I Used Google Ads to promote my YouTube Channel - THIS Happened

Should you use YouTube advertising to grow your channel? Let's find out.

So this was a video of mine that I released recently that did really well for a little bit, kind of took off and then it kind of flatlined. You can see here, the growth kind of slowed down and stopped. So I said, let me take some money, throw some advertising dollars behind this and see what happens. So you can see here, I started the advertising on September 6th. And you can see we've kind of had a steady inflow of views. The views are up, the watch time is up because you're getting more views and the number of subscribers is up as well. And you can see over here that the majority, we've had 274 views in the last 48 hours. The majority of those are coming from YouTube advertising, a little bit from external and 1% from other features, maybe from suggested, maybe from the browse screen. Now, has this helped my channel at all? Well, well, it definitely did help get a lot more views and watch time. The downside to advertising is if you go to the watch time, it usually tanks the average view duration and percentage viewed. You can see this very sharp tail here on the beginning of the video, which indicates that you're doing some advertising. Usually if you see this on a regular video, you would say, hey, I need to change this intro the hook. But you can see the usual retention of this video. Before I started, the advertising was pretty much closer to the one above, above here. So by the time we're getting to the end of this video, you know, really only 6 or 7% are sticking around. But the average retention and loss rate is, is decently well because by the time you're here, 28%, 6%. So it seems that the video, if people are watching it, it is retaining people over time. But obviously because it's an advertisement, people don't know your brand. They're dropping off pretty quickly in the beginning. So as you can see, the number of views we've had from advertising, 1,700. So almost all of the views we've had about 900 views or so that came just from regular viewership. So let's go over to the ad side of things so we can talk about what we did here. So you'll see Here, here's my YouTube Top Mistakes video and what I did, I just did a discovery video. So I want this video to show up in YouTube search when people are searching for something like top YouTube mistakes, common YouTube mistakes that small YouTubers make. So basically typed in a bunch of keywords related to YouTubers making mistakes, because that's what this video is about. So I want it to show up in search so that it has a higher chance of being clicked on. So you can see here, September 5th, no views. And we turned the ads on September 6th, and we started getting some views. And you can see here averaging about, you know, 121, 30 or so views, 140 views a day. And I'm just using a $10 a day budget. And if we scroll over here, you see I got 143,000 impressions. So what this means is YouTube showed this thumbnail, thumbnail 143,000 times. So that's pretty cool. It gained, as you can see here, 1753 views at an average cost. For view of 8 cents, costing $141.31, we got 39 earned views. That means people watch this video and then they went and watched another video. So that's an important metric because it means it's someone who clicked on the ad video, watch the video through, maybe made it to the end screen, and then clicked and watched another video or clicked on another suggested video of yours. And then we got anywhere from 21 to 40 subscribers. The conversion rate pretty low expected on an ad. The conversions are, you know, subscribers, maybe even some likes. It looks like here, if we go over to subscribers, you know, it's about 14 on September with September 5th, you know, 14 subscribers. And then it stay, you can see here, it stayed pretty flat. And then we turned the ads on and the subscribership started growing. So there you go. So we got about 34. So what's that, about 20 subscribers at $141. So if we do the math on that, 141 divided by 20, you're paying about $7 per subscriber. Now, if you're like, oh, well, if I do that, how long will it take me? How much will it take me to get 10,000 subscribers? It would be 70,000 DOL. So again, is using YouTube advertising beneficial? Well, you know, when your channel is smaller and you have a hard time getting views, you know, the YouTube algorithm isn't really working for you yet if you have a video that's doing well. That's why I wanted to advertise this video. Because as you can see, it did have this little surge in the beginning. It was getting promoted and suggested and it was going. And then it kind of died out. And I was like, okay, well, this got served. People liked it. People were commenting on it. Let me see if I can grow my channel little Bit putting some advertising behind it, as you can see, got 34 subscribers, not a ton. I'm only doing $10 a day. And I'll probably shut this down at the end of the month and just let the video go back to doing what it's doing. But I saw, hey, this is a video. The video by itself, organically is growing my traffic. It's getting a lot of engagement. If I put some advertising dollars behind it, will it continue to help grow my channel? And the answer is yes, it is. And I was very specific with my demographics. So if we go back to analytics, we come over to my audience. So you can see this is being mostly shown to unique viewers, new viewers, that's what we want. We're a new channel. We want new people to see us because nobody knows who we are yet. Okay. That's why you use advertising to get known. All right, we scroll down, you'll see most of the people watching this, they're not subscribed to the channel. You can also see that the majority are male. I didn't target sex on this one. I just said advertise to male and female. But it seems to be that men are the one more typically interested. And you're seeing, you know, a few 18 to 24 year old. I didn't target people that young with my advertising. I mostly did, as you can see here, the 25 to 44 range. And so what I did, I kind of went in and changed and I was like, let me do 35 to 44. Let me just try and hit people in my age range because maybe I'll be able to connect with them better and, and help them more. You know, people who are younger tend to want you to be super fast, really fast. My guitar teaching channel, I teach people in their 60s, 70s, 80s. They like that I go very, very slow. But we're doing a channel like this and you have a younger audience, it's like you got to be like, really going and things have to be really, really active or, you know, you. They lose their attention really quickly and then they're gone. And if we pop over to top Geographies, you can see here, I only advertise the United States and Canada. And this is where I see lot of mistakes with advertising. They try to get that cost per click or that cost per view down. It's 8 cents per view. That's a lot. You could get a penny per view. But what's going to happen is you're going to be advertising a lot to India and people in The Philippines or, you know, all these other countries that, yes, maybe they'll watch your videos, but ultimately they might not buy a product from you. You know, even, even in Canada, with my guitar teaching channel, I get a lot of students who are like, the conversion, the Canadian dollar to US is, is expensive. So it ends up costing them a lot more money to buy my guitar course. All right, people from Australia, same thing too. The US Dollar was stronger. And, you know, if they're buying a $300 course, it might be $400 Canadian. I don't know what the conversion is, but you see what I'm saying? You know, you want to make sure you're advertising to the places that will actually be able to spend money with you. So I tend to advertise to the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. They're also very English speaking countries, so that also helps out too. So ultimately, do you want to advertise on YouTube? You know, I don't think it hurts if you go about doing it in the right way. You really can tank your channel if you do it in the wrong way. But you can see throwing some money at a discovery video to get your brand out there and get people to know you can help. But you can see it's a lot more expensive than just going about it through the organic route. But, but if you are a youtuber that's just getting started and you're trying to grow your channel, it might be helpful in getting that snowball going. You know, I always tell people on YouTube it's a snowball. You start off really, really small, and over time it builds. All right? And once we get that snowball growing, it's really hard to get those first 500 subscribers, then those first thousand, then 5,000, then 10,000, 10,000 subscribers. You start seeing momentum. You're starting to hit those milestones a little bit quicker. Then all of a sudden you're at a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand. So honestly, it took me, I think I got to 10,000 to 100,000 much faster than I did from zero to 10,000. So, you know, if you're someone that has a little bit money and you want to invest in your business, go ahead, hey, I'm throwing $10 a day at this. Okay, that's $300 a month. You know, are you willing to spend money to invest in a business to do some brand awareness and get people to know you? I think it's worth it. Would I go, you know, spend the $70,000 to get those 10,000 subscribers? Probably not. Like I said, I'm probably going to run this for a month. I'm going to turn it off, and then I'm going to keep making more content. And when another good video comes out that I'm like, oh, this. This seemed to catch attention. This seemed to do something. Let me show this out to more people so that they can see this good content. Maybe they'll like it. Maybe they'll subscribe to my channel and they'll keep watching more content and that's it. Like I say, you're just trying to get that snow, and then once it's rolling, you know, you can. I don't really do any advertising on my guitar channel. Very little. I did a little bit in the beginning, and I do absolutely zero advertising to get views. I get a lot of organic views now because I have over 300,000 subscribers. But this channel here, hey, it's only. It's just got under just 700 subscribers. So it's going to take some time to get that ball going. So if I throw a little advertising behind it, it can help push the needle just a little further, a little faster. Now, if you want to learn the top tips that I've learned over the years to grow my channel from 100,000 subscribers to 300,000 subscribers, then I highly recommend you check out this video over here where I teach you some of the most important things I've learned over the years about YouTube.