EXECUTION Figuring out YouTube

[Andy Black]

I wanted to put a little watermark button bottom right in all my videos. Most people use a small 150x150 YouTube "Subscribe" button.




Dayum but it was hard to find one to download. (Unfulfilled need anyone?)

I ended up creating one quickly in Snappa.com.

Here it is if anyone wants it:

• YouTube Subscribe Button.png

Here's the instructions on how to add it from Google's own channel:

View: https://youtu.be/XY9z1xWws1M

 

[Andy Black]

I forgot to mention that I was talking to a friend who’s a B&B coach. I showed her my results to date with YouTube and explained the next tests I was going to run. She asked me to use her business for the tests. I think it’s pretty cool that I get to run stuff in two accounts, and also learn with her ad spend.

I’ll do both as I’m keen to try some things out. I’ll update this thread when I get some results.

 

[Andy Black]

This seems a good read. I’ll come back to it later.

• How to Set Up a YouTube Ads Campaign

 

[Andy Black]

Oh...

1) Setup a brand new Mailchimp account for a new test.

2) Got a squeeze page live on one of my sites:



3) Started a Google Ads paid search campaign about an hour ago:




4) Haven't got conversion tracking in place, a thank-you page, or even the initial welcome email setup.

5) Had dinner. Logged into Mailchimp to set some stuff up. Saw this:






By my calculations that's €0.17 per email signup.

I'm currently scrambling to get my developer to create a Thank You page and install Google Analytics before he downs tools for the weekend.

I'll then create a Google Analytics goal and import it into Google Ads as a conversion so I get conversions tracked in Google Ads. Then I'll see about setting a target CPA and setting up retargeting.

Oh, and tonight I'll send an email to my new subscribers (and the 14 I got from my test a couple of weeks ago that I've also imported into this Mailchimp list).

I'll create a brand new YouTube account for this, and start directing the email signups to video lessons on the new channel. I'll encourage them to engage in the comments with questions about the video and what future videos they want to see.

 

[Andy Black]

Just before bed last night I configured Mailchimp to email me when I had a new subscriber.

This was in my inbox this morning:




Spend as of 1:40pm today is €11.33 for 138 visitors and 47 subscribers.




I originally had a €5/day budget.

• I've increased that to €20/day to see how much volume there is.
• I've dropped bids from €0.10 to €0.08 to see if that slows things down a little.
• I wanted this to be a €5/day or €10/day test and case study.

Conversion tracking isn't quite working yet.

• We'll fix that next week.
• In the meantime I can count signups.

A major learning is that most of the visitors (and probably signups) are coming in for a search term I wasn't bidding on.

• Google are bad for showing ads for search terms we're not bidding on.
• It's a good learning in this case as I'd never have thought of this search term.
• I've separated this search term from the one I was originally targeting.

I've already had one email asking me for more info about this other topic. That's helping me figure out what to deliver that people actually want, rather than what I think they want.


It's nice having a feedback loop so I can see notifications in my inbox, especially that they keep coming in as I make minor tweaks.

 

[Nicoknowsbest]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing Andy.

Great motivation to just go out and run small experiments before getting caught up in your own head.

 

[Andy Black]

Google Ads stats for yesterday:




Got to love my optimization score:

 

[Andy Black]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing Andy.

Great motivation to just go out and run small experiments before getting caught up in your own head.

Yep. I was caught up in my own head at the start of this thread.

For starters, my goal was wrong (Grow a YouTube Channel).

Then I was following someone else's blueprint (which never works for me as I go off-piste almost immediately).

And finally, their blueprint was to create 5 videos and then launch (when I prefer to launch and learn).

 

[Andy Black]

Thought It would be fitting to update this progress thread with a video on YouTube:

View: https://youtu.be/38mgK3LDD3I

 

[Andy Black]

I've created a new YouTube channel to see if I can grow it using YouTube ads (and maybe Google Ads later).

I'll document the progress in here and as videos on my "Andy Black" YouTube channel.



^^^ That's the first ever thumbnail I created!

I did it in snappa.com (I upgraded to their $15/mth).

I added a "Play video" icon to the thumbnail. I don't see anyone else doing it. I do see lots of people pulling silly faces. Meh to that.

 

[Andy Black]

• Amended the YouTube cover art to my brand new account slightly.
• Published a second video (it took all last night and this morning to edit!).
• Seemed to have picked up a subscriber even though I'm flying under the radar (hello whoever you are!).

 

[Andy Black]

Hmmm... should I move my own "Play Now" button to match the one YouTube puts on a video?

Here’s the latest video on my new channel:

View: https://youtu.be/lmGdO8pgQLE

 

[guidaccio05]

Good stuff! Will be following along as I experiment with Youtube Video Ads.

 

[Andy Black]

I created a new progress thread where I’m creating an email list with Google Ads:

• Growing an email list with Google Ads

 

[Andy Black]

I decided we should run YouTube Ads campaigns for the appropriate clients for free for a month.

They cover the ad spend and might migrate to a paid service if it shows promise.

Interesting stats for this client already:

• We don't have conversion tracking in place. I've asked if she's got email signups in the past 4 days.
• Her landing page is very poor - I've offered to create a landing page with conversion tracking and other features in place. We don't charge for the build, but do charge a small monthly fee for hosting, support, split-testing, and optimisation.

Segmenting by device for that campaign we can see all the action is on mobiles. We've therefore turned off other devices and will focus on optimising videos and the landing page for mobile.

 

[Andy Black]

The client above reports she didn't have any email signups.

Is it any wonder when this was what her landing page looked like on a mobile:





She's pleased with these recent YouTube stats though. They're not all from our efforts of course, but they show promise!

 

[nickbanik]

I've been having a lot of success running the YouTube shopping ads and bumper ads for e-commerce, and I've been running some skippable in-stream for B2B tech/SaaS clients and having sides on lead generation. I haven't been running any that try to gain subscribers. Are you seeing success getting leads and sales? I've been running YouTube with a mix of branding and direct response for years this way and it works great. Especially when you remarket to people who watched the video ads after. I'm curious to read more about getting subs, as it's not something I've tried there with ads.

 

[Kid]

The client above reports she didn't have any email signups.

Is it any wonder when this was what her landing page looked like on a mobile:

View attachment 30020

It looks like Word document.

 

[Andy Black]

I've been having a lot of success running the YouTube shopping ads and bumper ads for e-commerce, and I've been running some skippable in-stream for B2B tech/SaaS clients and having sides on lead generation. I haven't been running any that try to gain subscribers. Are you seeing success getting leads and sales? I've been running YouTube with a mix of branding and direct response for years this way and it works great. Especially when you remarket to people who watched the video ads after. I'm curious to read more about getting subs, as it's not something I've tried there with ads.

I’ve not managed to even *start* YouTube Ads to get email signups yet.

While I wait for the video ads to get approved I fire up some paid search ads, they get traction, and I then have to buckle up and hang on!

• Growing an email list with Google Ads

 

[Andy Black]

It looks like Word document.

Lol. I think a Word doc might look better on a mobile than that page.

 

[Pat D. Rick]

By my calculations that's €0.17 per email signup.

Oh my....

Are you a wizard?

17 Cents per signup, that's amazing! I'm starting to question myself...

 

[Chris McCarron]

You’re good on camera which makes life A LOT easier when creating content. (I’m not and instead I have to use voice overs)

If you can be consistent with publishing content then YT will promote your content more often.

Keep an eye on watch time and click through rate as they’re key for rankings.

For watch time you can use cards and playlists to keep people watching your content.

For ctr experiment with different styles of thumbnails until you find a style that works best for your channel. This has had a positive effect for my channel and obviously this also increases my watch time as well.

Hope this helps.

 

[Andy Black]

You’re good on camera which makes life A LOT easier when creating content. (I’m not and instead I have to use voice overs)

If you can be consistent with publishing content then YT will promote your content more often.

Keep an eye on watch time and click through rate as they’re key for rankings.

For watch time you can use cards and playlists to keep people watching your content.

For ctr experiment with different styles of thumbnails until you find a style that works best for your channel. This has had a positive effect for my channel and obviously this also increases my watch time as well.

Hope this helps.

Thanks @Chris McCarron.

I’m testing videos without me on camera. I want to see how well they do without someone in view.

 

[SamRussell]

I started using a tool called TubeBuddy recently to optimise my video tags, and that's doubled my reach in the last week.

Using TubeBuddy to find keywords you can rank for, then put those keywords in the video title, file name of the video, file name of the thumbnail and in the first sentence of the description.

Once your videos have been up for a little while, you can play around with changing the thumbnails to see how that affects the CTR of each video.

 

[Andy Black]

I started using a tool called TubeBuddy recently to optimise my video tags, and that's doubled my reach in the last week.

Using TubeBuddy to find keywords you can rank for, then put those keywords in the video title, file name of the video, file name of the thumbnail and in the first sentence of the description.

Once your videos have been up for a little while, you can play around with changing the thumbnails to see how that affects the CTR of each video.

Thanks. I was using VidIQ for a bit, which is similar I think. I was getting quicker learnings running ads though, so cancelled VidIQ.

I think this thread is turning more into a YouTube Ads thread. I may end up coming back to organic stuff later, but it's the ads that I want to figure out at the moment.

I'd like to "start as close to the end as possible", which is to make sales. If I focus on making sales then how do I get people to a sales page from YouTube? The easiest way is to create an ad that people click on and go through to the sales page. I'm not sure if this is what @AgainstAllOdds was referring to in his comment a few weeks ago.

 

[AgainstAllOdds]

I'd like to "start as close to the end as possible", which is to make sales. If I focus on making sales then how do I get people to a sales page from YouTube? The easiest way is to create an ad that people click on and go through to the sales page. I'm not sure if this is what @AgainstAllOdds was referring to in his comment a few weeks ago.

My comment wasn't a few weeks ago. It was four months ago. And that's my point.

If you want to quantify the value of youtube, you could roughly do it with CPM rates. From several articles, it seems that a $5 cost per thousand views is on the higher end. That number represents 55% of of the total value, considering that Youtube takes 45%.

So, $5/.55 = $9.09 per thousand views.

Your channel currently has 30,735 views, which can be estimated as an aggregate $279.38 in marketing value created.

You started posting 3 years ago. And it looks like you have close to 100 videos now. That's $2.80 per video effort, and several years of being distracted.

If your business does not have an entertainment component, then I stand by my opinion that Youtube is a waste of time. It's a lot cheaper time-wise to pay for Youtube ads and funnel those individuals into what actually makes you money. Creating an entire ecosystem of videos in hopes of "getting traction one day" is a low expected value effort.

 

[Andy Black]

My comment wasn't a few weeks ago. It was four months ago. And that's my point.

If you want to quantify the value of youtube, you could roughly do it with CPM rates. From several articles, it seems that a $5 cost per thousand views is on the higher end. That number represents 55% of of the total value, considering that Youtube takes 45%.

So, $5/.55 = $9.09 per thousand views.

Your channel currently has 30,735 views, which can be estimated as an aggregate $279.38 in marketing value created.

You started posting 3 years ago. And it looks like you have close to 100 videos now. That's $2.80 per video effort, and several years of being distracted.

If your business does not have an entertainment component, then I stand by my opinion that Youtube is a waste of time. It's a lot cheaper time-wise to pay for Youtube ads and funnel those individuals into what actually makes you money. Creating an entire ecosystem of videos in hopes of "getting traction one day" is a low expected value effort.

Ah yes. Gotcha.

I’d contend I’ve made more from those videos than the CPM calculation, in that I’ve pointed many people to various videos and it’s likely resulted in new clients, course sales, and/or referrals.

I’ve also learned enough about video editing and YouTube Ads to run them for clients.

I’m with you in preferring to run ads to content/sales pages rather than hope they’re found.

 

[SamRussell]

Thanks. I was using VidIQ for a bit, which is similar I think. I was getting quicker learnings running ads though, so cancelled VidIQ.

I think this thread is turning more into a YouTube Ads thread. I may end up coming back to organic stuff later, but it's the ads that I want to figure out at the moment.

I'd like to "start as close to the end as possible", which is to make sales. If I focus on making sales then how do I get people to a sales page from YouTube? The easiest way is to create an ad that people click on and go through to the sales page. I'm not sure if this is what @AgainstAllOdds was referring to in his comment a few weeks ago.

That makes sense! If you can get paid ads working, then that's going to be the quickest way to get what you want!

 

[Andy Black]

Phew. It's taken me ages to get to the kind of video I have in mind.

I've taken a video people keep asking me the link to (and the one that I put spend behind earlier in the thread), and shortened it, but added CTAs, etc.

I've also done it without being on camera, and without a voice-over. This is so I can delegate/outsource this, and so it can be done for subjects I don't know anything about. I'm thinking of the process that can be outsourced and applied to other niches.

The video is just on my Andy Black Unlisted channel (yes, I unlisted all my videos on that channel ... it's only for embedding in this forum and for me to send links to people personally). The video will go onto a new YouTube channel that I'll keep under wraps for the moment as I want to see if I can blow it up from ground zero using the email list I'm building in this thread, and also from running YouTube ads.

Here's the draft video:

• I've not created a thumbnail yet.
• There's no sound. I'll add some music later, possibly from the YouTube library.
• Annotations etc are in black-and-white so I can move faster. Colours and fonts aren’t my lane. We can sort that out later.
• I'll email my list a link to this video when I put it on my new channel.
• I'll create the second video next week and add it to the end-cards.
• I'll then start putting ad spend behind the video on YouTube.

EDIT:

• Thumbnail added.
• Voiceover added.

Latest version (still on my "unlisted" channel):

View: https://youtu.be/BUVSIyVryA8

 

[Runum]

Nice work andy. What software are you using to produce that?