Module 11 - Vidnetics, a quick tour

What is Vidnetics used for?

Vidnetics is a tool for building YouTube ad placement lists and researching competitors' ads. Inside the dashboard, the video finder lets you search videos by keyword or channel, and gather information on individual videos to help build a placement list for a campaign.

How do I build a placement list with Vidnetics?

You search by keyword, for example "painful legs" for a medical device campaign, and Vidnetics returns up to a hundred monetised videos matching that search, with filters available for a more advanced search. From there you judge relevance yourself: one example video, about relief from sciatic leg pain, had 1.8 million views, which sounds strong until you account for it being a worldwide total since August 2020. Estimating that perhaps 20% of those views are from the UK, and that the video has likely been live around 18 months, brings the realistic figure down to roughly 20,000 to 30,000 UK views a month, and it may no longer even be actively featured. Relevant videos can be selected and added straight into an existing placement list, and the process is repeated across many keyword searches until you have built up the hundreds or thousands of placements a campaign needs.

How does the ROI calculator work?

Vidnetics includes an ROI calculator that takes a budget, an estimated conversion rate, an average cost per view, an average click-through rate, a lead-to-customer conversion rate and an average order value, and turns them into projected results. Working through the numbers, including catching and correcting a mistyped conversion rate along the way, produces a worked example of a quarter of a million views, 2,500 site visits at an average cost per click of two dollars, 500 leads at ten dollars a lead, 150 customers at a cost of 33 dollars each, and 22,000 dollars of total revenue, a 4.5x return on ad spend. The advice is to be realistic with the inputs, because unrealistic figures just produce a flattering number rather than a useful one. There is also a keyword research tool inside Vidnetics, though the preference here is to do keyword research directly in Google Ads instead.

What can the ad library show me about competitors?

The ad library searches for ads currently running on a given topic. A search for "leg circulation" returned nothing, but switching to "diabetes" turned up live examples, including one ad with 2.7 million views built around a personal story of being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a child and later using a particular glucose monitor, and another built around simple diet changes that had reduced arthritis pain. Clicking into an ad shows its length, its upload date, its description and its engagement, and critically its estimated ad spend: one 30-second ad in the example had roughly 140,000 dollars behind it, a sign the advertiser is serious and, in the same way a long-running PPC ad usually signals it is generating a return, that the ad is probably working.

How should I use placement campaigns?

Use the video finder to build placement lists, the ROI calculator to set realistic expectations, especially useful when demonstrating potential returns to a client, and the ad library to see what is already working in your niche. The recommendation is to treat a placement campaign as a complementary route to market with its own separate budget, not as a replacement for your other campaigns.