, “Ah, you’re scared.” You know, you get nervous, you turn them off. If you’re not giving your campaigns enough time or spending enough money to collect that data that is needed, then YouTube can’t determine if your ads are effective and optimize accordingly. You know what I mean? The YouTube ads won’t be able to be added.
So, how do you make sure that you give it enough data? Okay, first, you want to try starting with broad targeting. Wider audience targeting options allow the algorithm to gather data on who responds best to your ads.
After you let that run and you have some data in the bank, you can refine your targeting. Then, at this phase, use insights from your campaign reports to segment your audience based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.
This allows you to focus your ads on users that are most likely to convert. You want to be patient, you want to give it time, okay, party people? Don’t be expecting a barn burner on the first day of running your ads. Did I just say barn burner? Who talks like this? But don’t expect immediate results is basically what I’m trying to say. It takes time for the algorithm to gather data and to learn what works best for your specific campaign. Is anyone feeling the heat a little bit? It’s getting a little spicier here.
Creating Effective Landing Pages
Tip No. 3: Optimizing Your Landing Page
Okay, so we just jumped to a sano pepper now. When I was a wee thing, I tried my first sweet chili hot Dorito. Have you guys ever tried those? I was like 10, so naturally, I coughed from the spice, and I just remember my dad cracking up. That was not the Mexican he raised me to be—not handling a Dorito, no sir. And I have not coughed from spice since that day.
Importance of a Perfect Landing Page
So, before running your ads, you want to make sure that your landing page is perfect, perfect, perfect. Because if you have a killer ad and then the landing page is looking weak or untrustworthy or like, God forbid, not mobile optimized—what is this, 1999? Our potential customers might just, you know, get the ick. They might leave, and we want to make sure that we’re not losing money. So, you want to avoid not having a good landing page that is optimized for sales.
Examples of Strong Landing Pages
This, this, and this are all examples of strong landing pages. This is not, this is not, this is not. So, how can you make landing pages that look like this and not like this? Highlight benefits, not just features. Like, focus on the why. So, instead of listing features like, “This water bottle is compact,” you want to emphasize the benefits and the positive outcomes users will experience, like, “This water bottle is the perfect cup holder size, so you’ll never have a spill again.” Oh, you see? We’re bringing up the spice. That one was just off the dome. I like that.
Also, you want high-quality videos, a super catchy headline and subhead, and guys, while we’re speaking of text, no massive paragraphs. Now, I know that’s so hard because we just have so much we want to say, but you want to keep it point form. And of course, add testimonials, ratings, and reviews to add credibility. It might be your landing page that is hindering your sales. So, if you keep those tips in mind, you’ll be great. Heat up, chocolate habanero. That sounds literally delicious, but this one is spicy because it’s not cut and dry, guys. It’s not step by step. You need to be a problem solver and an analyzer. You have to let the data tell you a story.
Analyzing Your Sales Funnel
Tip No. 4: Identifying Drop-Off Points
So, the tip is this: you must look to your funnel to see where people are dropping off. Then, you want to make optimizations to your messaging and offer for improved conversion rates. For example, let’s say Michael is a fitness enthusiast, and he’s determined to grow his YouTube channel. Let’s pretend he’s super excited to have invested in creating YouTube ads, and initially, Michael was happy with the number of clicks he had generated.
But upon closer inspection of the data, he realized that viewers were clicking away just seconds into the ad before even seeing the full messaging about his program. So now, it’s up to Mike to infer why these people are clicking away. He thought, “Maybe the moves I’m showing at the beginning of the ad look too hard, and beginners are intimidated.” So, he created a new ad that started by acknowledging the challenges that beginners face. With that, Mike was able to significantly reduce the click-away rate and increase the number of viewers who watch the entire ad.
So, you can see why this could be hard. You know, sometimes it’s hard to tell with certainty what the issue is, and often it’s not going to be something that you can even Google, right? You need to use your common sense and experience to make your ads better over time. The key is to find one thing at a time that you want to improve and use your best guess as to what might be causing you issues. Do this by pulling one lever at a time so that you can be sure that that lever that you pulled was directly correlated with the outcome.
Promoting Shopify
Shopify for Online Sales
If you’re using YouTube ads, you might have something to sell—just a guess. And if you have something to sell but aren’t selling online yet, then you might want to consider Shopify. So, Shopify is an online store builder that helps you sell products and services to anyone, anywhere in the world. So, if that sounds good to you, I will leave you guys the link for a free trial in the description box. The trial truly is free, and it’ll let you play around so that you can see if you like it. But yeah, guys, this is a Shopify-powered channel, which is why I bring it up, but not even the only reason I bring it up is because I personally like it. I recommend it to my friends and family, and I personally just think it’s a great product.
Creating Effective Ad Creatives
Tip No. 5: Structuring Your Ad Creative
The ad creative might not be hitting, and this next tip on how to make great ad creative is a Carolina Reaper—okay, guys, not for the faint of heart because we are back in subjective land. If you’re seeing that your campaigns are running out of budget, if you can help it, try not to pause it even though it might feel scary. One of the best signs that your campaign has the potential to scale is that the only thing that’s holding it back is budget limitations.
Or, in other words, if you could put more money into the campaign, YouTube will spend it to continue to make your ads successful by hitting your CPA targets. At that point, YouTube is going to give you recommendations for what you should increase your budget to. Of course, up to you to decide whether you have the cash flow to support these suggestions, but rule of thumb is you want to spend money on the campaigns that are making you money.
Ad Structure and Length
Structure: So, ads should follow a five-part structure: hook, promise, call to action, proof, and call to action again. Length of your video matters. Check your data to see where people are dropping off, and that will indicate where your audience’s attention span lies. And of course, testing—it’s important to test different variations of your ad to see what performs best. Be mindful also of how you write your headlines.
You can call out a duration like, “See results in 28 days,” and in your headlines, you can speak to a benefit as well, like, “Lose weight, gain muscle,” for example. Use a power word or power words like, uh, “challenge,” “transformation.” These are going to evoke emotion and urgency, and that is a wrap. That is a chicken Caesar wrap, hold the hot peppers because we’re tapped out, and hold the chicken too because I don’t like chicken unless it’s fried.
Personal Story
Pickleball Experience
Speaking of fried, guys, the other day I absolutely fried my body. So, okay, I have been obsessed with pickleball—fastest growing sport in America. And the other day, I was on the court for two hours. So, I got paired up with a gentleman, and he started telling me how to play.
Okay, and at first, I was like, I was annoyed, right? I got into feminist mode, but then I was like, “To myself, okay, listen, he’s just trying to help,” and I was like, “Okay, lean into it, lean into it.” This could be good, and I did. I fully leaned into it because the next thing you know, two hours go by, and this retired tennis teacher was basically giving me a free lesson. He was like, “Use your core.” Can you guys picture this? He was like, “Use your core,” and I was like, “That means nothing to me.” But then, like two hours later, I was in fact using my core, and my skills just went up.
