Table of Contents
Introduction
All right guys, let’s get it started slowly. Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for being here today. That means a lot to me. I’m very excited to spend the next hour with you guys to talk about growing your business with YouTube ads. So before we start though, I’m curious how many of you are already running some sort of ads, Facebook, TikTok, whatever? That’s what I was thinking. Yeah. Who is on YouTube ads already? Cool. And who’s planning to go on YouTube ads?
Setting and forgetting a campaign is what would make life easier. However, there’s no 100% automation (yet) with PPC, but there are four partial automation tools that we can utilize within Google Ads.
- Automated Bid Strategies
- Automation Rules
- Scripts (Usually JavaScript)
- APIs (e.g., 3rd party software)
Since No. 3 and 4 might make more effort by hiring a developer or investing in expensive PPC agency management software for scaling large accounts, I pick the first two in this post to show you a few practical examples of how we use them.
Marco Julian Introduction
Little bit about myself. I joined the DC in 2016 that was with a startup called AMZ Tracker. You might know about Travis Jameson. Basically, I joined AMZ Tracker in February, and they opened up this whole new world to me, the DC. And I joined back then in my first conference here six years ago as a volunteer.
And now I slowly evolved and have my own agency where we help businesses in coaching, in e-commerce, as well as an info products to scale and get more sales with paid advertisement. Our clients are in a range from six figures all the way up to 500 million in sales. And on the side, I started a podcast called the Seven Figure eCommerce Blueprint, where I interview successful seven, eight figure eCommerce entrepreneurs.
I’m also in the planning of starting an info product as well as a coaching podcast soon. If you know anyone or if you run your own eCommerce business in the seven eight figure range, I’m also looking for some guests that I can interview just in case. Feel free to talk to me. Just to pick a few services, we do a lot of them, a lot of ads. But today, I’m going to focus on Google with YouTube.
We also do Facebook, TikTok ads, even all the way up to Badoo ads the Chinese market. And yeah, as I said, I hope there’s something for you today that you can take away and implement eventually into your business.
What We Will Talk About
My talk is going to be about three main points, three concepts here.
- The first one I want to show you why YouTube ads can work for your online business.
- The second thing is a lot of people might think, oh, I need to spend so much in producing the ad and running it and having it on the platform. I want to show you a few examples why that is not the case or it doesn’t need to be the case.
- And third, you don’t have to test everything.
The Power Of Video Ads
Before we start or when we start with YouTube ads, the power of video ads. When you remember your childhood, you can probably remember one or two ads in the past.
For me, it’s for example, the famous Coca-Cola advertisement with those red trucks, the jingle that comes with it and so forth. I know maybe in every region if you’re in the States or in Europe, there might be different variations of that, but I believe every one of you has some memories of those old TV ads.
And the reason why they’re so strong is because they’re talking to multiple senses. You see the ad, you hear to it, it creates memories, memories getting stored in your brain way deeper than just a simple text ad and whatnot.
Nowadays also YouTube is kind of replacing TV almost. A lot of people when they go on YouTube and actually see an ad, it kind of has the same power when we were used to watching those TV ads.
YouTube vs Facebook Ads
Now since so many of you guys are in Facebook already, there are some major differences. So what I want you to do is just imagine a town if you are on Facebook or if you go to Facebook, usually you want to socialize.
It’s just like in the DC when you just want to catch up with the latest gossip.
You want to talk what’s going on and so on. So when you’re advertising on Facebook, what’s important is to go there and interrupt those people. You can only target them by interests and try to place your product, your service accordingly.
YouTube, on the other hand, not always, but a lot of times people use it as their library. They go there to check out that they want to seek specific information, how to and so forth.
So on YouTube you have this added layer, which is also contextual targeting. Contextual targeting with keywords is one of the highest forms of targeting because you can target someone right in the moment when they are looking for your product, for your service. And you can show them a respective ad to stimulate them. So I brought here some examples.
For example, best Thai course. When someone is looking to learn a language, they type in best Thai course, how to speak Thai fast, how to study a new language. You can show your ads to those people.
Targeting
So to sum it up, Facebook is interest targeting primarily. With YouTube, you can add also intent targeting, which is very powerful. You also have a few other remarketing options as well with YouTube, but we can talk a little bit more in the Q and A about it.
Be Aware When Comparing Both Platforms!
There are some major differences as well with a metric. So you might have seen videos on Facebook that went viral and generated thousands of views and whatnot. You need to know that Facebook is measuring a view when someone is looking the ad for three seconds and more or someone who’s clicking on the ad. For YouTube, on the other hand, it takes 30 seconds and only from 30 seconds above, it will be counted as a view. So that’s a way larger span for engagement, measuring the engagement here.
Another big difference is that Facebook, you have a supplementary ad copy that comes with it. So there’s not that much focus on the video, like with YouTube where you only primarily have the video and you have a call to action button as well.
So that means basically a shitty ad on Facebook can still work if your ad copy is compelling enough, and you should keep that in mind when you run YouTube ads. So just disclaimer you because view are not the key metric. We saw a lot of videos that generate views on Facebook, but then actually they get more sales on YouTube as well. So don’t focus on the wrong metric here.
Case Study - eCommerce Accessory Brand
For eCommerce, there is a small case study. It’s actually a fellow this year who is a good friend of mine and he was running, back then at the time seven figure business. Then the famous iOS update came and his Facebook ads basically crashed. I think some of you might relate to that scenario. And the sales dropped quite significantly.
So we were talking and we were discussing a YouTube ad strategy, which he implemented and not only could he get back to seven figures, but the business is now on eight figures and more. And YouTube is one of the biggest channels here to generate the sales. So the second point I would like to talk about is you don’t need to spend a lot of money to run YouTube ads.
If Time & Budget is Your Concern, Start Small
So basically we have seen amongst our clients that really low budget produced ads, they’re generating quite the best results. And I will show you an example in a little bit. Just hope my wifi is now stable. Okay. Yeah, perfect. So you don’t have to put too much emphasize into building out this ad.
When do you have to actually pay with YouTube? What I just mentioned and I just gave you this engagement metric with views. So YouTube won’t be charging you up until 30 seconds, which is quite significant.
You might see those ads when you go to YouTube and in the first five seconds there’s a skip button. If a person’s clicking on skip, you don’t pay for this ad even up to 30 seconds. You only pay 30 seconds and above. And if someone is clicking actually on your call to action button.
So that’s actually quite important to know because you can play with your ad in those first 20 to 25 seconds. You want to qualify your target audience so that you make sure that everyone who is actually watching more than 30 seconds is actually a qualified prospect. And you want to filter out everyone else so you don’t have to pay for anyone that is not qualified.
Once they watch 30 seconds, it will be also measured as the view rate here. And then if you see here this image that I posted, I’m talking about primarily here in this presentation about in-stream ads. Those are the ads if you want to watch a video and they pop up and they have the skip button that I just mentioned. They have this call to action here and yeah, that’s the ad that I’m talking about.
Case Study - Info Product Business
So Lindsay is a client of ours. She’s the founder of All Ears English, a fellow this year she couldn’t make it. She got just got married. She had like two honeymoons and I think she’s now about to get to her second honeymoon to Argentina. She runs two businesses. She has a dog, she’s super busy basically all the time, she runs… And I need to make a shout out here the All Ears English podcast where they are teaching people with info products on how to speak better English.
I might sure take this course as well, let’s see how it goes. But with her, she basically spent around 20 minutes for the scripting and a couple of more minutes for the recording. I want to show you here really quickly how that looks like.
Lindsay:
Lindsay here from All Ears English. Do you want to pass the IELTS? It’s not easy, there are tricks and traps everywhere. So I want to invite you to take our free score quiz so that you can understand what score you would get if you took the exam tomorrow. All of our successful students, like Livia, Nicoli, Lucia, and Mayva, have all started by taking this quiz and then they followed our daily study plan. So go ahead and get started now with our free IELTS score quiz. I will see you there.
Marco Julian:
So as you see, really simple. There was not a lot of text that she had to produce here, and also this is a top of the funnel ad. That means what you just saw, we are sending people to a quiz and we want to get them to convert. And this ad was just started at the beginning of October, a little bit before that. And it’s right now creating conversions at $3 already, 150 conversions at a price of 460 in ad spend. And this CPA will continue to go down because it’s just started to get optimized and whatnot. But this is what you can achieve, for example, within simple ad like this.
So you don’t have to test everything. Some of you might be totally overwhelmed because there’s just so many things that you can test with ads in general or with any marketing channel that you want to apply to your business. I want to give you a little bit of a prioritization so you have the AD 20 there and how to go forward.
How Do I Get Started?
So a few things only matter. Of course obviously your offer is the core part. Also, how you structure the landing pages, how you have your ad copy there and whatnot. That’s the biggest part. I won’t be digging into that too much right now in this conversation. There’s a book from Alex Hormozi, one of the growers I’ve been hearing a lot during this conference already. The book is called The 100 Million Offer, which I highly recommend to check out. Today, I will be digging in a little bit deeper into the ad creative itself, and then there is audience and the targeting.
But I just want to say that YouTube is such a visual medium. I will be focusing rather here on the creative part than on the targeting. Also, given the one hour that we have to make it most valuable to you. However, if you have any questions after this talk, please feel free to ask me about those other points. As a general rule, one of my mentors, he’s running one of the biggest YouTube agencies out there. He has been doing some research and he recommends ads less than one and a half minutes. Ideally around the one minute and 20 seconds mark.
Ad Creative Testing
So very simple concept here of the ad. You want to have a hook to catch someone’s attention right away. You want to have a body. The body, I will tell you a few frameworks that you can test. So it’s one of the most important parts to have different concepts that you can test quickly there. And then there’s the CTA, how you pitch your product and create a little bit of urgency and scarcity at the end.
What Is A Great Hook?
So what is a great hook? A phrase that catches the attention in the first five seconds. It will also directly qualify your target because customer or your customer an avatar. As I already mentioned, then after five seconds to 25 seconds, it’s really important to talk to the right demographic to show them that the ads is for them to also disqualify non prospects or non-ideal prospects. And you should also immediately speak to what they’re looking for and their desire and offering that in this ad.
Ad Creative Concept or Framework
There are some concepts here. Starting out with a founder story where you can basically sit there or someone in your team or your co-founder and you talk a little bit about your business and you give some back background information. How you get started, what is the mission of your business and how those products can fulfill the desire of your clients.
Then what we also saw partly with Lindsay, she is testing or she’s using client testimonials, user generate content. Of course, I highly encourage all of my clients to have a process in place to keep on taking customer client videos to have them in the ads as well. So then you can also have a simple product or service presentation and always try to sell at the next step in the funnel.
There is also a little bit more complex framework and I actually have a cheat sheet later that is giving you more information and detail, plus a couple of questions that you can use if you’re about to script your own ad creative.
So the concept is called Aducate, it was popularized by Tom Breese. It’s called AIM. Difficulty, understanding, credibility, action plan, teach and exit. So again, with AIM targeting the people difficulty, you want to show the pain point, show the obstacle, you want to understand.
That means you want to put yourself into the shoes of your customer that you emphasize with them. You show a little bit credibility even if it’s just in the B-roll that you show, for example, if you gave a talk at a conference that you show them that you have some credibility there. You have some action plan.
So what can they expect? You teach them a thing and then you exit. As I said later, I can give you a sheet on that.
Call-to-Action
So with a call to action, it should be very simple. The next steps, for example, go to that page, sign up and you will get access to X offer. So if that’s a cheat sheet, a quiz or some kind of value add that you can give, it depends on your funnel.
With eCommerce, you might have a product that you want to sell. So what are good metric to measure here? So probably when you’re selling out, you don’t have a lot of the main metric here, which is conversion or cost per conversion. If you have that, it’s ideal of course because that’s that’s immediately giving you insights on how the ad is performing on your ROI.
But what our good secondary metrics, if you don’t have enough data is like the click through rate and here the benchmark to aim above 1%. If not ideally between 1.5 to 2% and the view rate. The few rate should also be between 20 and 25%. Again, you don’t want to have too much view rate because that means too many people who are not relevant are watching this ad and you have to pay for it.
Case Study - Coaching Business
So here’s a case study actually about this year. Davis, he will be on the main stage. He’s also in the background. He is the phone of My Consulting Offer. Before he started his own business, he was working for Bain out of San Francisco. And with his business right now he is helping aspiring management consultants to get jobs at firms like Bain, McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group. And Davis is, when it comes to everything in his business, especially in marketing and then when it comes to ads, he’s a very high speed tester in general. And he has this mindset really implemented in his actions. So with him we were able to really test out a lot of stuff and I will also show you an example there, and that’s also very important that you then later, once you have the right concepts, you can do more and more tests. I will show you a quick ad from Davis to give you some more insights here.
Davis:
I remember submitting my applications to Bain and going to my Bain interviews knowing I had an unfair advantage. In fact, the whole process of getting my Bain offer felt like I was cheating. The whole process was easy, it was worry free, and best of all, it felt predictable. I’ll share with you in a moment what that unfair advantage was.
My name is Davis and like you, I wanted to become a management consultant and I was able to get my offer at Bain Company without a business background, without having a big name company on my resume and without spending hundreds of hours preparing for the case interview.
So how did I manage to get my offer? My story actually starts from the moment I first heard about management consulting. The problem was I discovered what consulting was three weeks before the deadlines. And after doing some research, I found out that a lot of candidates spent at least a hundred hours just preparing for the case interview alone. And I didn’t have a hundred hours.
But then it was that moment when I thought I had zero chance that I came up with an idea. My idea was the cold email 40 recruiters and consultants from McKinsey, Bain, and BCG in hope that they would tell me the secrets of how to get an offer at their firm. And so by surprise, I got some responses back. They told me exactly what I needed to put on my resume and cover letter in order to get interviews, and they told me to type up questions I would expect on my interviews so I didn’t have to waste hundreds of hours preparing for the case interview.
The whole process just felt easy and predictable. That was my unfair advantage. After getting my offer from Bain, I started my career as a management consultant, earning a six figure salary, but most importantly, I knew I was developing skills I would have for the rest of my life.
I wanted others to have the same unfair advantage I did when I was going through recruiting. So I decided to start my own company, My Consulting Offer to help people one on one. My team and I have helped over 500 people just like you, land consulting jobs at some of the biggest companies in the world, including Bain, McKinsey and BCG and so many others.
The best part, all the managed to work in management consulting. Without hundreds of hours preparing for the case interview, without spending hundreds of revisions on their resume just to be rejected. They didn’t have to figure it out on their own. They had everything. They had a proven process.
If you want the same unfair advantage to get a management consulting job, then my team and I want to help you. For a limited time, my team and I are offering free 30 minute strategy sessions.
These strategy sessions normally cost $1000 but because I want to help more people get into consulting, for a limited time, I’m offering this call to you for free. So all you have to do to claim your free call while they last is to click the link next to this video, give us some details about your background so we can help you and schedule your free call with my team.
Using One Source Vido to Create 10-15 Variations
Marco Julian:
This is a scarcity countdown timer, by the way. Something we tried to test in order to get the click through rate up and yeah. SSR right now, this has been a presentation by Davis. He has been recording this video and that was actually being used in 10 to 15 different variations, just like testing out, having Davis in the picture, having Davis not in the picture, just with text overlay, having only B-roll and you can just do a lot of it. Working with the editor to together on that.
Final Words
Now at the end of this presentation, and I just saw the time, it runs really fast. We also started a little bit late. But as I promised to you, if you’re interested, you can download the checklist for this Aducate framework that is helping you to get your ads together. It’s really helpful. So this is for everyone who’s starting out basically.
And also what I wanted to offer it in order to get some value back to the DC because I got tremendous amount of value out of it. If you have any questions right now and you’re already running on Google and you have an ad spend of at least 3K, because that’s important to have some data, plus the tracking is right and whatnot. We could also give you help with a free audit to find out where you maybe have opportunity or using YouTube on top.
This is a short term offer for the first 15 people and only until DCBKK is over. So this will be the same talk. It just got opened yesterday for a workshop. So just to give you a shout out here, a heads up, this will be exactly the same talk because it’s just so short notice. So if you want to check out other workshops, that’s fine. Just want to give you a heads up here. All right, thank you.