Kyle Sulerud - March 10, 2021Okay, so you have a YouTube Ads campaign and it’s working! It’s time to scale it.
Scaling can be tricky. Getting a campaign working may be relatively easy, but things can break once you try to increase the budget and spend more only to get more of the same results.
I want to break down some strategies you can implement to help prevent the breakage and actually scale your campaigns profitably.
1. Test More Ads
Simply by adding more ads to campaigns that are already working, you’re going to give the system more to work with. This provides more things that the algorithm can test and, potentially, more winning ads. Think about it – if you have just one ad that is working really well, you can scale that to a point. But, what if you had five different ads that were working really? You’re able to reach different people depending on the messaging that works for them. Someone doesn’t have to even see all of your ads or skip through most of them to find the one that appeals to them.
Google can actually help with this. Their machine learning will know, in advance, which ads to show to which people. This is based on people who have already responded to your ads and because of all of the similarities people have with one another and all of the crazy algorithmic stuff that I don’t even understand well enough to get into. But, hopefully, you get the point.
By giving Google more input and data to work with, the algorithm is going to help deliver the right message to the right people. It could be a very similar message and they could be very similar people, but they’re going to respond to your ads in different ways. That’s why some ads work really well and some ads don’t work at all. Yet, there may be no explanation, rhyme, or reason to the ads that work and don’t work. That’s why testing lots of ads is very important if you want to scale.
You could get lucky and scale with one ad that really works well or you could put in a little extra work to find several ads that work well and scaling will be much easier. Even if you have one ad that is crushing it and working really well, and even if you’re able to scale that ad pretty well, you’ll be better served adding more and more ads into the mix. You will get better results by having multiple ads that work.
2. Add More Campaigns and More Targeting
This goes hand in hand because, when I am adding more targeting, I am putting the new targeting into new campaigns. Adding targeting into an existing campaign that is working can cause things to break.
The exception here is placement targeting. If I am adding new placements, I am adding those into existing campaigns. With any other type of targeting, I am creating new campaigns for new targeting.
To explain this a little better, we will assume we have just one campaign that is working really well. We are targeting 20 keywords in this campaign and we want to scale it. In order to scale this campaign, what do we do? We increase the budget. At a certain point, we will not be able to increase the budget anymore without either adding targeting or increasing the bids.
Now, adding keywords or audiences to existing campaigns that are already working can cause the results to completely fall apart. I’ve seen this happen. The algorithm gets completely confused and it feels like the campaign is starting over from day one. You’re feeding it some new inputs and it has to relearn what to do with these inputs. You do not want that to happen on a campaign that is spending $1,000/day.
Instead, when you want to scale by adding targeting, you want to do this by creating new campaigns for the new targeting. It also helps with your budget control. It’s much easier to spend $3,000/day or more across dozens of campaigns than trying to put all of that budget into one campaign and just hoping that nothing breaks. When you’re setting up all of these new campaigns with the new targeting, you start them out with small budgets and then you start to increase the budget as the results are coming in. Some of these campaigns aren’t going to work and you can simply turn them off. It’s much easier to do it this way than putting all of your targeting into one campaign.
3. Add New Ads Specific to the New Targeting
This strategy kind of combines the first two strategies we covered. Not only can you add new ads and targeting, but you can do it in a much more advanced way where you are adding ads specific to the new targeting that you are adding.
For example, let’s say you have a new product that helps people grow their YouTube channel. You’ve been having success running ads to an audience of people who want to grow their YouTube channel. One way to scale this would be to expand into audiences of people who want to start a YouTube channel. Very similar audience and people with similar goals, but the messaging, ideally, would be different here.
The targeting related to starting a YouTube channel would have ads about starting a YouTube channel. The targeting related to growing a YouTube channel would have ads about growing a YouTube channel. If your audience can be divided up into different segments like this, you’ll have a much easier time scaling by producing ads for each segment. You could take this a step further and could have completely different landing pages and products for each segment, but you don’t necessarily have to go that far. If your offer appeals to different types of people, then simply recording different ads for those different types of people all leading them to the same offer can work great.
4. Set Up Retargeting
Check out this blog that goes way more in-depth on retargeting.
Here’s the gist of it – set up lots of retargeting campaigns. Google lets you set up retargeting using banner display ads, instream YouTube Ads, discovery YouTube Ads, Google search ads, and even Gmail ads. And it doesn’t stop with Google! You can even retarget on Facebook, LinkedIn, or wherever your target customers are hanging out.
What does all of this retargeting do? Well, I’m glad you asked. It increases the value of your leads. Retargeting helps to maximize the revenue generated from each one of your leads. When this is happening, there are a couple of approaches you can take or maybe a combination of the two. You can sit back and enjoy the higher ROI you are getting on all of your paid traffic. OR, because your leads are now worth more to you, you can afford to spend more per lead. Spending more per lead is going to allow you to scale.
Now, there’s a happy medium here. You don’t want to be spending so much more per lead that it wipes out the additional ROI you are getting from your retargeting campaigns, but if you are willing and able to spend more per lead, you will be able to get in front of more people, you will be able to attract more customers, and it will help you scale.
So, that’s what I have for you today. If used correctly, these strategies can all help you improve your YouTube Ads.