Mastering Video Ads

Episode Description

Back by popular demand, it’s the Super Video Brothers! Returning to PPC Town Hall after just 8 episodes, Joe and Cory dive deeper into the magic and nuance of video advertising. Looking for a masterclass on creation, planning, and YouTube and other video platforms? This is your ticket.

This panel covers:

• Which bid strategies work best (target CPA, maximize conversions, and more)
• Insights you can glean from YouTube’s combination and placements reports
• New platforms that look promising for video advertisers
• Repurposing existing content, video or not, to run better video ads
• Data in YouTube Creator Studio that can help you optimize video ads

Episode Takeaways

Bid Strategies for Video Ads:

• Explore different bid strategies like target CPA and maximize conversions.
• Focus on CPC to assess engagement, particularly with YouTube lead forms.

YouTube Reporting Insights:

• Utilize YouTube’s combination and placements reports to fine-tune campaigns.
• Placement reports can identify successful channels for potential influencer partnerships.

Emerging Platforms for Video Advertisers:

• Consider platforms like IGTV and Hulu for expanding reach beyond YouTube.
• Platforms like Hulu offer self-serve options, though they might have higher minimum spends.

Repurposing Content for Video Ads:

• Convert existing content, like webinars or detailed blog posts, into video format.
• Use TrueView discovery ads on YouTube to leverage educational content for brand building.

Optimizing with YouTube Creator Studio:

• Use data from YouTube Creator Studio to track organic reach and audience engagement.
• Monitor where videos are shared organically to inform paid campaign targeting.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of ppc town hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys and i’m your host so we have a topic today. That’s a a second half basically a follow up on a topic we did about eight sessions ago. It was video ads and we had two great speakers We had joe martinez and cory hank and we just kept on talking about video ads And we went into a lot of detail a lot of best practices a lot of tips You So much so that the audience said, Hey, can we continue doing a little bit more of this?

Because that one hour really wasn’t enough. So that’s exactly what we’re doing today. We’re going to talk more about video ads and try to go even deeper than we did last time. But the whole goal of this is let’s make it really tactical. Let’s give you very specific advice. And let’s make sure that if you spend an hour with us today You get something out of it that you can apply to your business and your advertising right away So with that let’s go and talk about video ads

All right, and we’re back so we’re supposed to have Two speakers, like I said, Cory and Joe, but we can’t find Cory. So Joe might just be you and me today.

Joe Martinez: Hey, it’s a little one on one fireside chat. We’ll keep them.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. I mean, I just wish I knew more about video ads already not being here, but you know, it’s not that different from PPC, right?

Joe Martinez: Yeah. You know, it’s exactly the same as search, right? Don’t quote me on that. Hey, hey

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, slightly different way of targeting but at least bidding is the same budgets are the same.

Joe Martinez: Yeah, that’s it It’s familiar with google ads. It’s you know, it’s in terms of we’re talking about just youtube video campaigns you know, it’s something that I have enjoyed A lot more to me.

It’s, it’s much more fun to work with visuals. And I look at it as like, how would I rather watch a video or read a blog? I think anything with video is much more entertaining and I can get a lot of, I think, valuable engagement metrics from there that can actually help. Search campaigns and any other marketing efforts that you’re doing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. We definitely got to talk about that then. Right. So it’s the creative, how you put something together. That’s really visually appealing and how you then leverage the insights you get from that to really understand what your audience is thinking and how to optimize from that. Right. So my company Optmyzr, obviously we’re really into optimization, but when we think about that, it’s often very metrics driven.

That sounds like when it comes to video, it’s maybe more on a personal engagement level, so that’s fascinating.

Joe Martinez: Yeah. I think it’s, it’s easier just with, you know, you get how many characters in a text ad to say what you want. You can still trigger emotions with a text ad. You definitely can do that, especially if you’re layering on audiences and you knowing exactly what type of demographic that you’re targeting, but, you know, with a video ad testing, we could show those emotions, you know, we could, you It’s something as subtle as the music that you add on to an ad or a video can change how a person feels.

And it’s that kind of playing around and testing that I love. I came from a broadcasting background, so I was. I started out doing writing, you know, radio commercials and that type of thing. So it’s the sounds and how the actor portrays those sounds of what they’re saying in the text and in some music that’s different.

And then I kind of worked at a branding agency where they did a lot of video and we did some cool branding. So that’s where my love of video really started from. Yeah, and then tell us a little bit more about who you are, your expertise in this and and clicks marketing, the firm that you work with, or we deep, deep dive into all of these topics.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah,

Joe Martinez: no, thank you for letting me do that. Cause I forgot about it.

I am the director of client strategy at clicks marketing. I’ve only been there for about kind of October will be two years already. That’s gone by fast, but I’ve been in. Paid me to for about nine years now before I was in. Amy and I worked at Kohl’s corporate headquarters outside of Milwaukee.

So I had some retail and then that’s where I got my bug into e commerce and that’s how it kind of slowly transitioned into the digital world. Just funny. Cause I don’t do a ton of e commerce anymore. But I think that you saw it from, I see the line on the bottom that I have a radio background. So I think it’s I love doing the talking and speaking like this, but anything with like brand awareness and just getting a voice out there has always been intriguing to me.

So I love to focus on YouTube and display and awareness campaigns and brand building.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And now you’re sitting in that beautiful studio because you were a former radio DJ. So you know how to,

Joe Martinez: right? It’s still probably a little echoey because if I look down, it’s still like pure concrete floors.

This is like my dad and I, my dad and I built a safe space in my unfinished basement because when I took the job at clicks, I was like, Oh yeah, it’s a remote job. I was like, I don’t have an office at home because I’ve always worked at an agency in a location. I was like, I didn’t, I didn’t have an office space ready.

So I just had to build one simple. And this is pretty cheap.

Frederick Vallaeys: And these days we all work from home. And I think is it Marco joining us from Ireland? Elbow cough. So thanks for joining us. Anyone else who wants to tell us where they’re calling in from, Go ahead and do that. And of course, we would love to take questions.

So you know, Joe has really deep expertise in video ads. If there’s anything you want him to elaborate on or anything you’re curious about, just go ahead and put that into the chat comments and we’ll try to bring it up as a topic we talk about. But Joe, one of the things you were mentioning Was the engaging content, right?

And I think maybe one of the things with video is how do you even get started? I mean, like when it comes to a tech stat, I can crank out a tech stat in 30 seconds. How long does it take to make a video ad and how do you go about it?

Joe Martinez: Yeah, there are a few different ways that we’ve tried it. I, I don’t know if I honestly don’t remember if we talked about it last time, but I think we did, there’s the video builder tool

Frederick Vallaeys: last time.

Right.

Joe Martinez: Yeah. Yeah. That was kind of just released and that is an option. It’s not going to be. the option for everybody because there are specific templates depending on what type of video you want to run. And you can customize them to a certain point, but it’s one of those things where if you really don’t have any budget for video, or, you know, your company hasn’t allotted budget for video, or you’re a really small business and you don’t want to hire someone.

it’s a good tool to at least test it and try it out. You, when you’re creating that video template, you can save it, you can create, you can edit it and create multiple versions. And that’s kind of what I was going to of testing different music, testing a different intro, a different color or something, just see what triggers people’s engagement responses.

If you see any improvement from it and you could save it automatically to your channel. Unlisted if you want to and you can automatically create video campaigns from the tool itself

Frederick Vallaeys: And so for the people maybe more used to text ads It sounds a little bit like a responsive search ad where you put together a bunch of components a responsive display.

Yes Yeah, google just combines them.

Joe Martinez: Yep. Yeah, depending on what template it is if it is just more branding If it is there is Options for e commerce. So you can showcase certain products. So if you do one, that’s product focus, and then they’re going to go through, you know, three, four different products, you’re going to need a multi multiple images for each product.

You need the title or, and the price of what you want those products to be. So kind of exactly what you said, it is kind of that template.

Frederick Vallaeys: Does that come directly out of your merchant feed or do you have to submit it separately?

Joe Martinez: That is manually entered. Yeah. So you can go,

Frederick Vallaeys: you

Joe Martinez: can go in. When I first started playing around with it, that’s what it was.

I mean, it’s only been a couple months. I doubt that they’ve really updated it. But yeah, you can go within the template. Be like, I like how this one looks. And then I’ll say you need these many images this size. You’ll need these many titles. So it gives you everything so you can prep ahead of time. And then when you’re ready, go back and start building it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. And then how does the report? The reports look, cause I know what RSA is on the tech side. They tell you some of the combinations of how things have been put together. They really still don’t do the best job in the world of kind of highlighting, okay, this headline did this well. And so in your example, if you had different images, so how do you find out which images are working or which music is working best

Joe Martinez: with the video builder tool?

It’s not the ad format itself. You have to create the video and save it as a separate video. On, on YouTube first. So you’re still uploading us individual video. If you’re just naming your videos differently, it’s all going to be a different one. It’s technically not an ad format within the channel.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. So they help you generate actual videos and each one of these becomes the video ad. Yes. Yeah. You,

Joe Martinez: you have to save it to your YouTube channel before you can even use it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Got it. And then what is your strategy in terms of how many variations will you run?

Joe Martinez: I like to look at it specifically on YouTube.

What type of budget the client has, and if it’s one, if it’s branding, there’s a few different ways that we could test it out. I think how many asset variants that they have too, in terms of what images we can use or I, that I can get for them to put within the ads. If you don’t want to use stock photography I’d like to keep it to around two or three to test if it is a broader audience.

Like if I’m doing just a basic topic and I know it’s I’m not going to have any issues like reaching a maximum cap on that, then I might test out, you know, four or five different variants, but in terms of the creative, I’d like to keep it as a couple first, because if I’m doing any sort of call to action extension on top of that, I also like to test my call to action extensions too.

So I don’t want to have too many variants that I’m testing at the same time.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that makes sense. Have you found like anything, any component that just seems to have more of an impact than the others? So CTA, music, images?

Joe Martinez: To me, it’s, it’s that message that first five seconds, what, what is the narrator or what is the, the character or the actor saying within the first five seconds that’s gonna, you know, if I’m like people like me who listen to like YouTube, Off to the side with music or anything while I’m working it was if I hear something, you know What’s that first five seconds?

It’s going to trigger me to actually pay attention to the ad So I that message is going to be extremely important, something that I think is a little bit more difficult with the video builder tool is Your logo is not always showing up every time. And I think that is from an in stream perspective, that is extremely important where if they are paying attention, if they skip it, they at least see your brand name right away.

So that’s where sometimes we’ve shifted to other tools. I have a client that uses promo. com. That’s another template tool. And that goes beyond just YouTube. You can create video templates for Instagram, Facebook and a variety of other channels in different formats and kind of meet the specs for each of those channels.

That one’s just not, there it is. Yeah. It’s just not a YouTube ads platform and you can see it in the background. Those are examples of like. The stock video footage that you can use. We have a lot of SAS clients that clicks and you think like, I probably can’t find something that works. So it’s like, well, we look at what industry this SAS client is targeting and we try to find videos related to that industry.

And there’s, there’s some good ones. I mean, there’s some that are like, it’s clear it’s stock video footage, but then there’s some, it’s just like, it looks like a normal commercial shoot. So we just kind of keep our eyes open. If we see anyone else using anything remotely close to it, we try to switch it up so it looks unique to us or that company.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then the other interesting point you sort of brought up is you’re sitting there working and you got YouTube playing in the background and I guess you just music videos or.

Joe Martinez: Yeah, I listen to full albums. Yeah. So to

Frederick Vallaeys: what I mean, you said in the first five seconds, so important. Right. But yeah, put your logo in, but someone like you, you might not even pay attention to the logo.

It’s really, it’s like, is that five second commercial is that catchy? So, I mean, we’re talking here about video ads, but really you’re. Talking about radio ads almost. Yes. Right.

Joe Martinez: Yes, absolutely. That’s when all these voice assistants were starting to pop up. I was like, I got excited. I was like, here we go.

Radio ads. This is what I went to school for hasn’t really found out exactly what I wanted. But yeah, no, it’s the exact same thing. So sometimes we have, you know, Are you, how can brand X, you know, I can’t say a company name. How can brand X help you with, you know, tossing that. So at least capture some sort of trigger and awareness that will get the user to engage with the ad.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. Here, I want to show something else on screen for a minute. Not really video advertising per se, but you know, let’s have fun with this conversation. So this was an announcement from Google that you can now click on Query, or you can ask questions to big query using this natural voice system that they have. So big query is a great place to put all your your marketing data, including your Google ads data. And and so they’ve written this Q and a ball. So you can literally ask questions like how many orders did I get for a specific product? And you don’t have to build a SQL like query, you just ask natural language queries and it tries to.

Figure out from your data set what the answer to that is another really fascinating way that we’ve seen in the last week or so of using voice,

Joe Martinez: I’m just looking specifically at everything you have on your sheet. I’ll say,

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah, so Joe’s intrigued. So we’ll put the blog post in the show notes, but this is an announcement from Google so yeah, July 8th. So it’s, it’s about a month old at this point, but but really cool technology. And like you were talking about the voice assistants, right?

So one thing that’s really cool about the voice assistants is that they’re so good at interpreting questions. And one thing that amazes me by the way, is like, I have a, an 18 month old daughter and she goes up to the device and she, she wants it to show her albums. And. Like most humans who visit our house the few that actually are allowed during COVID, they they don’t understand what she’s saying, but after three months of her screaming at the voice assistant, exactly what she wants.

Joe Martinez: It’s kind of, my kids kind of have. A little flip of that. Like we watch a lot of, you know, funny videos, kid appropriate of course. On YouTube at night, we always have like dance parties. We watch, you know, some funny Star Wars videos and stuff like that. So then they, sometimes they walked up to the TV and say YouTube, find Star Wars bad lip reading.

And they’ll say that like straight to the TV thing. Like, Nope, doesn’t work that way. We, we don’t have that smart of a tv. Our TV’s a little bit older, but they’re so used to. Getting that information right away which has been kind of funny for them to see. I think actually my daughter might be upstairs watching the live stream right now on YouTube.

Frederick Vallaeys: Oh, nice. I love your daughter. So we got a question here from Ryan. Google Rep has advised us not to exclude certain YouTube ad placements. What do you think about that? I don’t feel like advertising on Daddy Yankee or Bad Bunny videos is appealing to a 35 plus audience. Kind of agree with you, Ryan, that doesn’t seem appealing, but what do you think, Joe?

Joe Martinez: Not to exclude, like, are they saying, like, ever? Like, don’t exclude placements ever? I mean, if you’re doing audience targeting, that’s fine. If you, I’ve used this phrase a lot, like, if you have a Coca Cola budget, and everyone in the world almost likes Coca Cola, that’s one thing. You know, if you have a limited budget, And you have a specific goal in mind with that campaign It’s always important to be optimizing to whatever is working.

I don’t Talk about audience for a second, right? Because I think you’re hitting on something there. So i’m assuming these are it’s channels for like children, right? So you’re not supposed to have a youtube account if you’re less under 13 years old So a lot of young people probably use their parents account.

Yep

Frederick Vallaeys: I think what ryan might be getting at is that yeah, listen, it might be You Fred’s account that seems to really enjoy watching Daddy Yankee and we’re trying to target him with some ads about like maybe a new car. But in reality, it’s probably going to be Fred’s children who are watching this. So can we actually trust audience signals at that point?

Joe Martinez: Yeah, yeah, if it’s I look at particularly of, you know, do you want your content shown on that channel? We have seen people have converted from a music channel because we’re focusing on a very specific custom intent audience that we’ve created. Now, like, no, if they were looking for specific SAS product on Google, we’re targeting that audience.

We’re not targeting that placement or that channel or that video. So the user could still be. interested in my product, it’s just look at what I watch YouTube. You saw on the bottom, I’m a massive Star Wars fan. I have other interests. I like to buy other things, but I’m going to be on Star Wars videos a lot on YouTube.

I still could be interested in your products. It’s just, this is what I’m doing for fun at night. So it’s, it depends on what your audience target is. And that’s hard without seeing, you know, exactly what you’re targeting, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re purposely targeting those specific channels.

So I think that’s why being proactive, if you feel your audience isn’t on. bad bunny channels. I so I like both of them. U them out and you can do t don’t have to wait till your placement reports. U List out there. I created one for the kids exclusion list. Sear has another one for the kids exclusion list, and there’s other lists out there where you can find a list of YouTube channels for a different variety of different genres and proactively exclude them.

If you don’t want your ad showing up there, you do have that control. And I don’t care what the Google rep says. If you don’t want your videos on there, it’s your brand. You can protect it, whatever you want, block it out. If you want to.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Don’t always stress to rep, right? We’ll show that list of our YouTube exclusions here in a minute.

But yeah. I believe we have somebody who just joined us. So welcome to the guys. Hey

Joe Martinez: buddy.

Cory Henke: Hey, can you hear me? Okay. Is everything good? I look all right. Oh man. Sorry. I had a little emergency this morning. I’m here. I apologize. Oh,

Frederick Vallaeys: my God. Yeah. I hope it’s good. Not too bad. Good. Well, thanks for joining us.

So yeah, we’re just catching up here on a lot of video related stuff, but tell the audience real quick who you are, how long you’ve been doing video. I can do the topics.

Cory Henke: Hi, I’m Gordon Henke. And you know, we started Variable Media about three and a half years ago here in Utah I’ve worked on a lot of great videos, I think the biggest one that we’ve worked on was the

I think everybody knows that one, but that was the one that kind of, you know, helped us grow and you know, I’ve been primarily focused on YouTube, speaking with, you know, I think you know, be able to discuss the video. That’s great. And I think you know,

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey Cory, if you’re your internet’s not great and you’re cutting in and out a bit there, but maybe we’ll give you a minute to, Put a button on the router and I will talk to you again in a minute. but it’s great to have you on the call and hope everything’s all right. So let’s go back to the comments actually. And some of the questions. So there was another question from Marco. So he ran a true view campaign that did really well, but was cut short several days not spending the budget.

No, this is actually one of the topics we had wanted to discuss was you know, how do you scale on YouTube? Right. So it seems like there’s so many video views, but then people at the same time. Still have a hard time actually spending as much money as they want to when it when it’s working well.

Joe Martinez: Yeah, I, I have never ran into the issue of, I, I guess it depends on, I saw, I saw my, my daughter’s commenting. She’s only in second grade. Well, thanks for watching sweetie. Yeah, looking specifically from, I’m going to try not to laugh now. Specifically from a TV only campaign. I would say depends on what targeting.

You’re using and I wouldn’t give up on that one yet. Even if you’re targeting is very specific, keep watching. Cause every single month I see that percentage of videos being watched on TV, increasing more and more again, I think would go back to looking specifically at how that initial. Targeting option is if it is just like a remarketing audience and you’re keeping that audience pretty tight.

You may have more trouble there, but in looking, you know, looking back at it, I think more and more we we’re getting, I’m personally, my accounts are getting a lot of video views from TV. And honestly, in terms of the percentage that they’re watching it, TV is actually the number one of the most watch time that we’re getting and game councils have been number two.

So. That is particularly what I’m seeing. If you’re targeting is specific, I would just maybe try to expand it out a little bit and seeing if you’re, if that can help you get the exposure that you want on TV.

Frederick Vallaeys: Cory, what do you think?

Joe Martinez: See last time my internet cut out.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly.

Joe Martinez: And this time

Frederick Vallaeys: I mean, how is it that YouTube are the most popular headset that we’ve ever had on this show? And we can never cut

Joe Martinez: the YouTube

good at YouTube, not the it, to set the YouTube.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, Cory may maybe turn off your actually, I don’t think you can turn off your video on this thing.

Cory Henke: How about now?

Frederick Vallaeys: Now we can hear you. Yes.

Cory Henke: Oh, oh man. This is rough on YouTube, man. You know, I was excited probably about two months ago to see the fact that we were able to just segment, you know, just for TV, but I think this is going to be the comparison against ETV as well as, you know, something new that, you know, I’m learning about in the past couple of months, which is just that self serve Google.

And I think that comparison between YouTube TV, CTV, and Hulu, all those three screens, the big screen in the house, I think is going to give us such a really good comparison from a CPM standpoint. I still really like skippable videos, even on YouTube. Because from what I’m seeing in the data, we’re finding that users still skip on TV somehow.

So, you know, smart TVs have unique capabilities, not every TV is the same. But it’s very interesting data that we are seeing in TV, and I really like the comparison to TTV. And the more platforms that I think that we see go self serve, I think only increases the work for a media buyer. From a data standpoint, it was a really good comparison across the board.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So you’re talking about all these new platforms kind of and that’s the solution then to spending more budget, right? If you have a video ad campaign that seems to be working well, how do you find new channels to maybe push it onto if for whatever reason you’ve tapped out on the YouTube any thoughts on, so I think Hulu is a fairly new one there that’s doing self serve about that.

Joe Martinez: Something that made me think of, sorry, going back to the previous question that we had that just popped in my head. There is a, because TV is getting more popular with YouTube in the placements targeting options of your ad group, there is a fairly newer placement targeting option called video lineups because people are watching more YouTube videos on TV devices.

So you can target I think it’s just worldwide. You can target whatever’s popular on YouTube at the time with your video ad. My son just walked in, of course, buddy, close the door.

Once, Oh man, this is funny. You gotta leave. Okay. I love you so much, but go away. But there are certain genres. If you want to target people who are just looking at game counsel. Videos you can target that’s one. There’s a variety of different cooking genres on YouTube that you can target now and it’s all broken out by a lot of different countries too.

So even how we can target our videos on YouTube with TV is going to be improved to match the TV viewership that we’re seeing. But I know we’ve looked into in Hulu what we can do. That is something we keep our eyes on. Sent out one form to RSVP to get into that beta. I just know if you’re interested in doing anything with Hulu, there is a 5 minimum per campaign.

So that’s something, if you are a little bit budget conscious. You know, Hulu may not be the best fit for you, but you also cannot target by specific TV shows. It is genre of TV shows you can do in specific interest. I don’t know, Cory, if you’ve gotten into that one yet or not.

Cory Henke: No, we haven’t actually, you know, had access to the data yet to really, you know, dive into the self serve.

I’m just more, you know, interested in terms of, you know, what we can see. But the point on. You know, just YouTube and the wide variety of countries, videos, et cetera. I think, you know, I agree with you. And I think it’s even cheaper when you go outside of the U. S., which allows you to get more views, test more and learn, I think, a little bit faster.

But, you know, the majority of my clients don’t have a huge international presence. I think, you know, the other thing that we’re finding on YouTube from a data side too is just the ability to see the difference between how people convert You know, when that YouTube is embedded, when that video is on a website versus, you know, the YouTube platform.

I think that’s another, you know, great indicator, very similar to, you know, country and video that you’re that you’re at, that you’re at right in front of.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, let’s sorry, Cory, I’m having a hell of a time understanding you. Fantastic advice in there. But I want to go back to one thing. So just before he came in, Joe was actually talking about a kid’s YouTube exclusion list. And I did want to show that on screen here for just a second as well as give you all the URL to that.

Right. So so I guess if we start breaking down how to be, how to be like a master of video ads, level one is like, just go on YouTube, right? Create the the, the video ads using all the tools that they have available. Do a bunch of different tests and then started looking at the metrics and based on those metrics, you might want to do some exclusions and metrics and performance driven exclusions.

But at the same time, it sounds like also you want to preventatively set up some exclusions based on things you think may not work well. In this case, we have a list of children’s channels and there might be other list of channels out there as well. And do you guys have any other favorite lists of exclusions?

Joe Martinez: Particularly with. No, I mean, I know seer seer has another one that they have a larger data set than I do. I think seer made one that might be almost 5000. So I’m sure a good amount of the ones I have on mine could be in theirs as well. I also wrote a post recently for word stream that just talked about understanding how placements work for YouTube campaigns.

And that one, Is because you can target websites, but if you’re targeting websites on the display network, YouTube or Google can still show your ad on relative channels and vice versa. So if you’re still showing your video on specific placements on YouTube, they could show up on the display network and vice versa.

So sometimes what you think you’re targeting from a placement specific campaign may not always be where your ads are always showing. So you can try to be as proactive as possible, but you really have to. Understand how the settings for these things actually work. Cause it’s like match types, right? It’s not as exact as we think they are all the time.

And that’s why we could see. A lot of placements that we don’t want showing up in our reports, right? So you see on the screen here for the people watching the video stream this is the seer blog post that they analyzed 331, 000 sites oh and i’m showing the wrong link now, but that’s the link right there and they find 165, 000 placements to negate by the way, what is the placement exclusion limit in google?

Frederick Vallaeys: Can you just upload 165k?

Joe Martinez: You know what my answer to that one is I don’t know offhand

Frederick Vallaeys: I know like for keywords, the limits are pretty high, like around 10 million or something, RS placements. I’m not like, and I know negative targeting is a little bit more limited for sure. So anyway, so that’s another good list there that you can use.

Okay. So now we’ve built our campaigns, we’ve done metrics exclusion, we’ve gotten these category based exclusions that we don’t think work well. And then that next stage is going into expanding our reach by testing out some new platforms. So we’re talking about Hulu. We’re talking about IGTV.

Actually, we haven’t talked much about IGTV. So Cory, is that a topic you want to tell us a bit about? So IGTV Graham.

Cory Henke: I’d love to, and I hope my audio holds up, and so if it cuts out again really bad, I’m just going to, you know, exit and restart. But does it sound okay so far?

Frederick Vallaeys: It’s passable.

Cory Henke: That’s passable.

Frederick Vallaeys: I’ll make you big on screen so people can try to read your lips.

Cory Henke: Okay. Here’s what we’re seeing on IGTV. Is that when we think about Instagram the areas that are promotable when it comes to video are You know stories as well as the news feed so you have to pay to advertise in those areas It seems like the areas that you don’t have to advertise for which also include video are where you can’t advertise for is on IGTV as well as live.

And so that’s where, you know, we believe we’re getting the most organic reach with our video is in that IPTV. And so the big trouble with that IPTV is how to promote it. Right is that if you create very long form on instagram, you put it in igt How do I really get people to see it? And I think that’s one of the most difficult things with long form video on instagram And so we’ve kind of we’ve kind of taken two different angles to be able to promote that video And so the first angle which doesn’t help your view count on instagram Is to take that long form and run it inside the Facebook newsfeed, just the Facebook, you know, post to be able to get to see how people react to long form inside the, inside the feed, which would be the Facebook feed.

And then the other way to really drive up Instagram IGTV views would be to take that IGTV and embed it on a webpage. And so thank you for that note, Cory, great name too. And so if you take the IGTV and you embed it on a web page, that is a great way to then, you know, drive up the views of that IGTV.

And you can also, you know, send users from a URL standpoint to Instagram slash, you know, whatever that handle is. And that puts them, you know, right on the IGDB from a, from a from a desktop perspective. So, you know, we play around with things in the in the newsfeed with, with, with URLs and sending users directly to long form with like watch now as a call to action.

And then living that Instagram URL. As I as I explained.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. Joe, any thoughts on that?

Joe Martinez: No, I haven’t really messed with the Instagram TV at all. So I was actually looking forward to see what Cory said about it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. So it’s, it’s interesting that they do really well there with the the long form educational content. I’m actually curious, like, so it’s a company like Optmyzr.

We don’t typically think about B2B as something we would want to advertise on Instagram or even take talk. But then I hear buzz that, yeah, maybe we should be doing things there. Is that what you think about that?

Cory Henke: I think for any advertiser, and especially B2B, it’s like, where do I spend my time? You know, and when I think about somebody holding that mobile device where and ingesting like long form It has to be I think very important to them. I think people can easily ingest long form unlike youtube And so, you know for Optmyzr, I think youtube is going to be You know, that place that they will see probably, you know, the most impact from long form.

But you know, that’s not to say that, you know, you couldn’t find, you know, potential value on Instagram. I just think that the way that I know Instagram is from brands that do e-commerce have a huge audience, you know, on Instagram. And so you’re talking about with people that have, you know, 258 followers, two 50,000 followers, you know, or more.

And so we don’t have that. You know, and you don’t see necessarily the returns, you know immediately like, you know Is it does it cause you to not necessarily invest that time and effort into long form next time, right? I think you know building up the youtube channel is still Better placed long form if you’re going to focus on it

Joe Martinez: and what we’ve seen from B2B and you know, a few of our SAS or lead gen clients too is the long form and just the TrueView discovery ad format.

And that has honestly become one of my favorite ones just because we’ve had clients do, they’ve had webinars or seminars and they’re like, this is great, you know, we got really good engagement, good signups. It’s, you know, hour, hour and a half webinar. And then they’re like, well, now we really can’t do anything with it.

I was like, well, people, if people are searching. For this content or educational topics on YouTube, we can target just the search results with discovery ads and really showcase that again, it’s from brand building, you know, we can’t add a call to action extension or a lead gen form to a discovery campaign, but it’s getting them engaged with your brand.

And then using that watch time and that engagement to hoping they subscribe to the channel. And then we can remark to them in other ways and just other ways that they have interacted with us to just. Introduce them so they even know you exist.

Cory Henke: And that’s the other point too. When you compare those two, like long form platforms like YouTube versus IE TVs, it’s right to Joe’s point of, we have so many opportunities to capture different aspects of the audience. Like you can segment subscribers. It’s just people who have liked, you can’t necessarily IGTV.

And so you’re so much limited in terms of, I think what you can learn, the data that you get back, as well as, you know, being able to target specific users, I still think there’s so much more advantages on YouTube currently.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. So then we got another audience question here. So Rebecca’s asking, what are some of the main metrics that you will use to optimize video campaigns? Saying that sometimes it’s a little difficult to prove the value beyond just a view rates and earn actions when the client is actually very, you know you know, lead gen focused, maybe we can talk about lead forms at this point.

But before we jump now, let’s kind of what do you think for Rebecca here?

Cory Henke: I can I think it’s a good shot. This this question I think what main metrics we use, especially with lead forms is you know, we focus on CPC because, you know, the CPC for a lead form is very different. It’s like not them going to the website, it’s them engaging with that lead form.

And so, you know, that really shows us, you know, the impact of how engaging it is, especially if we don’t have a lot of lead flow. Right. And so we use that to kind of say like, okay, let’s test a couple of audiences and then let’s focus on that CPC. I think another thing that you should do when focusing on the CPC or some, or some of these upper funnel metrics that you mentioned, like view rate and earn views, I think those are great to look at is also, you know, Testing your bid type.

We think that that is like one of the biggest variables that you can look at, like target CPA versus maximized conversions. And that is a great way, I think, to potentially find some more lead volume that could help you decide what audience works better, but, you know, I would look at the engagement with the lead form.

And then I think one thing you should definitely test is and that’s unique to YouTube, especially the lead form is the call to action. You can play with that call to action with the amount of characters in that limit. And so being able to use things like fill out today. Right. Fill out now, you know, maybe it’s one of those pieces, but there’s a lot of different aspects of the lead form that you can change and then test, but I would focus on the CPC.

If you’re not finding that, you know, using view rate, CPM and earn view is a great indicator.

Joe Martinez: One thing that we have done is at least just to cover your bases, create a, an audience in the audience manager of anyone who’s watched your video as an ad within the past 540 days. And add it as a optimization, you know, bid only audience to every single one of your search campaigns. That’s something that we’ve gone back to see, okay, they have seen a video ad.

then they go back and convert. So that’s one way that we keep an eye on it. And just depending on what volume again for search so that audience needs about 1000 active users every 30 days for it to be eligible to at least show the data within our search campaigns. But create as deep as video viewer audiences as you can just to see how it’s impacting people’s search behavior.

One thing that we always do is we adjust our columns as well. We look at View through conversions and cross device conversions of, you know, are these leading to those eventual metrics as well again, people are there to people go to YouTube to watch videos. That’s pretty much the only thing you can do there.

They’re not there for your white paper. They’re not there for your demo. So again, I hope it to use it as to plant a seed. Lead forms are perfect for collecting that information. We try to keep them as it. Short as possible and having it be as auto filled as possible again, so they can get back to why they were there in the first place was not to interact with your ad to watch the video.

So we want to make it as easy for users as possible. And sometimes I don’t want to say this term, Frederick, cause we’ve joked about this so many times, but focusing on that, that micro conversion, we’re not asking for that demo or that free trial right away, you know, or we’re asking for. something, just their email, just to get them interested.

And we’ve used that before because clients say email works really well for us. So, okay, fine. Let’s use YouTube to build up your email. Cause you know, you have such high conversion rates from your email marketing campaign and all your other branding efforts. So it’s shifting, like what mindset people are in on YouTube.

You know, even if it is a custom intent audience, which can be pretty specific, it’s still not search their intent at that moment was not to look up something. It was to watch a video. So we we’ve shifted our call to action and what we want that user to do. It’s not the deepest form of conversion. That we’re trying to get them to do typically with search, it is something going to be something higher level and that’s where we see a better impact, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s where we’ve made it so difficult for ourselves in the last 20 years of PPC advertising of saying, like, it’s all about the lead. It’s all about the sale, right? Last click attribution and. I mean meanwhile for 100 years before that we’ve been doing traditional marketing where maybe it was a bit more about branding and putting Your name top of mind when somebody is actually looking for the thing that you sell and and being okay with that Not necessarily being directly equatable to the sale.

And so that’s what the role that youtube plays, right? It’s just Stay top of mind, be active and also be helpful. I mean, and that’s the thing on YouTube with this long form content, it’s such a great place to share your advice. And hey, why are the two of you on this call today? It’s because you’re going to get long term benefit of these guys know what they’re doing when it comes to video advertising.

And at some point, somebody is going to need some help. And who’s going to be top of mind? Well, the folks who have been doing these types of things, so it doesn’t have to directly equate to a lead. But how do you go into the C suite, right? How do you go through your boss and your manager? But even, and so Cory, I know you’re your own boss, but Joe, I think you have a boss, right?

Joe Martinez: I do.

Frederick Vallaeys: So how do you justify spending an hour of your time with me here?

Joe Martinez: I mean, you, you pretty much explained it, you know, it’s the payoff. It’s the people reaching out after the fact. Like I’ll still have people being like, yeah, I read that blog you wrote. And I was like, which one they say it. And I was like, I think it was like two years old, but like, you never know when some of those things, you know, pay off, it is, it is.

That awareness and you know something depending on what the product is, you know There’s a lot of products that aren’t just a 12 t shirt That’s more of an impulse buy and you can easily do that, you know, look at what product you are selling you know clients who you know, you’re trying to sell a A sass product that’s you know gonna eventually cost them, you know, five to ten grand a month You know i’ll go up to that c cedar boss and be like Hey, you’re seeing me the first time, give me 5, 000.

And they look, they look at you weird and they’re like, oh, okay, well, that’s what you’re doing to your potential customers right now. Why the hell should they sign up right away when you don’t want people doing it to you, but you want to do it to everybody else. It’s just think of that experience of how you would feel.

If that’s happening to you and that can change the C suite mindset of like, Oh yeah, I, I typically don’t just drop, you know, five to 10 K without even thinking about it whatsoever. So that’s where it kind of, we, we really push the nurture part of it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And I think at some level, people also want to kind of know who they’re doing business with.

Right. I mean, so you may say it’s 5, the offering looks good, but. Right at this point, now they’ve gotten some of your personality. They kind of know what you stand for. They they know you love your child dearly, even though you had to kick him out of your office. Right? I mean I had to go on

Joe Martinez: YouTube and yell at him to get out.

Frederick Vallaeys: That makes it personal. People do want to do business with folks that they think are You know, in some way like them and that they think who they think will treat them well, if things don’t go well. And that’s also the reality of business, right? Like it’s there are going to be tough times in any business relationship and it’s really about understanding How will that person behave under pressure under stress?

And I think that’s where the personality can come out In video materials that we do there’s one other point so I was talking to some of the hennepin folks another big agency and and they were saying that In months where they see a lot of webinars and a lot of webinar signups They can’t directly call it or equate it to new customers, but they do see that that Tends to be a leading indicator of the business growing.

Right. And it’s, it’s another one of these educational things where it’s not about asking for the sale on the spot. It’s not asking for the actual the delete to come in, but but it does work, right. And I think we can think about YouTube in some sort of the same way.

Joe Martinez: Yeah. And kind of going back to like the brands you trust too, it’s.

I mean, we, we legit love talking about this. Like, all three of us have been at conferences before, remember those things? And like, yes, we talk about our personal lives and other stuff, but like, we legit, when we get together, we nerd out. We nerd out about all this paid media stuff. All the time because we legit love it.

And I think if, if you’re passionate about what you do, and we’re talking about paid meetings, that’s what we do, but whatever product you’re selling, you know, if you’re truly being honest and it’s, it’s clear that, you know, you care about what your product that you’re selling it. And that comes across in your ads, especially your video ads.

I, it can help people fall in love with you. You know, people are going to buy from brands that they trust and they can personally connect with. And the more that we can show that within our ads or any of the marketing efforts that we do, you will see that pay off.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. So shifting topics a little bit here.

So finding people who are likable, who they will trust, like, how do you go about finding maybe new partners and channels to to put your ads next to, and does that even matter? Or do you just like, Straight up care about audience, no matter what channel they might be on.

Cory Henke: I, I think we have to look at, you know, Google, YouTube and their properties with some of like the best targeting that we can find on the planet right now.

And so I don’t think that influencers and channels specific like partnerships are. Extremely important. Does it work? It is a, you know, direct correlation. You sell something in the fitness space. You found the first, you found the best fitness influencer on YouTube who already did a video about you organically, right?

Seems like a great partnership to make, but I don’t think it’s necessary.

Frederick Vallaeys: Joe, what do you think?

Joe Martinez: Yeah, looking at specific influencers, you know, we’ve had ones where Our clients have already done, you know, the persona research on, you know, flat out asking, you know, their current customers and getting that information. You know, what we’ve done from, you know, looking at specific channels and everything to do it.

We have looked within YouTube studio. And just see from either external via websites or where have our natural organic video ads being shared from, whether it’s, it could be an external website, it could be other playlists on YouTube and using that information. Is he like, does that person have an influence?

And is it something that we would want to potentially partner with? There is a ton of valuable information on placements within YouTube studio. Or YouTube analytics, depending on what, what you’re used to calling it. That is something where we have researched on the organic reach and how is that organic reach and who’s sharing it?

How can that make an impact on how we market with ads later on?

Cory Henke: Yeah. And if I could only add to that, I think you know, the placement report, like if you go to the placement report in in YouTube and you’ve got enough conversions to really You know, look at the placements and decide, okay, these are a lot of conversions that have come from this channel.

I mean, that’s a great way, you know, to find the right influencer. I can think of a I’d say the health brand that we were working with, just opening up to YouTube and seeing the place to report. We saw a lot of conversion on like yoga, you know, like yoga, health. And so like a yoga influencer does yoga, you can see probably putting out consistent content, where could I probably, where can I potentially do my product placement, you know, during that long form yoga session, you can start to think about things like that before you even reach out and literally have a plan for the what you want.

And I think that, you know, could potentially help the situation, but the opportunity is there. I just don’t think that is necessary. You want to jump in and start to.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let’s shift topics here one more time. So Cory, you’d hosted a PPC chat less than a month ago. Wanted to ask you how that went. And whenever I go to PPC chat, I always find out interesting stuff because for those of you not familiar with the format, it’s basically on Twitter.

Hashtag PPC chat. I believe it’s a Tuesdays at nine o’clock Pacific every week. And there’s a different host comes in with about. You know, five to 10 questions. And then the the audience participates and gives their take on stuff. And so you hosted one on video ads. How’d it go? And like, what was your biggest takeaway?

Cory Henke: PPC chat is always amazing. I think you’re all so thankful for this community. You know, it’s absolutely great. I think, you know, the big thing I learned, and I always do learn, and I think Joe might be the same, is how much people are really yearning for video. Like, you know just answers, answers to YouTube content.

I don’t feel like there are a lot of influencers or, you know, people in the space really talking about video and I wish a lot of more people would, but I think that was the biggest thing is just, you know, trying to educate and, you know, we’ve dealt with some of the questions that we felt today, which is like, you know, what are the most important metrics to look at?

You know, like that question there, like what was the biggest hurdle for your brand, you know, to use YouTube? And so a lot of, you know, introductory questions to YouTube, nothing necessarily in depth, but how much in depth can you go just text on Twitter? So but again, it’s always a great conversation and we always have a fun time.

Like let’s maybe look at this question, Fred. Do you have a funnel audience strategy when testing your YouTube campaigns? I mean, absolutely, you know, top custom affinities, detailed demographic, mid and market. Anybody who’s engaged with us on YouTube and then love, right? Like anything from the web or CRM list through like similar audiences right there in the mid funnel as well.

But yeah, always have a funnel strategy if you have a budget, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t start today. Right. Just doing just simple retargeting, you know with 10, 15 bucks. And then question eight, you know, is another one that we get all the time. What is the preferred length for you to, and I think my response has grown to be the one that I used to get, you know, in school from the, from the English teacher, you know, make it as long as you think to get your point across.

Right.

Frederick Vallaeys: Did you ever get an eight or like a one paragraph answer? Never. That’s the problem with that, right? Oh man, it’s it’s

Cory Henke: always a tough, things are so subjective but, you know, in my opinion, you know, when it comes to length for long form, I think the thing that I’ve seen over the years is people and advertisers are very surprised at how long people watch things on YouTube.

And I think the longer they watch your video, the more you can kind of confirm for yourself that like, oh, I have something. You know, I have something somebody is willing to watch. So,

Joe Martinez: yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: there’s two sides to this coin too, right? I mean, I think when people ask for what is the best length it’s partially about how long do they watch, how well do they engage and how likely are they to become a customer or have like.

Counted as micro conversion But I think the other half of that question is a little bit about like is there a quality score? For a video ad like is there a certain point at which google just says like this is better and regardless of what happens on the conversion side, like we actually want to show this more Okay, because one of the questions before you came in cory was for From I think it was Marco.

He was saying that he was running a really successful YouTube campaign. And all of a sudden, like it just stopped, even though he had budget left. I couldn’t quite figure out what happened. Like, is there a quality score that comes into play? And like, what does Google want us to do?

Cory Henke: I’d love to hear Joe’s answer to this, but when I think about quality score for YouTube, the closest thing that I’ve ever been able to tie it to is view rate.

And like, if you can hit a 45%, 55 percent view rate, that should correlate to a 2 cent, 1 cent cost per view. But when we get a view rate in the 60s, that’s where it’s just 1 cent cost per views, you know, all, all, all around town. But if we have a view rate that’s like 25%, 24%, we’re dealing with like 7 cents, you know, 6 cents, 5 cents and so on.

I would look at the view rate as kind of like your determinant if, if you’re gonna get, you know, a really good value for your video. Because I think the way that YouTube looks at it, is that higher the view rate Lower the cost lower than you rate

Frederick Vallaeys: a view right now I mean So say you have a 30 minute video versus a 30 second video like is the view rate the completion rate or like explain that metric a little bit and how we need to

Cory Henke: Joe, correct me if i’m wrong But the view rate is based on 30 seconds for anything for any video longer than 30 seconds and then if a video is 30 seconds or less it is based on the completion of that video.

Joe Martinez: Yes, and then there’s also You And then you can see your stats get muddled up because if they don’t watch for at least 11 seconds, it does not count towards your view. So, yeah, so if you’re trying to do your ads math, you’re like, these numbers aren’t matching up. It’s like, if they don’t watch 11 seconds of the ad, it does not count.

Towards the view. So that’s why your, your six second bumper ads never count towards your video view total.

Frederick Vallaeys: So turn people off from your ads really quickly, or if they stay past 11 seconds, make sure they’re really engaged. That’s complicated again, correct?

Joe Martinez: They make it fun.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Well, and Joe was making the point, Cory, that you know, first five seconds really critical.

That’s when you hook the person and actually compile them to look away from what they were doing. Look at the screen. Engage with that ad. How do you go about making those ads engaging in the first couple of seconds?

Cory Henke: We’ve got so many strategies for you know, for the first five seconds as well as you know, the first 30 but the first five we’ve tested everything from you know, quick cuts face to camera, you know worked so well right human to human opening up directly talking Can usually get people to say, but I think what we love to do is brand engaged.

Relay the problem, right? That we’re trying to solve, solve the problem, but then qualify the audience right before 30 seconds. And so what do I mean by qualifying the audience? If you’re trying to target emails, 25 to 34 with one kid, Okay. If you pass at the end of that 30 seconds and maybe between, you know, 25 to 30 you said, and if you’re a mother, you know, right.

And so you begin to qualify that audience and really only get it who you really want past 30 seconds, but you’re still able to bring into the entire group, you know, prior. Now, what is this going to do? It’s going to lower your view rate, right? Because only your core audience is going to be able to make it, but at the same time, it should create a better qualified audience.

Past 30 seconds, which should drive more conversions and a better 30 rate cost. Yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: that is a great tip. And Hey guys, I can’t believe we’ve done it again, but we’ve talked for almost an hour. Sounds like we could have gone another hour here easily. So maybe both of you need to come back. Maybe third time’s a charm, right?

In terms of for everyone, it’ll be mine. That breaks that time.

Cory Henke: We’ll be back.

I need this one back.

Frederick Vallaeys: So Joe and Cory, take us home. Maybe a final closing thought from each of you. How do people reach out to you? If there is one thing people need to know, what is that? And then we’ll wrap it up. Joe.

Joe Martinez: Okay. Yeah. I’m sorry. Yeah, you can, there it is. They had it up there. Twitter, Instagram.

I’m at Milwaukee PPC. There’s my email. I think you guys were all prepped. I didn’t even need to say anything yet. The, my coworker, Michelle Morgan and I, we do have a YouTube channel. We have two videos every week. Constant. We’re seeing paying off. That’s a perfect example right there. So there it’s youtube.

com slash paid media pros.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right, Cory.

Cory Henke: Hey yeah, you can always find me on twitter at core hinky you can also reach out to me. Bear will be always willing to help answer any questions anybody might have I think I will leave us with this I work with a lot of e commerce clients and I think you know this year is going to be crazy for e commerce and so I think jumping into video regardless of platform will be huge because Being able to relay how you feel about your product, what it is, explain it, even as a founder or as a small business will be huge.

You know, people are going to be at home, they’re going to be watching video. So this is going to be a very interesting coming year for everybody. So thank you for, thank you for watching.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, absolutely. And like you said E commerce huge. So we had a session last week. If people didn’t catch that, it’s up on our YouTube channel.

One of the best sessions we’ve done lots of stats in that one. And Google was sharing that in the last four or five months, e commerce has grown as much as it was, as it was expected to grow in the next two years. So we’re basically already in 2022, as far as the forecast used to be. So great, great stuff.

Good going back to school. I was talking to Joe, his kids are in a hybrid program. My kids are in a hybrid program. Lots of YouTube. And you know what my kid does after the class ends, he starts clicking on different YouTube ads, right? So video is going to explode. It’s going to be crazy. So if you need to sell toys, the kids are watching.

Cory Henke: And and a note about that, that, that session that you did for an e commerce session was so good. I think I screenshot or not screenshot. I’m sorry. I was watching it, you know on the tv And so I was taking like pictures with my camera And like these screenshots I ended up in decks that I was presenting and people were asking like what’s pvc?

Let me show you

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah, so I don’t know your friends because this is the best kept secret in the pvc world All right. Well, thanks, guys. It’s been fun. Thanks, everyone, for watching. The next episode we have officially planned is not for a couple of weeks. We’re going to have a Q4 e commerce session, but this time at Microsoft.

But we’re hoping to do another one next week on a topic we’ll announce very soon. So thanks for watching, and we’ll see you on the next one.

Joe Martinez: Thanks, Fred.