Kyle Sulerud - April 13, 2022Here’s how to make sure you have a funnel and an offer that will enable you to run successful YouTube Ad campaigns. These go hand in hand, although the offer is more important than the funnel, which I’ll get into in a bit.
The funnel + offer make up one of the five components of the AdLeg Arch, which is a framework I developed to explain why some YouTube Ad campaigns work and others flop.
YouTube ads have been an absolute game-changer for my clients, but it hasn’t always been perfect. Any time a client’s ads were struggling, it was kind of like a game of Whack-a-Mole trying to figure out where they were struggling and how to fix it.
We’d fix something, and see some improvement, but then we couldn’t scale and we had to fix something else.
As I kept analyzing the data, I discovered what my top clients were doing differently from the ones who were struggling. I was then able to apply the findings across the board, prove things out, and that’s how I came up with the AdLeg Arch framework.
Anyone can make this work as long as you take the time to make sure every piece of your arch is solid. I’m going to show you how to do that right now starting with the funnel & offer.
The key here is that your funnel must be appropriate for the platform.
Think about this…
When you’re on YouTube, you’re not getting bombarded with messages and alerts. You’re not scrolling through a feed looking for the thing that will give you the next rush of dopamine. You are not in instant gratification mode.
YouTube users are in consumption mode. They’ve come to YouTube to spend some time.
Because they’re in consumption mode, it can be harder to pull their attention away from what they’re watching. And because of this, traffic from YouTube – YouTube Ad clicks – generally costs more than traffic from other ad platforms.
But, once someone clicks on your ad, they are still in consumption mode.
So let me ask you this…
Would it make sense to have this person opt-in for something that you are going to send them by email, or to have them opt-in for a live webinar that is happening in three days?
No, that’s a waste. If that’s how your funnel works, then run ads on the cheaper ad platforms.
You’ve just attracted a visitor who is in consumption mode – give them something to consume…immediately!
Sure, you still have them opt-in, but then you should immediately give them something to consume. And when they’re coming from watching a YouTube video, the most logical thing to have them consume is another video.
Here’s what a successful funnel looks like for YouTube Ads. This is the type of funnel we’re running for most of our clients right now.
It goes from the YouTube ad, to an opt-in, to a Video Sales Letter. This could be an automated webinar or it could be a shorter VSL.
People are usually opting-in for the VSL, but that doesn’t have to be the case. They could be opting in for a cheat sheet or maybe you have a book funnel.
Even if people are not opting in for the VSL, the ‘thank you’ page should have a VSL, because you want to take advantage of this consumption mode that YouTube viewers are in.
If you’re not taking advantage of this with a VSL, then YouTube Ads may prove to be too costly for you.
From the VSL, you’re bringing people to your offer. This will usually be an offer to buy a course or an offer to schedule a phone call (a discovery call, a sales call, whatever you want to call it).
On that sales call, you’ll be selling your main offer. But the first offer, the VSL offer, is for the call itself.
Yes, of course, there are exceptions to this. But this works, you don’t need to reinvent it.
So if the reason this works so well is that we are sending people from a video to another video, then why don’t we send people directly from the ad to the VSL?
Why do we require the opt-in?
First, the opt-in page introduces your webinar or VSL. You’re not just sending people to minute zero of a video and hoping that they stick around to the good stuff. On the opt-in page, you can tell them what the good stuff is going to be so they’re more likely to watch more of the video.
Also, the simple act of opting-in creates some buy-in and elevates the perceived value of the content someone is about to watch.
The opt-in page also allows for fast A/B testing. You can test different headlines, different bullet points, and you can quickly see what’s going to resonate the most with your target audience, and what’s going to entice more people to opt-in.
Having an opt-in page also assists Google’s artificial intelligence because you’re sending more positive inputs into the system.
Without the opt-in tracking, it will be much harder and take much longer to optimize because there will be fewer inputs being fed into the machine. (This also applies to manual optimization – you’ll have more positive data to look at when working your manual magic.)
And lastly, having an opt-in page allows for follow-up. It allows you to keep in contact with people who didn’t watch your whole webinar or who haven’t taken action. You can email and even call them to provide more value, answer their objections, and drive them to your offer.
So really, when we add the follow-up, the funnel looks more like this:
At the beginning of this post, I said that the offer is more important than the funnel. You can have the most amazing funnel in the world, built by Russell Brunson himself, but if it is promoting an offer that nobody thinks is valuable, it’s going to flop.
On the other hand, you can have an offer that’s a no-brainer for your target market, and you don’t need much of a funnel.
To paraphrase something I’ve heard Dean Jackson say: “Sometimes, the only thing you need to sell a horse is a sign that says Horse For Sale.”
I’m not going to get into how to craft a winning offer now, but I do think you should have a proven offer before you start investing money in YouTube Ads.
If you’re not offering something people need or want, and if you don’t have an appropriate funnel for that offer, then the “Funnel & Offer” block falls out of the AdLeg Arch, and the whole arch crumbles.