I have a YouTube channel where I share HubSpot development and digital marketing tutorials. A few videos were doing pretty well, but since my channel isn’t very large, they were not getting a whole lot of views. So, I decided to experiment with YouTube in-feed discovery ads. I have run Google search ads before, but I soon realized YouTube ads are very different. This article is a collection of my notes and steps to follow when creating a new campaign.
Understanding YouTube Discovery Ads
Before diving into the setup process, let’s understand YouTube Discovery Ads. Discovery Ads are a type of YouTube ad format designed to help users discover your brand, product, or service as they browse YouTube content. These ads appear in various places across YouTube, including the homepage, search results, and related videos.
Campaign Settings I Recommend
Create a new campaign and apply the following settings
- Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance
- Select video
- Select video views (later on you can specify what type of ads to show)
- Add your campaign name. You can come up with a naming convention that works for you, but I used “YouTube CPV – in feed – video xyz”.
- Enter a daily budget of $3 or $4
- Set end date in 2 weeks to prevent overspend for the experiment phase.
- Network – uncheck video partners
- Locations – If targeting USA, I would manually enter all the US States. You can find a list of states here.
- Language: English
- Related video: I left this empty to simplify things.
- Multi-format ads: I tried a campaign with this unchecked, and it didn’t perform well because all of the impressions and views were being sent to in-stream ads. So you may want to test a campaign with and without this checked.If it is unchecked you can specify where to show ads, in-feed or in-stream. But each ad group needs to have ads of one type in-stream or in-feed. You can mix them together. This needs to be checked if you plan on running a youtube shorts ad.
Ok, now on to the ad group settings. This is where you can experiment with audience targeting.
Ad Group Settings
Before you create your ad group, you first need to think about how to target your audience. There are multiple ways you could do this. Target an audience you know like a customer list or a remarketing list of people who visited your website. You can also target people who visit certain channels or videos. In my research and testing, these worked the best for me.
Affinity: Look at your GA4 audience demographic data for affinity groups. You can start broad, like “business professionals,” and narrow that down by age/gender. Or you can select in-market audiences created by Google. From my research, affinity audiences are less expensive than in-market audiences.
Placements: Some tutorial videos I saw online suggested targeting one YouTube channel placement per ad group. This is no longer possible and you have to select a minimum of 10 channels per ad group. I would recommend group channels by a particular topic
- Add your targeting options
- Set audience expansion to broaden your reach. The campaign can show your ad to more people once it knows what is working. This is worth testing, a campaign with and without this setting checked.
- Upload a video and set it as unlisted. This will prevent any impact on your existing videos and the organic traffic it is currently receiving. Google Ads also recommends advertising shorter videos.
- Add a heading, description, and destination URL. You can create different ads pointing to the same video to test what ad text works better.
- Companion banner: I just let this be the default, but you can upload a custom banner if you have one.
- Target CPV bid: uncheck automatically set bids and set it to 15 or 2o cents.
Some Things to Keep In Mind
- If you uncheck multiformat ads, each ad group will need to target either in-feed or in-stream. You can’t have a mixture in an ad group
- Once the ad group is created, You can’t seem to be able to adjust audience targeting. So, I had to create a new ad group targeting to make it narrower and then pause the one I originally had.
- If you want to do some video format experiments, Google has a video creator tool that lets you create an asset library. I gave this a try and was impressed by the speed you could create a video ad. It provides some templates that you can then edit with your logo, colors, images, and text. You can even add an AI-generated voiceover. Once the video is created, you can upload it as unlisted to your YouTube channel or have it saved directly to your asset library inside Google ads.
- I experimented with all of the different campaign types, and subscriptions/engagements and views seemed to work best for me.
- The average view rate of in-stream ads is 15% or higher, and a good view rate for in-feed discovery ads is 2% view rate.
Conclusion
YouTube Discovery Ads offer small businesses with modest budgets a cost-effective way to reach their target audience and drive meaningful engagement. By following these steps and leveraging targeted placements, you can create impactful YouTube Discovery Ad campaigns that effectively promote your brand, products, or services. Remember to continuously monitor and optimize your campaigns to maximize their effectiveness and achieve your business goals.
Contact me if you would like to discuss how I could help you set up your YouTube Ads campaign like this for your business.
