The Complete YouTube Ads Course, Beginner to Expert | Course Introduction

Why do most YouTube ads courses fail people?

Most of the paid courses I've seen simply don't teach what people actually need to know. I'm Simon Young, CEO and founder of s.media, the UK's leading YouTube ads agency, and personally I've got over 20 years of Google Ads and now YouTube ads experience. This course is going to teach you how simple strategies on YouTube ads can get you in front of thousands of people and generate new business, and if you stay to the end of this presentation I'll personally offer you 20 minutes of my time to go over any questions.

As an agency we see people struggling continuously because of the amount of misinformation out there about YouTube ads. One of the biggest issues I have with courses that are out there is that they're overpriced. I've seen courses for tens of thousands of dollars, I've taken most of the ones considered to be the best, and most of them miss loads of the basics, things like setting up audiences properly, how to set campaigns up, how to exclude negative keywords. A lot of them I've nearly fallen asleep in, and I'm supposedly one of the most interested people in this content in the world.

My other big gripe is that they teach a cookie cutter strategy: you need this many subscribers, these calls to action in these places, just keep spending. Fundamentally I understand that every business is different, and a lot of these courses just teach people how to waste money quickly. Part of what this course teaches is how to scale properly, whether you're starting from a small budget or already spending and want to improve.

Why should YouTube ads be part of your marketing mix?

I believe YouTube ads should be part of the mix that any business considers for its marketing and advertising activity. There's so much in the back end of Google about audiences, profiling customers, using the right keywords and placements, and applying that to your business, and the psychology behind how you interact with those customers matters. With over 120 videos in the course, we break all of that down into bite sized chunks.

I want to break this industry because I'm fed up with people offering courses when they don't practise what they preach. Most of the people selling courses at tens of thousands of dollars started out with a few clients, found a bit of a strategy, and now teach a cookie cutter approach, even though every business has different needs, customers and price points. As an agency our bread and butter is still running ad accounts for clients, so we can offer this course at a fraction of the cost of those other courses, and I believe it's worth far more than the tens of thousands of dollar courses, or even the 997 dollar courses that are often designed to lead you into a bigger upsell.

Why is YouTube such a neglected opportunity?

YouTube is neglected largely because people don't make video, and making video can feel expensive and difficult to know what to make. Google owns YouTube and is using it as a test bed for content, and Google is fundamentally eating video for breakfast, meaning it wants video because people engage with it more than the written word.

If you produce the right video with the right content, people engage with it, Google notices, and it will promote that video to the top of a normal Google search for very little money. I think I'm one of the world's top SEO experts and have been at the top of that field for over ten years, and I've seen a video rank at the top of Google just from the right words, phrases and structure, backed by a small Google Ads budget. Done properly, that video can be a gold mine.

You don't need to be on camera yourself if you don't want to be. You can do voiceovers, employ actors, or use other people in the business who are happy to be filmed. A big added benefit is TrueView: you get roughly 30 seconds of free advertising, because if someone clicks off before 30 seconds on an in-stream ad, you don't pay as an advertiser. Compare that to something like Facebook, where a few seconds of a view can already count as a paid impression.

The other benefit of YouTube ads is that Google knows far more about people than almost any other platform, tracking where people go, which apps they use, which websites they visit and what products they look at. That means you can target far more precisely than on other social platforms, including targeting people who have visited a competitor's website, or been in market for your kind of product.

What results has this actually produced for clients?

Here are some example results we've produced for clients. A beauty therapist offering laser hair removal was generating leads worth hundreds of pounds. An orthodontist had average bookings of seven to ten thousand pounds. An e-commerce clothing store was getting three times return on ad spend on a high ticket, premium product. These results were achieved quickly and consistently within the first two or three months of running their YouTube campaigns.

I believe this is a golden era for YouTube, because so many businesses think they need a big, well populated channel before they can run ads, when in reality you just need a channel and one video to get started.

How can you target your competitors' audiences on YouTube?

You can put your ads inside your competitors' content and target people who have visited their websites, so that a few days after someone visits a competitor's site, when they're in the mood to buy, your advert appears in front of them. You can also rank in the search results for your chosen keywords, and if your video is structured properly and gets good engagement, Google will promote it into the main Google search results, potentially reducing your need for a separate SEO strategy.

Beyond keywords, you can target very specific individual channels and see how your ads perform against particular competitors and placements, looking for the placements that generate the most inquiries, phone calls and orders. You can even target individual videos, choosing exactly which video your advert appears in. I call this a pattern interrupt: someone is watching a video already, your ad drops in, and the job is simply to grab their attention.

What are the biggest mistakes beginners make?

The mistake I see most often is going too broad too quickly. It annoys me that nearly all the courses out there teach people to start with a broad audience, because that just puts your ad in front of the wrong people, slows down learning, and wastes ad budget.

A second common mistake, and an easy one to make, is copying and pasting content straight from another platform and expecting it to work on YouTube. A lot of agencies are lazy and just carry content across from somewhere like Facebook, and it simply doesn't work in the same way. YouTube is somewhere people come to research and learn, and the biggest search terms are "how to", so content that teaches people about your product or offering tends to work well there.

The really big mistake, though, is wanting to get going too quickly without a proven strategy, putting an ad live and testing it based on what you know from Google Ads. I've seen a lot of experienced Google Ads people rush into YouTube this way, and it's the best way to waste budget and get little or confusing results. Use a proven strategy, use a system, and that's what this course teaches.

How should you structure your ads and your channel?

The structure of ads on YouTube isn't complicated. First you have to hook people in and give them a reason to keep watching. Then you educate people, showing them what your offering is and what your product can do for them. The mistake I see people make most is forgetting the next step: giving people a reason to take action. I've seen so many videos where people educate really well but never ask viewers to visit the site or make an inquiry.

You don't need a fancy camera to get going. Authenticity matters a lot, getting your face, your brand and your message across in a truthful, honest way makes a real difference to how your brand is perceived and how many people take action. My business partner Andy Price, one of the UK's leading creative directors, has shown lots of different ways to achieve this within the course, whether that's a simple, authentic, straight to camera approach or cutting together b-roll and existing assets. Once you've found a format that works, it can become a simple case of copy, paste, upload, repeat.

What does the actual campaign strategy look like?

The strategy starts with the campaign settings. One of the biggest mistakes people make is using the cookie cutter ad strategies already set up inside YouTube. Instead, use a custom video campaign, select computers and mobile phones as placements and exclude things like TV, and add the URLs and placements identified through earlier research.

From there you can see exactly which videos your adverts appeared in, and which of those created conversions, which is something a lot of other courses don't teach at all. The approach is to create a campaign with as many relevant placements and specific keywords as possible to start, giving you the broadest but still accurate audience, add a discovery ad, and prepare three pieces of creative so you can see which advert performs best. After about a week you can double down on the winning creative. Only once you have a winner do you increase budgets and expand the audience, and from there it becomes a rinse and repeat process: put up creative, understand the audience, don't scale until you have winners, then scale.

I've had clients spending as little as two dollars a day and getting fantastic results. One example that springs to mind is a mortgage advisor spending around two dollars fifty a day, who had spent as much as five dollars a day at times but couldn't cope with the number of leads that generated, getting three or four good inquiries a day for around a dollar each.

What's inside the course, and how do you get involved?

I've been through the courses that cost tens of thousands of dollars and the 997 dollar ones, and in my view they're not worth it. This course is 14 modules with a hundred plus videos, broken down into bite sized chunks so you can skip around or focus on individual parts of running campaigns, with full access, updates and lifetime access to everything as it changes.

If you buy the course you'll also get a free copy of my book about YouTube marketing [title unclear in the captions]. There are two options: the full course, with 14 modules, all the strategies and scaling techniques and access to a Facebook group, or the fast track package, which adds one month of VIP treatment with one-to-one calls with me or a member of my team, plus unlimited email support. You can find out more at yt-course.com.