Is promoting your videos with Google Adwords worth it?

[Darren Taylor]

I posted the below in a similar thread a few weeks back. I hope it helps:


I've recently been playing with AdWords for my channel promoting 1 video. I am an AdWords professional (qualified in search display and video and used the platform since 2010) and even I have found the results hard to stomach.

1) I spent around £20 testing out a campaign to promote 1 video

2) Average watch duration was below 45 seconds! (really poor!)

3) I did get some subs (7 to be exact) That's a cost per sub of £2.80. Definitely not sustainable!

4) I generated views at a cost per view of just £0.01 - but they aren't good quality views! (Even though they were all from the UK, which is my primary target market)


I've run YouTube ads for big brands and the results are much better than mine were. Here are the reasons I think this is the case:

1) They already have brand recognition. If a big company says something, you're more likely to listen

2) My videos aren't polished from a presentation and production point of view, I have only been on YouTube for 3 months, so it's not a bad thing to say.

Some people I KNOW for a fact are using AdWords to grow very quickly, but they already had high quality production, tons of videos and experience, oh, and tons of subs too (15k at least)

EXAMPLE

If you look for "Fred Lam" he is somebody I discovered via AdWords and his channel is growing quickly as a result. but please note the reasons above why it won't work for you... Yet

Also, as I said, I have used AdWords for nearly 8 years as a pro in my day job and I struggled to promote my new and tiny channel, so if you aren't experienced in AdWords, you'll find it tough!

There are so many things to consider like targeting options (MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR), ad formats (in stream or discovery ads) locations, bidding, ad copy optimisation etc...

 

[MyBigBrain]

Hi Darren, thanks for your input. It's good to hear from an AdWords pro.

If I may ask you a question: Is there a delay in YT analytics of the number of views with AdWords? I am asking because my YT channel is small, so before AdWords, I was averaging about 25 videos viewed per day. Since AdWords, my views have dropped to about 16 per day. So my video views have dropped since AdWords.

But according to AdWords, in the last 24 hours, 148 people have clicked my AdWords ad, so should have landed on my YT channel page. This is about a 600% increase in traffic, yet views of my videos have dropped.

How can this be explained? Either the stats from AdWords are false (massively inflated), or YT is treating the massive increase in traffic as bots and not counting the views (and also penalizing) my channel with a drop in views).

I would like to know what you think is a likely explanation for this? What I am doing is really not much different from paying for views. Does YT treat paying for views from AdWords any different than paying bots or clickfarms for views? Or is there a delay in my YT view count while the YT algorithm is trying to decide if the new traffic is genuine and not bots?

It just makes no sense to have a large drop in channel views when AdWords should result in a large increase in views.

Thanks.

 

[Oliver Andersen]

Hi Darren, thanks for your input. It's good to hear from an AdWords pro.

If I may ask you a question: Is there a delay in YT analytics of the number of views with AdWords? I am asking because my YT channel is small, so before AdWords, I was averaging about 25 videos viewed per day. Since AdWords, my views have dropped to about 16 per day. So my video views have dropped since AdWords.

But according to AdWords, in the last 24 hours, 148 people have clicked my AdWords ad, so should have landed on my YT channel page. This is about a 600% increase in traffic, yet views of my videos have dropped.

How can this be explained? Either the stats from AdWords are false (massively inflated), or YT is treating the massive increase in traffic as bots and not counting the views (and also penalizing) my channel with a drop in views).

I would like to know what you think is a likely explanation for this? What I am doing is really not much different from paying for views. Does YT treat paying for views from AdWords any different than paying bots or clickfarms for views? Or is there a delay in my YT view count while the YT algorithm is trying to decide if the new traffic is genuine and not bots?

It just makes no sense to have a large drop in channel views when AdWords should result in a large increase in views.

Thanks.

I tried promoting one of my videos through Facebook ads and I got to 2000 views for one video and after a week I lost 900 of them which I have no idea of why that happened so you are definitely not the only one who is experiencing this.[DOUBLEPOST=1512865221,1512865154][/DOUBLEPOST]

I spent about $8.50 and got 79 views over the course of one week. I could get that many views just signing into a different work computer. So I’d say not worth it. But I’m going to try one more time, targeting a huge channel after the release something and see how that goes

Great I would love to follow up with you & hear how it went [DOUBLEPOST=1512865602][/DOUBLEPOST]Okay so far what I am understanding from reading all of the peoples very very very helpful responses which I appreciate very much
is that for new channels AdWords is not a good source to use when trying to gain your first subscribers unless that you are already a well-known channel that has about 15K subscribers then AdWords is a great tool to boost your growth.

 

[MyBigBrain]

I've recently been playing with AdWords for my channel promoting 1 video. I am an AdWords professional (qualified in search display and video and used the platform since 2010) and even I have found the results hard to stomach.


2) Average watch duration was below 45 seconds! (really poor!)

I can now confirm this.

After having no (or worse) impact linking adwords to my home page, today linked to a 2 minute video which is in a playlist, and the view duration for this video tanked. The audience retention for this video is 5.7% (9 seconds), compared to my average retention of 46%. This video has suddenly become my worst performing video by a massive margin in terms of view duration.

So the views for this video has increased, but people are quitting almost immediately. 90% of the people who click are from India, which leads me to believe that they are employed by clickfarms to milk adwords/adsense, so they have no interest in the content at all.

After 3 days, adwords has been a massive failure in terms of promoting my channel. It has literally been a waste of money. I'll also add that I don't advertise to any countries where English is a first language, in order to keep the cost low (average cost per click right now is 4 cents). I wonder if advertising to the US, Australia, UK, and Canada would make a difference, since my ad is written in English.

EDIT: I think adwords may be relevant for selling specific products, but for promoting watching videos on YT, it may be much less effective.

 

[UnboxingSve]

It is good in a sense that you can get views number increased a lot. But do not expect anything more than that. For example, I paid one video I think around 5-10$ to be advertised and I put keywords and ages and everything specific because it was related to gamers. So, at least I was hoping to get few subscribers from it. I got around 2k views on that video and 0 (zero) subscribers. And since then that video is getting very little attention so it even didn`t help it to grow faster in the views. And in my opinion, it was really interesting video. So, I would not suggest it - talking from my own experience.

 

[Franklin]

I have always looked at it, but never purchased an ad. I may give it a try for one video and see how it does.

 

[Justin West]

I've done a lot of adwords and FB/social ad campaigns and I always look for what I call the "money lever." Basically, you need a great system already set up that will create revenue, and you constantly test small messages and campaigns until you find one in which money earned > money spent. If you only plan to monetize with Adsense then using PPC ads will probably never make sense, except in the very long term, which is difficult to measure.

Real marketers only do things with measurable results.

 

[Darren Taylor]

Hi Darren, thanks for your input. It's good to hear from an AdWords pro.

If I may ask you a question: Is there a delay in YT analytics of the number of views with AdWords? I am asking because my YT channel is small, so before AdWords, I was averaging about 25 videos viewed per day. Since AdWords, my views have dropped to about 16 per day. So my video views have dropped since AdWords.

But according to AdWords, in the last 24 hours, 148 people have clicked my AdWords ad, so should have landed on my YT channel page. This is about a 600% increase in traffic, yet views of my videos have dropped.

How can this be explained? Either the stats from AdWords are false (massively inflated), or YT is treating the massive increase in traffic as bots and not counting the views (and also penalizing) my channel with a drop in views).

I would like to know what you think is a likely explanation for this? What I am doing is really not much different from paying for views. Does YT treat paying for views from AdWords any different than paying bots or clickfarms for views? Or is there a delay in my YT view count while the YT algorithm is trying to decide if the new traffic is genuine and not bots?

It just makes no sense to have a large drop in channel views when AdWords should result in a large increase in views.

Thanks.

I've never seen that myself, though I know YouTube takes view count very seriously, so on the one hand, if they even slightly suspect a view isn't legit, then they won't count it.

You're right in saying there is a delay in view count increasing when you drive views via AdWords, sometimes I've seen delays as long as 48-72 hours. But, I've never seen view count decrease outright.

How are you driving views to your channel in the first instance? (outside of AdWords)

 

[Oliver Andersen]

I can now confirm this.

After having no (or worse) impact linking adwords to my home page, today linked to a 2 minute video which is in a playlist, and the view duration for this video tanked. The audience retention for this video is 5.7% (9 seconds), compared to my average retention of 46%. This video has suddenly become my worst performing video by a massive margin in terms of view duration.

So the views for this video has increased, but people are quitting almost immediately. 90% of the people who click are from India, which leads me to believe that they are employed by clickfarms to milk adwords/adsense, so they have no interest in the content at all.

After 3 days, adwords has been a massive failure in terms of promoting my channel. It has literally been a waste of money. I'll also add that I don't advertise to any countries where English is a first language, in order to keep the cost low (average cost per click right now is 4 cents). I wonder if advertising to the US, Australia, UK, and Canada would make a difference, since my ad is written in English.

EDIT: I think adwords may be relevant for selling specific products, but for promoting watching videos on YT, it may be much less effective.

Before you started AdWords what was the top trending countries in your analytics?
I think there would be a better potential to promote your content to those countries as each person needs varies from country to country so for example, a video that is popular in U.S might be unpopular in for example Burma due to the cultural difference & people doesn't like the same as others do.

I laughed when you said click farms that is something you can easily convince me on, I always get suspicious when someone promotes my videos & I notice many of the views come from India, Vietnam or Thailand that's usually not a good sign unless it is accomplished the free way then all views counts regardless of where they come from.

 

[MyBigBrain]

How are you driving views to your channel in the first instance? (outside of AdWords)

Social media links, google searches, Youtube search, suggested videos etc.[DOUBLEPOST=1513028652,1513028519][/DOUBLEPOST]

Before you started AdWords what was the top trending countries in your analytics?

USA (58% of my audience)
Australia
Canada
UK.

I've now added the above countries to the targeted countries list. Let's see if the stats improve. But I do expect the cost per click to far exceed 4 cents from these countries.

I can't believe I didn't think of this before, but since I am getting garbage clicks from India, I've removed India from the list of targeted countries. The garbage clicks should theoretically drop drastically.

What I've noticed is that there is a BIG inconsistency between the adwords stats and YT analytics. For example, adwords would show there were 100 clicks, which means my video has be seen 100 times, but the YT analytics show only 15 views. Maybe the YT algorithm has dismissed the extra views as bots or something, I don't know.

EDIT: Now getting garbage clicks from the Philippines...more clickfarms.