YouTube Advertising

I’ll just come out and say it.  The best way to avoid being suspended by Google is: DON’T BE SKETCHY.  There are multiple factors that go into not being sketchy, especially with multifaceted campaigns like those on YouTube.  Allow me to give tell why your being suspended, and give you 4 Solutions To Get Your YouTube Ad Approved.

How Do I Know If My Ads Are Approved?

If you go to All Video Ads, then click on the Ads tab at the top of the screen, a list of your video ads will pop up.  Next to the ad it will tell you if the ad has been approved or not.  If it has been disapproved it will tell you why. In this case the video has no content.  That is because we have taken those videos off our YouTube channel, so they no longer exist.

Get Your YouTube Ad Approved

Problem

Frankly, there are industries that Google doesn’t like. Some industries have a reputation for not having the customers best interest in mind.  Here are some of the industries that Google is hardest on…

• Weight Loss/ Diet Pills
• Financial Investing
• Real Estate Investing
• Any Get Rich Scheme

What do these industries have in common?  They promise something that they can’t necessarily fulfill.  Much of what they are promising is not easy to accomplish, but they offer simple solutions.

Solution

Let me stress that many companies in these industries are not sketchy.  We work with multiple companies in these industries. Their ads don’t get disapproved and they have a positive ROI.  The difference between the industry and these clients is that they are offering true value. They are selling their expertise and the right way of doing something. If you want to beat an industry reputation do not offer a quick solution. Instead offer value based on your experience. Teach the right way to do something, don’t offer shortcuts.

If you want to beat an industry reputation do not offer a quick solution. Instead offer value based on your experience. Teach the right way to do something, don’t offer shortcuts.Me

Value Is Important To Get Your YouTube Ad Approved

Problem

• Ads demonstrate little unique value to users
• Promotions that represent you, your products, or your services in a way that is not accurate, realistic, or truthful

Solutions

• Be specific in each aspect of your ad. Your video ad, your headline, your landing page video, and your offer needs to show what you’re truly going to do for the customer. At Video Power our offer is not vague. We do not say we will make you more money.  We are specific, we will drive targeted traffic to increase sales.
• Avoid gimmicks.  Your video should show the value of your product. Your hook, your promotion, and your CTA should all build the value of your product. Gimmicks are a no no.  Examples…
  • make a million dollars a day
  • lose 400 pounds in a week

Avoid Looking Like Spam

Problem

Most people live by the credo if it looks like spam, it probably is spam. I know I do after I once bought a 300 dollar puppy off an online ad, and the puppy never came. Google lives by this credo as well. They cite some of their main concerns as…

• counterfeit goods
• dangerous products or services
• products or services that enable dishonest behavior.

For this reason they will not approve, “promotions that prompt users to initiate a purchase, download, or other commitment without first providing all relevant information and obtaining the user’s explicit consent.” The last thing Google wants is a million people waiting for a puppy…  like me.

Solutions

• Take the time to develop a quality video with a quality offer.  If it looks sketchy you will be put in the dangerous goods, products, or services category by association.   Here is an example of a quality ad that shows value…

• Be transparent.  The best ads and landing pages tell exactly what your purpose is.  Why is the customer there? What you want them to do? What will their information will be used for?  If you are asking for their email address, tell them exactly what they get by giving you their email and what their email will be used for.
• Your URL must be from your website.  Keep your landing pages associated to your website. Google hates it if the website is just a landing page. For example google does not always approve lead page URL’s (ex. www.leadpages.videopower.org).  That page isn’t real by the way.  So don’t click on it. A good url would be like the one for our YouTube Advertising Course…

Avoid Inappropriate Content

Problem

This is pretty self explanatory. Google wants you to avoid the following..

• hatred; violence; harassment; racial; sexual, religious, or political intolerance, or organizations with such views; content that’s likely to shock or disgust; content that’s exploitative or appears to unfairly capitalize at the expense of others

Solution

Dont be afraid to test.  Some of you may not see your content as inappropriate. You also may think it is funny, or classy enough to not be inappropriate.  Try testing different landing pages and videos to see what headlines, content, and offers get approved.  Testing will also help discern what landing pages work best.

Here are some examples of appropriate inappropriateness…

Resources

There are a number of resources that Google gives us to keep our ads approved. I would recommend using this post first because reading Google’s stuff is sometimes a daunting task.  If you want more info on their policies, here is a list of resources that could help your when trying to get your YouTube ads approved

Adwords Policies: https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6008942

The Approval Process: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722120

Fixing Dissaproved Ads: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6080541

When it comes to trying a brand new marketing tactic, most people’s biggest fear is wasting money.  The solution: let someone make mistakes first and learn from their mistakes. We have already wasted plenty of money.  This post is meant to be a guide for setting up your YouTube advertising campaign, so you don’t waste money testing things that we have already tested.

For those of you who wouldn’t even know where to begin when it comes to placing a YouTube ad, let’s start by going into your AdWords account.  On the left you will see the tab that says “All video campaigns”.  Click it, and click the little red button that says “+CAMPAIGN”.  If you are still lost follow the image…

Now that the noobs are with us, let’s get a little more specific.  You will be taken to a General Settings page for your campaign. I want to go through each section of this set up with you. That way your campaign doesn’t get set up for failure.

YouTube Advertising Campaign Settings

General

“What’s in a name? That which we call a YouTube Campaign. By any other name would smell as sweet.”  Romeo may not have thought a name is important, but it is. Your name should be very specific and reflect the campaigns goals. It should also state if it is an In-Display or In-Stream campaign, but we will get more into those later. It will be easier to compare to other campaigns you will make in the future.

Your budget should start small. Somewhere between 25-50 dollars a day; enough to test, but not enough to waste a lot of money.  I know you’re excited about this but don’t just come out guns a blazin’.  Your targeting groups, your ads, and your funnels will have holes at the beginning and you will waste money. Once you fill those holes you can scale that budget.

Finally, in the Advanced Settings, turn off the Google Display Network. For us, the GDN hasn’t ever performed very well, so we like to turn it off. You should also select to have your ads play out evenly over time.  If your ads are all playing at the same time of day, that’s money wasted.

Location

Where do you want your campaign to play?  You can get as specific as zip code, city, and state.  You can also get as large as national and multinational campaigns.  There are literally all the possibilities in the world!

Advanced Settings

The last place you’ll want to check out in General Settings is your Advanced Settings. Here is a checklist for what you want to do in there:

• Optimize your ads for conversions.  We do not care about views, we do not care about clicks, we do not care about traffic.  We care about conversions. Conversions = $$$
• Limit how often a person can see your ad.  We do around 3-5 times a week.  You want people to be customers, they won’t do that if they are annoyed of your ads.
• Decrease your mobile bid by 100%.  Mobile doesn’t convert nearly as well as desktop because the ads aren’t clickable.  You end up paying for views.  Not customers.

YouTube Advertising Campaign Videos

You will be asked to add a video ad right away when setting up your campaign. It is optional, but whether you do it now or later the process is the same. You’re going to want to link your YouTube channel to your AdWords account. Then, to add your video simply copy and paste the YouTube URL into this box…

Remember, do not have In-Display ads and In-Stream in the same campaign.  Separate them into two campaigns. They are two different strategies in terms of targeting and what videos you want to use.  You also want to make it easier to compare the two. Un-click either In-Stream or In-Display depending on what kind of campaign you are building.

In-stream

Adding your In-Stream video is very simple…as a side note, how great does Jake look in that picture?  His eyes just seem to penetrate the soul.

• Your display URL will show up on the ad. It doesn’t have to be your full landing page URL, it just needs to look pretty.  We usually capitalize every word and keep it simple.  For example VideoPower.org
• Your destination URL is your landing page; the specific page that you want people going to when they click on your ad.
• The companion banner will show up on the top right corner of the page while your ads playing.  YouTube will make a default one for you, or you can upload one of your own that goes along with your offer.

In-display

If you decided to make an In-Display campaign, this is a little more work.

• Your Thumbnail is important.  It should be eye-catching.  It is the first thing people will notice and has the potential to make people stop and read your headline.
• Your headline and description are the most important parts of the In-Display ad. Write a headline and description that will make people click.  Why do you think BuzzFeed is so popular? Their headlines are amazing, and they get people to click.
• Send people to the video. When a video is being used as an ad you have the option in YouTube to put a Call-To-Action button on the video. This will get the person off YouTube and onto your website.  If you do send them to your channel, be sure your channel is linked to your site.  You are creating a path for people to follow to become a customer.
• Choose to place your videos in search results.  People pay more attention to videos when they pop up in search because they are not pre-occupied watching another video.

YouTube Advertising Campaign Targeting

There are multiple types of targeting you can use for your campaigns.  If you want a little more info on each one here is a blog post we wrote about the different targeting groups, or you can check out this infographic.  Here is how we set up our targeting groups…

Name and Budget

We like to create a targeting group for each different type.  Like your campaigns, make your targeting group names specific.  If you are doing Website Remarketing, name it “Website Remarketing” and put all your Website Remarketing lists in that group.

You can get even more specific than that if you’d like. For example, you can split of your keywords into multiple groups based on their relationship.  At Video Power, we may have a keyword group named “YouTube Advertising Keywords” where the keywords all relate to YouTube Advertising.  Or we might have a group called “PPC Keywords”, where we target keywords specific to PPC.  This allows us to compare and spend money where it works best.

Start your bids around 7-10 cents.  Then go back and change those bids to spread your budget around.

Demographics

This part is simple. You know your customer (If you don’t, you’re getting way ahead of yourself). Choose their age, gender, and parental status. Always uncheck the unknowns. Don’t spend money on someone you know nothing about.

Targeting Groups

Choose the targeting group in the drop down menu. The only one that is outside the drop down menu is Interests.

Topics and Interests are all based on how well you know your customer.  Use the search bar to find relevant topics and interests.  Only use the most relevant.

To add keywords or placements put them in the box that shows up and click “Add”. Placements need to be found by scouring YouTube. There is no great tool for finding placements.  Keywords will give you suggestions below. You can also use the keyword planner found under tools in AdWords

Website Remarketing and Video Remarketing are both created using the ‘Remarketing’ section.  They only differ by what Remarketing lists you set up.  You have to go in and make these marketing lists.  To set up your Remarketing lists go to Shared Library> Audiences> +Remarketing Lists.  To create Video Remarketing lists, your YouTube channel will have to be linked to AdWords.

Here at Video Power Marketing we like testing things.  It is the only true way to know what works and what does not.  In our testing we came up with a question that could have profound effects on the outcome of our In-Stream video campaigns: “What kind of video works the best?”  A.K.A. Does the quality of your ad really matter on YouTube?  So like the Curious George that we are, we decided to test it out.

We started testing different video ads in the same campaign. All targeting groups were the same and the purpose of each was to generate leads.  The ad would take people to a landing page, where they would enter their name and e-mail address.  In return they got access to a free video course in which we would later upsell them to an actual product.

Low Quality In-Stream Ads: Shot From My iPhone

• CTR: 3.14%
• Conversion Rate: 14.3%
• CPA: $0.98

The first of the  In-Steam ads was a lower quality video that was actually shot on an iPhone.  We thought, as most of you are probably thinking right now, this would be our worst performing video.  However, life is full of surprises.  This video was actually our best performing ad.

Let’s compare the numbers of the first “low quality” ad with our next “high quality” ads.  This video ad was both shot on a green screen with professional lighting, filmed with a nice DSLR, took multiple takes, and then had an hour or two of post-production work.  Once again, a conversion was getting a name and an email.

The High Quality In-Stream Ads: Shot On Green Screen

• CTR: 1.95%
• Conversion Rate: 3.6%
• CPA: $1.84

This ad performed the worst between the two ads with a lower conversion rate and a higher cost per conversion.  It is funny that this is our worst performing ad, because most people kill for these kind of numbers in their TrueView ad Campaigns.  We must know what we are doing or something.

But here’s the Twist…

Now that we have looked at the numbers, let’s take a step back.  We were pretty astonished when we saw the results of this experiment.  It went against everything we thought we knew about video marketing.  So we went digging a little deeper to try and understand how this happened.  The purpose of the campaign was to acquire leads, but the ultimate goal of acquiring a lead is to turn that lead into a customer.  So we took a look into our sales funnel analytics to find what the ultimate conversion value of these new leads were.

Although the Video Ad shot with the iPhone had a higher conversion rate and a lower CPA, the conversions (Leads) that came from the “Higher Production Video Ad” were almost 2x  more likely to purchase later on.

Basically, what this means is that the value of a conversion for the higher quality videos was almost twice as high as the conversion value for the iPhone video.  So, based on leads that converted into customers, the high quality videos were the better performing videos.  At the end of the day we want ads that would get us leads with the highest value.   We are more concerned about the quality of the leads, not the quantity.  We would much rather have the video that produced less leads, but would eventually produce more customers.

The Student Becomes The Teacher

We learned from this that quality breeds quality.  While we may be able to obtain more leads from a lesser quality video, they are lesser quality leads. Quality customers come from quality leads. And yes, that last sentence does sound like something Spiderman’s uncle Ben would say.

Every part of a campaign should be focused on obtaining customers, even the video. That is why your entire video strategy should be based on conversions. It is also why we test, so we can help you create a great strategy, because every little thing matters when you investing in your future customers.

In the words of Tommy Calahan (Tommy Boy)  “I could get a good look at a T-Bone steak by sticking my head up a bulls ass, but I’d rather take the butchers word for it.” We are the butcher for TrueView and In-Stream Ads.

* Important Note: This test was ran for 2 weeks with an ad spend a little over $200 giving us a small sample size to base decisions.  These are the results we saw.

In 2013, Google made 58.8 billion dollars on advertising.  It  is safe to say that Google is taking over the world, and you are paying for it.  The PPC model is at the heart of this subtle take over.  Keyword bids continue to rise as their demand increases.  Take for example the word “insurance”.  The average bid for the keyword “insurance” is up to 55 dollars per click.  To me that is absolute madness.  How does the average business owner expect to see great returns on such a hefty investment?

Avoid the Great Bidding War

Imagine if you had gotten into AdWords in the early part of the millennium (AdWords was introduced in 2000, self service accounts became available a couple years later). AdWords was a new platform. Bids were low and therefore the opportunity to maximize your return was high.  If you look in the right place you can find that this opportunity has re-presented itself to us. In 2006 Google bought YouTube, and just over two years ago they added TrueView (YouTube) Advertising to the AdWords family.  Much like where PPC was 10 years ago, opportunity is ripe in TrueView.  The same bid for the keyword “insurance” would cost you no more than 10 cents on TrueView.  Compared to 55 dollars on PPC ads, that ain’t half bad.  For you PPC buffs thinking you can jump right into this and find success, you need to slow your roll a little bit.  While TrueView is managed in the Adwords platform it is a whole different ball game.  You have to put in the offseason work before you get into a regular season game.  The main reason for the difference in strategies is linked back to the difference in models: PPC (pay per click) vs. PPV (pay per view).

PPC vs PPV

Situation 1: PPC

Let’s take a look at what your cost per click will look like in a Pay Per View model.  If we look at a phrase like “Real Estate Investing,” we find that keywords can be pricey.  That specific keyword is around 8 bucks per click.  The average cost per click for related keywords is above $20.  That’s absurd.  If you had a 1% conversion rate, which is actually pretty good, that means for every 100 clicks you get 1 conversion.  Based on a 20 dollar CPC you would be paying $2,000 big ones to acquire a customer.

 

Situation 2: PPV

Now let’s look at this from the the PPV point of view. This information comes from one of our clients.  If you look at their campaign, the total cost was $95.10. From that cost they had 83 clicks. That is a cost per click of $1.21. Comparing this to situation 1, if you get a 1% conversion rate it would take $121 to acquire a customer. If you gave me the choice between spending $121 or $2,000, guess which one I would choose?

Stealing Attention

In a pay per view model you are paying to steal someones attention.  Think about it, these people are not searching for your product with an intent to buy something. They are on YouTube to watch their video.  You can use the perfect keyword or the perfect placement to put your ad in front of the perfect person (someone who should be your future customer), but if your ad sucks they are just going to skip your ad and move on to their video.  They will not click your ad, they will not go to your website, and they will not become your customer.

What Does it All Mean?

There are two morals to the story.  The first, I believe, can be described in the words of Mr. Robert Goulet (or Will Ferrell on SNL), “You wouldn’t hire a clown to fix the John.”  In other words do not believe for a second that just because you know PPC that you can do PPV.  Second, while PPC is great, it does not offer the opportunity that is currently available with TrueView.  I don’t know about you, but I like lower costs, free traffic, and the possibility of higher returns.

If you have had success with PPC, then you can likely find that same success with PPV (if you know what you are doing).