Module 2 - Mis conceptions and expectations

Why will placements alone not let you scale?

Because there is a finite number of placements available, and once you narrow a channel list down to your own geography there are not enough views left to grow on. If we go back three or four years, and to some extent still today, a lot of people are talking about placements. It is about placements. We want our ads shown inside the right channels and shown to the right people, and there are a few types of software out there, one of which we are going to show you in this course, that let you select the placements where you want your ads to appear. The really attractive thing about placements is that you can choose exact channels.

The issue then is scaling. Take an example where you pick a hundred channels and they have all got a million views. That sounds awesome. We can put our ads into those 100 channels because they are all really focused on topic. But if each of those videos has got a million views, that will be over a period. If you then start to narrow that down into your particular country, territory, maybe town or city, you are going to find that within that placement list there are just not enough views of that particular video or that list of videos within your geographic area.

You can bid higher and be the advertiser of choice for that channel, pushing out the majority of other advertisers, but you are still not going to manage to push everybody out. Within that list of videos there is a finite number of placements available. If a video has a million views, that sounds great, but out of those million people how many watched past two or three minutes? I am guessing, let us say 25 per cent if you are lucky, so that is 250,000. On that video, how many people watched it in your territory? I am in the UK, so let us say 30,000 maybe, if I am lucky. If that 30,000 watched it over the last year, that is less than a thousand views per week. If we are trying to scale a campaign, it is pretty much impossible to do it based on placement.

What do you use instead of placements to scale?

You overlay audiences with who someone is. You look at who your perfect customer is, what keywords they are searching, which websites they are visiting, which apps they visit. All of these things come into it, and then Google will serve you a placement list based on your budget. That allows you to scale properly once you have chosen the audience properly.

So placements are okay. Placements have their place. You can use them for some campaigns and I do recommend them for campaigns, but not when you are trying to grow and scale. If you really want to scale, you are going to have to work with the audiences that Google provides and create your own audiences, such as custom affinity and custom intent.

What gets missed when people talk about scaling?

Negative keyword lists. Many people are just talking about upping budgets and they are not mentioning negative keyword lists as much as they should be. When you scale your campaigns you should be looking to add negative keywords, add placements you do not want, and remove placements that are not performing. All of these things come into YouTube ads.

Can you turn a YouTube ad on and get results from day one?

No, and that is probably the biggest misconception with YouTube ads. Everybody is hyping YouTube ads as the latest thing. People are coming off Facebook looking for another lever, another big opportunity, and everybody is talking about the return on investment that is achievable through YouTube ads. It is off the scale. But one of the big misconceptions is that you put an ad up and it delivers from day one.

What you need to do is test, test, test, learn, reiterate and tweak. These are the things we are going to be teaching in the course: how to grow, how to scale, how to structure your ads, and why it is not possible just to turn it on and off and expect results from day one.

You put your ad up and it is going to take a week or two for it to learn and for Google to populate the audiences. Then you have got to rely on your conversion data working, because Google will try to optimise for whatever you have chosen as your goal, and it is going to take two or three weeks to learn. Sometimes longer. I have seen campaigns take four to six weeks to even learn. Then you can scale it, then you can start spending some budget, then you can drive more and more impressions, views and click-throughs, and start working on manipulating the placements you want to keep and getting rid of the ones you do not. That is how you can scale properly.