Transcription
[Music] Hello, and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaer, and today I have a treat for you: the very popular Joey Bidner is here today to talk about Google Ads, specifically the YouTube part of Google Ads. That's the whole discussion today. You're in for a treat because Joey is going to be sharing deep strategy ideas and very specific tactics and advice that, uh, I mean, you're not going to hear anywhere else.
So, if you're new here, this is what the podcast is: every week I share Google Ads information with you to try and help you get more out of your Google Ads, to do better at Google Ads, to manage your clients or spend your own money more wisely in Google Ads as much as you can. So, in order to do this podcast, I do have a sponsor, which I would appreciate if you helped me by checking out the sponsor, opt.com/PSP. So, Opto is an online software helped, uh, designed to help you get more out of your Google Ads. If you need someone to help you find critical issues, errors, problems, major deficiencies in your keywords, your bids, your ads, your strategy overall, this system is designed to find those for you. It's an analytical tool that connects to your Google Ads and makes it work more efficiently. It is a phenomenal tool, and you can try this tool for free at my special link at opt.com/PSP. The link is in the description. You can get two months for free of this software, which which which I personally recommend. I I I I I I like this software. I use this software, and it does a lot. Joey has been on the show many times; he's talked about the software; uh, it's it's a really easy-to-use software, and and I enjoy it. There's nothing else like it. You can get uh, eight weeks, eight weeks for free at opt.com/PSP.
All right, and with us is the Joey Bidner. Joey, thank you so much for being here. We're going to talk about YouTube strategy and all kinds of great tips. You always bring great tips, and not only is uh, Joey been busy with Google Ads, you've been growing your family; you've been, you know, expanding the world more than just with job creation, right? We both are job creators. That's what that's what I tell my wife: I'm a job creator; you're a you're a life creator now.
Yeah. Yeah. Again, thanks for having me on the show. But yeah, I had my first child, uh, my son Noah joined our family, and then also just to make life fun and exciting, we also moved uh, back to Canada, where I'm originally from. So yeah, it's been a really busy few months, um, for sure, and I'm just yeah, happy, happy to be back on the on the show.
All right, well, great. Well, let's uh, let's jump into it. Joey, you're you're going to talk about YouTube. You're going to talk about strategy, so I I know that this is important. I I'll hand it off to you because I know you never come to the show empty-handed; you have a plan, and I love it. Make my job easy. So, ready, set, go.
Yeah, so, um, goes to YouTube. There's a lot we're going to cover today. First, I want to start off by talking about the different cases on when YouTube makes sense, because it's not something that like every account should just have. I have a few scenarios where I recommend YouTube; we're going to talk about that. We're also going to go into the the theory of YouTube, because it requires a bit of a a shift of perspective, because it's measured differently; it's approached differently; it's very different than search or shopping, so we want to talk about the theory a bit. We're also going to cover KPIs, the key performance indicators, how to measure performance, because th like I'm going to talk about completely different columns that you probably didn't even know existed, and that's what we use to observe trends in our YouTube performance. And then we'll finish off with talking about types of creative. Um, I have a bit of a four- or five-pronged approach on what type of creative works in YouTube and using them together to really like tell a story. So, in summary, that's yeah, that's what we're going to go over.
Okay, awesome. Well, I I I I think that your very first prompt there about what you what you said about when to use YouTube, that's that's one thing I I get a question a lot is: should I devote any budget towards YouTube? Because, as you know, most Google Ad search campaigns need more budget anyway, so I always have a hard time pulling any money from YouTube and putting it um, or from search and putting it into YouTube. So, what what's your thoughts on when to use YouTube?
So, yeah, I kind of have three scenarios. The first one, the most common one, is when a product requires education. Right? People might be, you know, are likely have the need for the product, but they're not searching it yet, because either they don't know it exists or they don't know what to search. So, I'll give you an example like um, I had a client that sells a stop-infusion travel mug for loose-leaf tea. There's no question that loose-leaf tea drinkers want would be happy to drink tea on the go, but they're not searching like they they likely don't know that product exists or they don't know what to search for: stop-infusion travel mug. So, we use YouTube to target people who are interested in tea, and we show them how awesome this travel mug is, is that you can you know, infuse it, infuse your tea on the go, stop it, reinuse it, put it in your bag, it's not going to spill, all that information, right? And it's high-funnel education for your product. Um, so that's the first one; that's the most common. Um, the second, which I find the most interesting, is when you have really, really high-competitive, high-CPC industries. So, for example, software as a service, SaaS companies, right? I'm talking forty, fifty dollar CPCs. Bottom of the funnel is a dog fight, yeah. Um, and it's not to say that it doesn't work, but you can often get really like incremental profitability by just going a little bit higher funnel, right? Where we're going to target people that you know are interested in this category; you warm up the traffic by getting in front of them visually, and then maybe even been um, targeting with like less bottom-of-the-funnel terms like it's it can just be a dog fight to put 100% of your budget into those forty-dollar CPCs, where you can generate a lot of high-quality traffic higher up the funnel. So, I find that works really well. Now, that strategy does require again a bit of a a mental shift, because you usually need to implement like a we call a lead magnet strategy, which maybe we'll talk about in another episode, but um, that's also how I'm using it for B2B at least, is high-CPC, um, high-competitive industries.
And this is largely driven, I assume, when clients, you know, don't have tens of thousands of dollars to throw at it, you know. So, you know, if if if they are highly funded, maybe perhaps they should jump into the dog fight at the very bottom of the funnel, but but if they're trying to get a toe in, this might be a more appropriate way when their budget is not fully capable of competing in that environment.
Yeah, or or in the context of let's say they they do have a decent budget or they don't, and they they can increase their budget a little bit, right? Like let's say they're like, you know, oh, I've got a little bit more to to spend. Instead of putting that into into search, let's say, which was expensive CPCs, and you're like, okay, well, we'll get like four more clicks a day, right? You could say, you know what, let's put this in YouTube and and see how we can make the most of that little bit of extra funds you want to give me, you know. So, it's that that secondary channel that can just be really high value. Now, we'll talk to this about this a little bit later, but it's not to say that YouTube is cheap, because yes, views are cheap, but you typically need a lot of views per person for it to work. So, we're gonna get back to that in a second, um, after I I mention my my last point and when I use it, um, but yeah, the last case and when I use YouTube is when my bottom of the funnel is um, a bit saturated. Like, let's say you have a really high search impression share, or you've reached the limit of what you can spend per click um, for profitability. So, for example, if you have a really low average order value product, right, and your conversion rate, you've done everything you can to get the conversion rate as good as you can, but you know you're not going to increase it. In order to get more in order to get more volume, you need to increase your bids at that point, but you know, if you increase your bids because your average order value is so low and your conversion rate's not going to increase, you're going to eat away at your return on ad spend and likely bring it below profitability. That's another case when going higher funnel for a small amount of money can benefit you. I know I talked really fast there, so might the listeners might need to rewind, play that in slow motion, but yeah, did that make sense?
Yeah, I imag I've heard that a lot of people listen to my podcast on, you know, 1.5 or double X. So, guys, Joey's on the podcast today; he says a lot more words, a lot faster. Okay, he's younger than me, so slow it down today. You maybe speed up during mine, but uh, yeah, no, I'm I'm sure it's fine. I I was well understood; I think it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, so yeah, those are the three cases that I use uh, that I use it. And going back to the point of the the theory of YouTube, to how to make it work, it really needs to be understood that in order for YouTube to work, you need to achieve a certain level of frequency per user, user, because nobody converts after seeing an ad once, right? You need to to follow somebody around and need to really get that ad in their face, especially because a lot of YouTube is passive, right? They're they're watching their content; they get interrupted; they check out, kind of. So, you need that person to see that ad six or seven times just to get that brand cognition, and then they likely will Google your brand name, come in through your brand campaign, come in through a shopping campaign, and convert there. So, um, that's just something that really needs to be understood, because a lot of times people will say, oh, like YouTube is so cheap; I can just put, you know, two dollars a day, because cost per views or two cents. It's like, well, no, because then you've got this, let's say you you've got a big audience of people, because you're targeting all of America, all the people who are interested in tea; you're going to show to all those people once every seven days, and that doesn't really do much, right. Um, so there's a of a shift; you still need a decent amount of budget, and we're going to get into KPIs next on how you can observe these things, but it really is about influencing people in the way of that they'll understand that you exist, and then they'll continue their journey to find you through search and shopping. People will very rarely convert through a YouTube ad; they will lead into your search and shopping campaigns by starting from a YouTube, YouTube visibility. So, you're getting really cold traffic to assist the rest of your campaigns.
Okay, yeah, and I I I won't jump ahead because I'm sure you'll cover it, but you you caught my attention there because you specifically went into the frequency per user, which is a number I have waffled on a lot, you know. I'm like, what's the right number? So, I I'm I'm I'm I'm curious what your thoughts are there, but um, we'll stay tuned and and wait.
Okay, sounds good. So far as far as strategy, what's up next?
Well, I think this is actually a perfect segue to start talking about frequency per user, because KPIs are next, so that's one of right, because that was yeah, that that's one of the first things that I I've always wondered, because that directly affects my bidding, budget, and and and how much saturation I do in one audience, or do I choose fifteen audiences, you know? How much saturation do I want per user? So, yeah, yeah, let's let's hear what what are your thoughts.
Yeah, so again, I think high saturation is absolutely required, okay. Um, and it's important to narrow down on your audience in the sense where more is not better. The larger the audience you have, right, the more eyeballs it's going to take for the system to know who's working and who's not, right. Um, if you've got an audience, we're only showing to each person once, like the the bidding system, if you're on Smart Bidding or just the algorithm in general, and even picking which ad works, when it's not going to know what to do, right? Because that frequency is too low. So, I always say that you know, start with your audience small, as small as you can really, you know, um, and grow from there. Um, do that, did that answer your question, kind of?
Yeah, no, you're you're you're right. Let me, because I I was um, talking to someone today earlier, and um, I realized I don't I don't know if I've ever made this point clear, and and you're setting this up perfectly. You said it, so let me just restate what you said. Um, you are deciding from the very first how much um, how much of a of of a world you're going to be marketing to, right? Your environment, your platform. Okay. Every time you add a keyword, a an audience, any kind of targeting, you immediately grow that platform. Okay. You could have a small platform and achieve a very high frequency per user, impression volume, even if you have a small budget. If you find yourself struggling with low search, you know, low search impression share, which is, you know, that's not what we're talking about here, but the same thing applies: the more keywords that you add, the more audiences that you add, the more uh, YouTube channels that you add, the less you're going to be able to cover that platform. So, you know, when Joey's talking about, you know, starting small, um, he's saying that not because he thinks you're dumb and you need to, you know, take it easy, you know, uh, he means you need to start small so that you can achieve that saturation, because you won't be able to decide anything if you get next to no impressions um, across three million people, you know. I mean, that's not very effective; you have no repetitive marketing at that point, which is the point of YouTube.
Yeah, yeah, you you hit the nail on the head with that summary, and um, you know, that always goes to the point people ask like, should I add frequency caps? No, we want frequency. I ignore I ignore that frequency cap. Um, so when it comes to frequencies, what to expect though, right? Um, typically in a in a cold-traffic campaign, meaning you're targeting audiences um, of you know, either those Google predetermined audiences or a custom audience with with keywords, you know, it still won't be all that high, to be honest. Even if you narrow it down pretty low, you'll if you're getting a a 1.6 frequency per you are like, you know, that's fine. Like, a lot of my super cold-traffic users go to 1.6, but if you're like down to one, 1.1, it's like, okay, try to narrow it down a bit. I know it doesn't sound like a lot, but it does make a difference. Um, what I'll then do, this is a you know, a sweet little tip, I'm just going to slide in here, um, to increase that that frequency per user of the people that your ads at least initially resonated with, is I will create an audience, so there is in the audience builder there is an audience um, option for creating YouTube audiences, and you can create an audience for anybody who has viewed, and a view consists of somebody who watched thirty seconds of a video, who has viewed one of my YouTube ads. Now, you can say all my YouTube ads or a specific YouTube ad, and you can say, and I want to keep them in this list for seven days. So, within the last seven days, if somebody viewed your cold-traffic campaigns ad for more than thirty seconds, then they'll be put into this audio, then you have another campaign of just targeting that audience, and that's how you can bump up the impressions per user um, uh, of the people that matter. So, it's creating a bit of a filter system. Then we'll talk more about this maybe in another episode, but then you create a third layer where you retarget people who have been to your website. So, it's like people who cold traffic, warm traffic, people who watched the video but haven't clicked yet, and then anybody who's either clicked it out or been to the site. That's like my favorite strategy right now. So, um, and and it's all it's all, so you know, cheap compared to you know, the cost that you have to pay with search and and other methods. So, you're you're dealing with, you know, pennies at this point rather than with search with dollars, you know. In order to remarket on YouTube or remarket on on Google, you know, when they come from a text ad, we're talking dollars paid to achieve this with this; we're talking cents, which is, you know, pennies. So, that I mean, that's that's great. So, I love that. Good, that is very nice of you to share. That's a guys, I mean, you should at the end I'm gonna tell you how to get in touch with Joey; you should at least get in touch with him to say thank you, because he's throwing out hot ones here. That's a good one. So, yeah, so uh, going back to that KPI, so frequency per user, it's it's kind of a mouthful. In the column section, it's average frequency per user, and just to make it more complicated, they like they abbreviate it, so it's like AVG npfr, you know. So, if you're like Joey said, there's a frequency column and I can't find it, you know, type in AVG I NPR, and you'll see it, and you'll see there's an average frequency per user, then there's an average frequency per user over the course of seven days and thirty days. So, this will give you a sense of how many times am I hitting these people. So, I like that. Um, next one, pretty pretty straightforward: CTR. I actually like using CTR as a measure of again, am I reaching the right audience? And CTR here is going to be very different than CTR in search, right? In search, typically anything above a two is considered good; in YouTube, anything above a 0.5 is considered good. Um, so I like CTR. Now, the next one is is great, but it kind of counteracts CTR, and it's percent viewed. Yeah. So, the percent viewed, and that's like percent sign viewed um, in the columns category, this is it says, okay, how many people watched twenty-five percent of the video, fifty percent of the video, seventy-five percent, 100%? This one is good, but if you have a high click-through rate, it's going to affect that number, because people might click through if if you got a really good ad that hooks quick early, you know, people click on the ad, they stop watching the ad. So, I have had I have had really weird results where I'm like, man, I'm getting conversions, like everything is working well, but I've got a horrible view rate, and it's like, oh, well, my click-through rate's high. Ah, yeah, yeah. Um, view is also misleading if you have a short video, right? If your video is like thirty seconds or fifteen seconds, which some are, it's going to show through the roof, of course it is, right? So, shorts, for example.
Yeah, I I would um, Joe, tell me if you disagree here, um, but I typically advise my clients, if we're going to run YouTube ads, to not send me a fifteen- or thirty-second video, cuz I'm like, the same price that you pay for this short, twenty-second, thirty-second video, you know, that you didn't you didn't want to pay your your your graphic or your video guy to be do do anything longer, so you kind of cheapened on it; you're paying the price on the YouTube side, because you're paying the same fee for them to view that short little compact ad as you would if you had gone ahead and done maybe two minutes, something like that. I I typically invite a little bit longer. I mean, you can have I think up to I think thirty minutes or something like that that you can do, but uh, you know, I don't usually advise that, but I tend to suggest, you know, hit the good stuff up front, you know, hit hit hit the most important part, because technically that part is free if they don't watch the video; you can get that message to them free um, before that quote-unquote view impression happens that you pay for, and then if they watch it, you've got them engaged, possibly three-, four-, five-minute video if you have content that can support that kind of time, but uh, any thoughts? Do you agree, disagree?
Yeah, I I definitely um, like uh, long video is preferred. I absolutely prefer long-form video, um, but you know, it's not to say that long-form video is um, the only way, because you know, the invention of like shorts are everywhere now, right? Like short, digestible, the vertical format, that's a thing, but long-form video also makes more sense if you are trying to educate somebody. Um, yeah, I definitely prefer long-form video, but it's not to say that you know, only send me long form. I I typically will do a bit of a mix, you know. I'll do a bit of a mix. Now, we are going to talk a little bit more about video uh, sorry, um, uh, creative um, at the end of KPIs, so we'll dive into what type of creative works best and all that, but um, uh, yeah, but you you did definitely hit the nail on the head like, you know, long form um, like I I actually have some some clients where we have like one-hour videos, you know. You can use videos from uh, from their YouTube channel for an ad, and as long as it starts well, because again, you said it right, it needs to start well, as long as it starts well and the audience is hungry for that content, then you know, it makes it makes sense to show a video as long as it's as long as it's got substance to it, as long as it's got a purpose; it's teaching them something, because people are on YouTube to learn. So, good, great.
Okay, um, yeah, let's let's let's keep going. What else you got?
Yeah, so, um, uh, earned views, earned views, likes, and followers. This is an important one, because an earned view is somebody who has um, watched your ad and then they viewed a another video on your YouTube channel. Same thing with earned likes, earned followers; it's like the it's saying your your YouTube ad was the starting point, and then they went to your channel and digested more content, and that's valuable to see, you know. That's really valuable to see, especially from the creative standpoint of what creative is working, because you know, and this is going back to the theory where you know, we're no longer in a single touch-point era of online searching; people have what is it? I think Google estimated about two hundred touch points before making a conversion or sale, making a purchase, right? People, they digest content, they visit, they revisit, they compare, they leave, you know. So, it's important to kind of um, appreciate that fact that there will be multiple touch points. If somebody saw your ad and then went to your channel and followed you or saw another ad, like that's valuable.
Yeah, yeah, great. I I I agree, and and just so you guys understand, we're we're still in the section of where Joey's talking about the different columns and metrics, the KPIs, the numbers that you can look at whenever you're you're checking your Google Ads account. So, you know, you're saying what I'm hearing what Joey's talking about, what is he talking about? These are things you can see in your active YouTube campaigns to make sure, you know, what am I earning? What am I getting out of this? Don't just look at the impressions and clicks and cost; you need to know for the efficiency of what you're doing; this is what Joey's listing here. So, go ahead.
Yeah, so beyond that, um, engaged views. Okay. So, an engaged view is something that is relatively new, where it is um, somebody who watched some of your ad and then converted, but not through the ad. So, it's kind of like a view-through, um, but it it it it's something that's it's still a little bit of a mystery. I think a a big part of engaged views comes from um, enhanced conversions, cuz the whole way enhanced conversions works, right, is instead of using the gclid, which is the click-identified piece of code on like a search ad, they are following someone's email address. Now, your email address is associated to your YouTube account, so somebody converted through your um, search campaign; they put in their email; engaged views are saying, oh, their email matches the email of their YouTube C uh, YouTube um, account that viewed your ad. So, the way you can see engaged views, it's through a segment; it's um, if you go segment conversions, add event type, you will see on your conversion column, you'll see clicks, so somebody who clicked your ad and converted, and then you'll see engaged views, and that's somebody that saw your ad and converted, but likely elsewhere. So, I like to see that difference uh, just to give you a bit of a bigger picture of what's happening, which again is a freebie, right? That could potentially a it when you can seize value out of Google without paying; you you could have gotten a um, a free U impression. I don't I actually don't know if it works with the engaged view; I don't know if it counts if you get an impression but not a view and then a conversion; I don't know if that counts, but at least if you got a view, which is going to be pennies on the dollar, and then you got a conversion, I mean, that's that's just like that view-through conversion with display, except with display you literally didn't pay anything, but with with YouTube you would have gotten a view for just pennies on the dollar and then a conversion. I mean, those those are always really easy wins that happen naturally; you can't really optimize for them, but you can always appreciate when they come through.
Yeah, and it's not to say that your conversions are going to double count. I don't want people to think, oh, I the conversion through search; it's going to split the attribution. And in the end, what this does is it helps the algorithm make better decisions, cuz you know, I might open up a can of worms right now, and maybe this is for another call, but I actually prefer maximize conversions and maximized conversion value on YouTube campaigns, especially now that they have these extra signals, and also I believe it's not, you know, this is a speculation, I believe they use the whole earned view, earned like, like I think they use all those touch points to steer the algorithm. Um, I used to be a manual CPV guy, and then and I was like, makes no sense that you maximize conversions, conversions are low, and I started testing it, and my results are just better, you know. In almost every account, my results are better with maximized conversions, um, and I believe a big part of it is because of these extra signals being thrown back to Google, thrown back to YouTube through enhanced conversion attribution, which yeah, box of worms open, sorry.
Yeah, no, I I I believe it. I believe it, because the algorithm's going to use as many uh, key uh, successes as it can, and that's the thing about YouTube is that there is you don't have to set up these other engagement points, unlike search, where you have to tell it, you know, time on site and these other kind of soft conversions; you have to create those; they're already happening on YouTube. So, yeah, I I believe that they probably are; I I would speculate in the positive on that as well. So, okay.
Yeah, so you you gave away the goose; you already said that it's working better. So, I mean, you yeah, I guys, I don't know; we can we can duke it out in a separate episode, but I mean, you said the you said the gold standard there; if it's working for you, whether it's manual or automated, if it's working, I'm always in favor for it. So, yeah, I mean, that's that's proof right there; that's that's cool. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah, so I think I think for KPIs, that that's pretty much it, um, you know, I I like a pretty lean KPI list, and those ones really like tell the story if people are in how many times you're hitting them and the interaction from them. I will say one more actually, when looking at your creatives, um, one of the ones that I use to identify which creative the algorithm is liking, and I know that's probably putting a a thorn in your side by me saying that, but which one is is hitting based off of those signals is um, is percent served. Okay. So, not percent viewed, but percent served, and that is essentially um, showing the split between if you've got five videos in a campaign or in an ad group, for example, and you've got one video that is serving forty percent of the time, another one twenty percent of the time, and another one like five percent of the time, that's kind of telling you that that one is not hitting based off the signals that Google is collecting, and I have more or less like cross-reference that with some of the other signals like CTR and and it is often end up being the least performing one based off my other metrics, but it's just showing, okay, like, what is Google showing in priority, um, or you can also tell you if there's a problem, like, hey, Google is over-serving this one video, and it's got a a terrible CTR, conversion rate, whatever KPI you decide to choose to really monitor, and you can turn it off because it's over-serving it, let's say, right? So, I really like percent served.
Yeah, and that's I mean, all the Google Search managers in the world are are are jealous of all the positive signals and data that comes with YouTube. I mean, I mean, you when we talk about KPIs in search, it's it's a pretty short list, but there's so many ways to measure engagement beyond just a click, beyond just a view here, and that's I mean, that's that's just another thing on the list is is where you can you can see so much. I mean, there's no way to like a text ad, you know, you can't like a website, but Google has all these other signals, and yeah, I mean, I I believe that it probably could use a lot of this to help form better decisions about why certain ads are showing as opposed to a search campaign that has three responsive search ads, and it shows based on, you know, click-through rate and uh, relevancy to the search terms, you know. I mean, there there's some vague signals there that we aren't exactly sure how it's reacting to it. So, yeah, that that makes sense; that makes sense.
Okay, so we have creative types next, and you have some examples to share.
Yeah, so this is always the next question I get, right? Is, well, what should I use for creative, right? So, and I I'm gonna get into a bit of a five-point thing, but before I do that, I want to say like YouTube does not need to be high production, right? YouTube does not you don't need to hire an agency for a YouTube ad. I've got a lot of successful ads where it's straight up the brand owner with their cell phone talking about their product, right? Like it it's very, and and I honestly find those types of those types of creative go further than super high-polished commercials. Um, so I love how accessible it can be. So, that's the first thing. So, when it comes to creative, we need to identify and talk about the importance of leaning somebody into your brand, right? A a a bad ad, for example, example, is just talking about one like just how great your product is right away or how many great features it has. We need to ease them into it. So, the first thing I like to say is: give me a piece of creative that is a hook. A hook is something that's based off of what is the problem you are solving, right? And you just talk about the problem that the user has, because you know, this comes back to that point of value proposition; person digesting this content always needs to know the what's in it for me at this point; they don't really care how great you are; they just care about what you can do for them, right? So, it needs to be very front-heavy in the sense where the first five seconds matter the most; do not put your branding there. I always hate when ads have have a big swooping brand logo; the client, the the user doesn't does not care what your brand name is right now; they just want to know, you know, oh, you don't want to be confined to your desk to drink loose-leaf tea; take it with you anywhere in in a a a loose-leaf travel mug, you know what I mean? Like hook. Yeah. So, that's that's the first piece of creative that I think is the most important, right? Then you have creative about product features, right? Once they've seen the hook, hopefully a bunch of times, then they can see, oh, now you know that there is a problem that we can solve; our travel mug comes in six colors; it's made of stainless steel; it it's got a two-year warranty, you know. Um, you talk about product features in the second video, right? Moving on from that, okay. Now they're familiar with your product; now they need social proof. Okay. The third video is testimonials or um, influencer stuff, right? Like yeah. So, I know influencers; I always like it's so weird because I honestly hate the influencer model, because it just seems so slimy, like you send your product
Described which is the “speak to the problem” kind of thing. Don’t make your first video um, the, you know, the social proof, you know, the branding, the call to action, offer kind of thing. I think the best one is speaking to the problem because of the type of um content you’re putting out here. You’re you’re reaching a cold audience. You don’t tell a cold audience, “Hurry, you’re going to get your 5% off just today!” Like, give me a break. Who who is even fooled by 5% off nowadays? Give me a break. Um, so the the importance of having a message that’s most impactful for this, I think is the first one he listed, that “speak to the problem” kind of message. Tell them this is what this can solve, this is why this is important, this is why it matters, and uh, you know, go from there. So great, great list, very good stuff.
Yeah, and and I think another thing that people, you know, might not also realize is that for for any of the videos you use, um, you know, and maybe this is these ones would come a bit more from the product feature side of it, but you can use any video on your YouTube channel as an ad, right? Because remember YouTube is just it’s not a it’s not a direct upload; it’s just a a link from YouTube that’s used. So I often will start recommending sending YouTube to clients. If I look through their YouTube channel, it’s like, ah, you know what, you’ve you’ve got a hook video here, you’ve got a product features video here; we could use these as long as the first five seconds are not drawn out, and you can just jump in with what you already have. So yeah, I think that that level of accessibility makes it um, you know, makes it easy to at least start, or even cut up something that you already have. You could, you know, you may have something, and then just you’re like, yeah, I have that, you know, 30-minute video from an expo that we did, but there’s also two minutes of where we were talking to current customers, you know, and you take a a cut out of that and use that as an ad. I mean, there there’s a there’s a possibility there as well. So a lot of stuff you can do without having to engage in new content and stuff like that. So good point. All right.
Yeah, and and I think—oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to—on your—do we have time for the question, or we gonna—we jump into the question? Okay. Okay, yeah, cool. So Joey, uh, has—I I don’t know—I don’t know how this happened—somebody’s banging on my door. I’m answering the the door at 3:00 AM in the morning, and somebody’s asking for Joey. You I don’t understand how this happens, but Christie emails me and asks, “Can you ask Joey this question for me?” I’m like, “What is what’s going on?” So Christie, thank you for the question. Uh, she wants to know—said, “Hey, I saw Joey’s post about submitting questions for your upcoming podcast. I have a couple below.” She wants to know, “How do you measure the impact of YouTube activity further down the funnel?” That’s the great question. Yeah, great question. We’ll start with that one right there.
So when it comes to measuring activity down the funnel—so just to clarify, you know, what Christie means is, you know, YouTube is high funnel—people who don’t know who you are, people who might not even know the product category exists. Further down the funnel is like your search campaign for somebody looking for that product, or maybe even your brand campaign—somebody’s already been to your website, then they type your brand name in—like that’s down the funnel, right? So there’s two ways to measure. One, the most important way to measure any YouTube lift is topline lift, which means when you—after you started YouTube—did your overall business metrics grow? And this is an important one because I find sometimes we stay a little bit too much in platform, and we need to look at the business holistically, where it’s okay, we started YouTube on January 1st, and we let it run for for four months, you know, usually when you run a test like this, too, you you won’t do another incremental increase of spend somewhere else, so you could really measure the lift of YouTube—measure the lift of that one change you made—like, did our numbers grow in compared to either the previous period or the year before in the same period? That’s, to be honest, the most effective way to measure any kind of lift from YouTube because they’re not going to come back through you YouTube, and sometimes not even through Google ads.
Now, to answer her question more specifically though, how do you measure down the funnel? So remember how I mentioned there was that option to create an audience of people who viewed your YouTube ads? You can layer that audience in observationally on a search campaign. Oh my goodness, listen to this. Oh, getting heavy. Okay. All right. So you layer it in observationally, and you know, this is calling back to many episodes that Chris has talked about, but observational audiences, or audiences on the campaign—a search campaign or shopping campaign—where they’re not affecting your delivery, right? They’re not increasing your bids; they’re not—it’s straight up observation where you look at your your conversions and your clicks, and you can see, of my conversions and clicks, how many people were in these audiences. So typically, you know, you’d put on some stuff in there for, you know, in-market audiences of people who like tea, for example, for the tea example. You can also layer in remarketing audiences and this YouTube audience. Um, so that’s one way to to see that direct lift. Now there is a little bit of a window uh of where people get kicked out of that list though, so it’s not one for one, right? Like, um, Google is not allowed to hold on to that data forever anymore, so I’ve never seen it become really like apples to apples—oh, somebody watched our video and then three months later converted—they’re still in this audience. It doesn’t work as clean-cut as that, but that is another way to just measure the connection, the immediate connection between YouTube and a search campaign. That’s cool. Whoa, I was not expecting that one. That’s that is deep-level stuff there. Okay.
All right, so last question from Christie. She says, “What audience targeting have you found to capture the most engaged users?” Yeah, um, another great question. So when it comes to audience targeting, I usually will start with the custom audience with um people who have um uh search query history or purchase intent, where I’ll go to—now, if you have the luxury of having data from your other campaigns, you could take your highest-performing search terms um and put them in there, um and that really gives Google a bit of a round of like, okay, if they have this search intent or this purchase history, like this is who we want to target. The other side of it is in-market audiences. In-market audiences are people that Google have put in the bucket of tea drinkers, you know, or um whatever—there’s a million audiences—in specific though, I want to say in-market because affinity audiences, those are people who for a much longer duration of time might be interested in this topic; they are way bigger, right? And we want to go back to our original point of don’t make your audiences too big, right? When we’re narrowing on people, like I will again start with my custom audience, and then if I if there’s an in-market audience that really makes sense, it hits the nail on the head, I’ll put that in there, but I’ll almost never put affinity audiences because then we’re talking about way too big of an audience, and volume is not key here; it’s precision. So um, yeah, that’s what I’d say, and to be honest, when it comes to the other um content types, you know, you can target uh, specific channel or content types—I I’m not really doing those because they’re no longer available for conversion-based bidding. Um, those those levers are not there, and you know, full transparency, as I said before, I’m I’m doing more conversion-based bidding for YouTube, so um, and in the past I always found audiences worked better than the content targeting, so yeah, which that’s my take on it, which is kind of the point of the whole YouTube thing, you know, I mean, this is—it’s high level; you’re going high level with this, so you want to keep it a little more broad, and I think those uh those are good suggestions, especially understanding the difference between affinity audiences and in-market audiences—very good differentiation there.
So Joey, I am glad to have you here as always. Really good stuff, you delivered today. Thank you so much. Uh, if you are—oh oh, I’m gonna cut you off, I’m sorry. Okay, I’m I’m not done here. I’m not done here. I got one more value bomb that I want to drop on the audience to leave to really leave on a high note. Okay, let’s do it. Um, you know, because I I left a lot of trap doors open with this, you know, “Oh, conversion-based bidding is great, blah blah blah,” which I still stand by, but um, there is one Google trapdoor, similar to something that you’ve mentioned in the past on display campaigns—you know, you don’t want to show them on apps, right?—YouTube kind of has its own little trapdoor where a YouTube video can show on the Display Network. So you’ve probably seen it before—you’re on your news channel, you see a little box in the corner with a video playing with no audio. Yeah, that is YouTube showing on the Display Network. Now there used to be a checkbox that you could uncheck to not be on the Display Network and YouTube campaign; they took that away, but but in your content exclusions—so when you go on the the the navigation on the left, you’ll see content, then you’ll see exclusions—you can input a content exclusion of what’s it called—“Google AdSense without youtube.com.” I’m going to copy-paste it; I’m going to give it to you to put in the show notes because it’s written—“Google AdSense without youtube.com”—paste that, you put it into your uh content exclusions, and you will not appear in that area because what I found—it’s commonly known as—when it does run there, that’s where you’ll start to see overinflated um percent views, right? Because no, it’s it’s running in the background, so your percent video view will be higher, um your click-through rate will be much lower because people aren’t clicking on them; it just—it’s a Google trap. So I really wanted to mention that one so everybody is in good form when they try YouTube for the first time. Well, I am glad you interrupted me. That’s a that’s a great tip. Thank you, Joey. Uh, if anyone would like to speak with you, as always, please let them know how can they get in touch.
Yeah, the easiest way to get in touch with me is through LinkedIn. I am a big-time Google nerd, and I’m always just kind of posting the things that I learn along the way, so if you like to kind of just follow along, learn stuff, chat with me, uh, add me on LinkedIn or uh visit my website, Joeybit.com. You know, I offer account management services as well as coaching and consulting. All right, well, thank you guys for listening. Thank you, Joey, for being here, and we’ll catch you next week.