<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nIt turns out US subscribers are cheaper than average at $0.27, which is a pleasant surprise!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In summary, I paid $0.019 per view, $0.31 per subscriber.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nGoogle Ads Discovery Campaigns<\/h2>\n\n\n\n Finally, let’s compare this Conversions campaign (titled \u201cSubscribers\u201d) to the two Discovery campaigns I’ve been running forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m afraid I won’t be walking you through the campaign setup process. I just remember it being ugly and confusing, with several course corrections after days of my ads not getting any impressions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here are my results over the same time period, again broken down into two screenshots:<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nRetarget is at $2 per day and Keywords is at $1 per day, so I’m currently spending $8 per day total on YouTube ads, mainly to gather data for this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m getting the cheapest views with the Conversions campaign, but that includes In-stream views. Those are the ones forced on you that you can skip after a few seconds, whereas In-feed views are intentionally chosen by the viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nThe Conversions campaign is clearly outperforming my Discovery campaigns in all four “earned\u201d categories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201cvideo played to\u201d percentages are higher for the Discovery campaigns, but those include multiple videos, the rest of which are far shorter than 42 minutes! Still, for the video in question, the Retarget campaign is generating twice the watch time per view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Complicating matters further, my Retarget campaign targets about 30 countries with bid adjustments for each:<\/p>\n\n\n
\n
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nAs you can see, I’m paying $0.045 per view for the US but only $0.010 for Brazil. I wish Meta had per-country bid adjustments! And also, what’s up with the nearly 7% view rate in Italy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While there are too many variables to control for, my gut feeling is that my Retarget and Subscribers (Conversions) campaigns are performing comparably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since I don’t need any more data for this post, I’m going to turn off the Keywords campaign and lower the budget on Subscribers to $2, for a total spend of $4 per day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
YouTube Ads Conclusions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n If you made it this far, congratulations. You may have the necessary patience and persistence to launch a Google Ads campaign.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThere are no truly bad options, other than perhaps an In-stream campaign, which will get you cheap views but little else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you want to dip your toe into YouTube advertising and you have a Promotions tab in YouTube Studio, you could be up and running in 10 minutes, though you may end up paying twice as much for the sake of convenience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you’ve used Google Ads in the past and have your YouTube channel linked, you could probably set up a Conversions campaign in a half hour by following along with this post and\/or Andrew’s video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you fancy yourself a true connoisseur in the advertising arts, you could dive into one of the many YouTube tutorials on Discovery campaigns. It’ll likely require a few hours of your time, but that’s a small price to pay for an asset that could serve you for years, as my campaigns have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whenever I release a new song, I just copy\/paste one of my old ads and swap in the new video’s URL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I’m certainly no expert on Google Ads! I’m sure many of you could teach me a thing or two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Have you tried YouTube advertising? Share your results and strategies in the comments!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"YouTube has been pretty good to me. Since 2012 I’ve racked up 18K subscribers, 9.2M views, and 263K watch hours despite not having any \u201creal\u201d music videos. Granted, more than half of those views were for a song I was hired to cover for a Just Dance game. Embarrassingly, I filled in for Will.i.am on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":9798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"default","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"boxed","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[46],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9795"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9860,"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9795\/revisions\/9860"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}