YouTube and Video Ads

Episode Description

Video is captivating. Video is exciting. Video is… underrated?

Believe it or not, most brands don’t do video right. From failing to grab people’s attention to picking the wrong format, there are mistakes and pitfalls at every turn. And despite some technical glitches, Joe and Cory are here to show you how to level up at what they do best – video.

The panel discusses:

• Efficiency and cost-effectiveness of YouTube Ads
• Audience engagement and Ad formats
• Building and leveraging a YouTube channel
• YouTube’s role in a broader marketing strategy

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: And I think we’re live now. So welcome to PPC Town Hall number 12. My name is Fred Vallaeys from Optmyzr. I’ve been doing the PPC Town Halls for you know, as it says, 12 or 13 weeks. We skipped a week and we try to keep it fresh and exciting by introducing new content and having focus areas and always new speakers.

So this time I wanted to talk about YouTube and video ads. And so a couple of the questions that have come up recently is YouTube. Is that become really cheap during covid when a lot of advertisers may have pulled back some of their spend? Or is YouTube even cheap by comparison when you look at search ads?

And so that’s one question that we’re gonna address today. The other question is, is YouTube really just for branding and Building your upper funnel traffic. So is that the truth or is that a misconception? And if you are more interested in selling stuff or a lead generation, what are some of the solutions that you could deploy from YouTube and how do you connect your YouTube efforts to some of the other efforts you might already be doing on Google ads?

So before the show started, I had given the wrong link for my guests. to join me. And I was very worried because most PPC topics I can talk about for hours myself. But when it comes to YouTube, I really do need some help. So for that today, we have two great guests. So I want to introduce first Cory Hanke from Variable Media.

So Cory he’s got a couple of claims to fame that we’ll put up on the screen right there in a minute. But Cory had the best presentation overall at Hero Conf in 2018. So congrats on that. And it was a presentation, of course, about YouTube and video. So tell us a bit about yourself, Cory. Welcome to the show.

Cory Henke: Hey, Fred. I appreciate the opportunity. Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. So I think you know, a little bit about me. I’ve been really working in YouTube for the past, you know, three to four years and you know, started my agency focused on that and we’ve expanded out, you know, to analytics and Facebook you know, since then, but YouTube has really been great for advertisers and really a platform that not only gives you performance, but in my opinion, it gives you some of the best Consumer behavior, you know, you learn so much about your audience as well as new consumers, returning consumers, you know, new visitors, returning visitors just through the video, let alone the performance metrics that you get.

And when you combine YouTube with the targeting, the experience and the history of Google, you know, you really can make a platform with video you know, change the look of your brand and then change your brand from also performance and revenue standpoint. So we’ve leveraged it. To do some really great things.

Frederick Vallaeys: Cool. So we’ll talk much more about that. Now I do have to admit one of my producers I’m bringing him in right here. I don’t know if he wants to show you, but he was really excited about something related to you. So Ashwin.

Ashwin Balakrishnan: Yeah, so I was, I grew up in, in New Jersey in the nineties and I was the only kid who likes Scottie Pippen more than Michael Jordan.

And I used to get so much crap for that.

Cory Henke: Hey man, you know, you got a friend over here. I’ve used, I’ve used his accomplishments, you know, to always say like, man, if you’ve got a little bit of his blood in your veins, you know, anything is possible. So I really appreciate that you’re a fan dude, you know, cause he never gets the credit he deserves.

Frederick Vallaeys: Ashwin, thanks for producing the show with us. I’ll send you back to the background for now, but let’s bring in Joe, our other panelists. So, you know, Cory won best presentation, but Joe in that same year at the same conference, who won most actionable. I’m sure he might’ve had a better shot at winning best presentation if it had been about YouTube, but I think it’s something else, Joe.

And Joe, before the show was saying that his internet, I voted, I voted for Cory. So, Oh, good. Well deserved Cory. So Joe, tell us a bit about yourself and your internet. We’ll hold up there. Yeah. Yeah. The director of clients. Yeah. But

Joe Martinez: my passion has really been. Really near and dear to my heart. It’s been a passion of mine and like to utilize it for a bunch of clients, no matter what type of industry it works. Nice. So welcome to the show. Internet, not great. So we might have to do a lot of typing and put third banners to out to get people saying, but yeah, we have people listening to us live.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I always like to ask where are people coming in from today? So if some folks want to put that in the comments where you’re listening from today you, your country say hello. We’ll show that up on the screen right now. And I know people are watching, so don’t be shy. Tell us where you’re coming in from.

Last week we had people I saw from from Belgium. We had some from Finland, from Europe. Yeah, it looks like today. People are shy or the common system is not working. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to roll the opening clip here. There we go. Somebody coming in from Ireland. Welcome from Ireland.

Where I’m sure it is happy hour and you, you might be drinking again. That’s right. All right. So let’s open the show and then we’ll go into the discussion in just a minute here.

All right. So we’re talking YouTube and video ads. So I wanted to set the stage with something here, which is a little bit of industry research to put YouTube in contact with all of the other things folks on this call are probably doing. And so this is some research that was spearheaded by Brain Labs and Hennepin.

Optmyzr is also sponsoring the collection of this data. So well, the question that I thought was interesting here, if you look on the right side of the screen is last month, which paid media platforms were you advertising in? So you can see there that was Google, Facebook, then Instagram, then Microsoft, and then YouTube in fifth position.

And YouTube was about on par with Microsoft. So, but what was interesting was the prediction for June. So looking forward to the next month, where did people think they would be spending? Their money. And that chart has disappeared. Where did it go? I can swear to God guys yesterday it was there, but yesterday before they changed the dashboard, YouTube had gone to the number three position.

So I was kind of curious from the two panelists, like, what are you seeing in terms of YouTube? Is that like cheap now in COVID days that people pull back on it? And where does it sort of fit in when maybe some strategies have shifted?

Joe Martinez: When has it not been cheap? I mean, I think that’s the honest question.

I think that’s been something Cory, myself, and you probably heard Brian Garvin on a few webinars too. We’ve been harping on this for years. It is always been insanely cheap just due to the platform itself. There is so much video content being uploaded to the platform every single hour that there’s not an ad in Torrey.

And advertising is really

Cory Henke: cheap. And building on what Joe said, I think for what we are seeing is things are, you know, I say 15 to 30 percent cheaper than what Joe already mentioned, which was already cheap. So there definitely is more value. I just think it depends on the advertiser because, you know, during these COVID times, I think people are just a little bit more nervous about spending at a higher level.

And YouTube is kind of that, okay, I’ve taken care of search, taking care of Facebook and Instagram. Now let’s test into YouTube. I think now’s the time, you know, because things are so much more efficient. You know, if you’re, if if you’re willing to test in that area, but I still look at it as a platform that isn’t necessarily first, but I think it still needs to be uncovered because it can add so much value outside of just performance.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And Joe, you were saying that part of the reason it’s always been cheaper is just there’s continuous new content being pushed onto the platform, but that’s also the downside of it, right? That’s why advertisers in the past have basically said we’re pulling off of YouTube unless Google gets their act together and cleans it up because we don’t want our brand to show next to something that could be highly objective or it could just be something that we don’t really.

Agree with, but it’s not like the worst thing in the world. So how, how have you guys seen that play out?

Joe Martinez: Initially we’ve seen better in terms of content exclusions that you can add to the mix that have been better. Some of the lists that have been hand curated by other marketers. A lot of people have been proactive with creating specific exclusion lists.

Whether it goes from, I created one about kids websites. If you don’t want your stuff on kids channels, I mean, Other people have created one for news websites and any controversial one, any political websites. So there are a lot of lists out there that you can add for exclusions. Some of that stuff you can be proactive on, but also I think some of the ad formats itself, like the TrueView discovery campaigns, you can limit yourself to target just The YouTube search results with discovery campaigns.

You don’t have to be a pre roll in stream ad all the time. And that gives the advertiser a lot more control.

Cory Henke: Yeah. Oh, I would, I would have to agree. I would definitely have to agree. Sorry. Are you gonna say something?

Frederick Vallaeys: No, no. It’s always great when the guests disagree because it gets lively, put on the box.

Cory Henke: Well, I mean, I, I think we take a little bit of a different tactic. You know, I think Joe I think I think Joe and his exclusion lists are great. You know, like we use them, you know, and I encourage other people to use them. But I think our tactic that we take with our brands is we try to build our own. I guess you could say like media platform with our own channels, like building our own TV station.

Like we know, Oh, these placements work. These placements do also work well. Let’s continue to add them to our own list, right? Oh, wow. These placements, you know, aren’t doing well. And let’s add them to that Joe list of exclusion. So it’s continuing to optimize and continuing to learn because when you start to find different channels and different pages or different videos that work well, that’s also key insight into your consumer.

This is the video that they’re going to watch before, or this is the video that they’re going to watch after this ad plays. And so that is interesting. Like we were working with an advertiser that was not necessarily working well on YouTube and it was for a baby product. And what we found is that with the minimal conversions that happened, right.

It all came before hurricane content. And that was interesting. It’s like hurricane news content. Like that’s, what’s really driving these conversions. And what we found is it was more of a fear based type of product is that like, before you’re watching hurricane content, you’re in kind of a heightened mode.

And so serving something that could potentially help the future, you know, child of yours, right. Kind of gets you into that mode. So I think there’s value in understanding the channels that convert as well as do well for me from like a CPC or click through rate perspective.

Frederick Vallaeys: And is this then a difference in like strategies?

And Cory, you’re sort of saying like build your own platform, your own, TV channel almost. So does that mean like you latch on to the big influencers, the channels that you like, and you just kind of trust that they continue producing enough content? Whereas maybe the Joe. What you’re saying is, listen, there’s so much new content and that’s what makes it cheap and let, let Google’s machine learning figure out where to match you to, but take a few more risks along the way, because some of that stuff is new.

Some of the the the channels are new, don’t have that much content. So you don’t really know who they are.

Cory Henke: Yeah, Fred, I, I would our, our tactic. You know, I think there’s two approaches, you know, I think Joe’s approach is really to take advantage of like Google and the targeting, right? If I open it up broad, I keep it more affinity based or brought in market.

I’m taking advantage of all the new videos being uploaded and all the new content. What I’m saying is that like, if you find channels that work well, you can have a compliment. You can have both. You know, that, that, that worked well. It’s just like, I have that broad, you know, strategy, but then I also know like these certain little pockets that do very well for me and while they aren’t scalable, you know, I still think that they, you know, that there’s still value and understanding why those channels work well.

You know, versus others.

Frederick Vallaeys: Makes sense. And I think Joe has dropped off for a minute to reset his wifi router. But Cory, let’s talk a bit about the formats that you have on YouTube. That’s we’ll bring those onto the screen right here. Sure. Right. So, and by the way, all of these resources for everyone watching, if you want to find the resources that we’re showing we’re not going to show the links.

They’re too long to type in, but if you go to the show page right there on episode resources, you click on that link right there. We’ve taken literally every link that we’re talking about. It’s on that page. And if we talk about some new stuff here that we hadn’t put on the list before, we’ll put that on later today as well.

So that’s a great place to find links and resources about what we’re talking about. But yeah, anyway, back, this is the the YouTube hub page on formats. Right. So talk a bit about. Favorite formats, you got

Cory Henke: favorite formats. Let’s scroll down a little bit, you know let’s talk, let’s talk about the fun stuff, right?

Anyway, no, no, scroll up a little bit, a little bit. I’ll scroll up a little bit. Let’s talk about those first. Let’s talk about skippable and non skippable. The first two that Fred showed were on the display side. I think those are fantastic units. But in my opinion, I think you can learn so much more from a skippable or a non skippable video app.

I think when we compare these two, the big differences that I see are these non skippable ads usually drive very high cost per clicks. But also very high completion rates with a 15 second interstitial type of ad. You usually get a higher completion rate, very similar to a bumper ad, which is a five second, again, non skippable in the beginning.

This mostly plays in between. I think you find somebody who’s willing to watch your ad to the end, but not necessarily willing to click through and find more. So more of like a brand placement that is 15 seconds. I like it, but more harder to like learn from. With a skippable video, knowing that you don’t pay for a user until 30 seconds, there’s a lot that you can learn in that first 30 seconds.

In my opinion, there’s a lot more that you can optimize inside of a skippable video ad to make it more effective. And also with a skippable video ad, there’s unlimited time. So you can run a 40 minute ad or you can run a 10 second ad. And I think having that type of variation always get also gives you insight into what your consumers want to see from you potentially in future videos.

Frederick Vallaeys: So we got the whole show we’re doing here and we could literally turn it into an ad Even if it’s an hour long

Cory Henke: you can take this part. You can take this. This presentation Whatever we want to call it and you can well, it’s already on youtube current It’s already on youtube currently And so we can we can take this and you know Put it right into google ads and run it as an ad tonight

Frederick Vallaeys: And talk a bit more.

So you’re talking a lot about learning stuff, right? So the longer format, you got 30 seconds to learn something about your consumer, the person watching it. Like what’s sure. Are you talking about learning? Like, is it demographics? How long they watch, what parts of the video they’re interested in? Where do you find us?

Yeah.

Cory Henke: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we could take something like this, right? Like if we took this episode and we compared it against a different episode, You would now know, wow, which users are willing to stay longer versus and video versus essentially like Snapchat or Google Shopping, right? You would know, wait, you know, is it the is it potentially the actor in the video?

Like, we ran a test with dentech where we ran a 20 minute, yoga type of ad it was chair of Vinyasa yoga, and we used a black male and a white female as kind of like the spokesperson just to see what people responded to. And we also created a funny and a not funny version and the not funny version one and the white female one, you know, in terms of a click through rate and CPC, which was their key performance metrics.

But what we found inside of that was we know who to put on our next Instagram post. We know who to put on our next end feed ad if we want that specific metric. And I think that’s what you learn. But besides that, there’s a ton of different variables, sound links in the video. The type of video I think is so crucial, but I think the most important piece, create that variation in the beginning of the video versus in the middle or the end, because you’ll learn more with more people that start.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And the point being that if you got it wrong, then people will just drop off by closing the browser or just skipping the ad. And then you don’t even learn anything from that middle portion. Exactly. Yeah. Makes sense. Let’s take a look at the other formats we got up here. So that’s your skippable and non skippable.

Yep. Then we got your bumper ads and your sponsored cards.

Cory Henke: Yes. Yes. So, The bumper ads have been always a topic of discussion. I think they launched in early 2019, late 2018, and I’ve tested them across a variety of clients, app clients, e commerce clients, business to business clients. And they might work the best for brand clients, you know, because I haven’t felt, I haven’t felt that they were as advantageous to us from an, from an e commerce standpoint, you know, like that really didn’t allow us to, to really.

You know, you know, evaluate that specific ad unit. I still think, I still think that it plays a role. I still think that it is a great branding tool. If you want reach the CPMs, you know, are about one to third that of skippable, you know, so you do gain value in the reach. I think they work best in my opinion, from what I’ve seen when you’re.

Launching something new which is introducing a new product, restocking something, potentially a flash sale because of the lower CP lower CPMs, you know, your audience is on YouTube and you can reach a wider group of potentially a small audience. You know, at the lower CPM with that five second bumper, if you just want to introduce them, but I would say that you want to serve that bumper to somebody who knows about your brand, because it’s very hard to introduce something in five seconds.

And they’re not going to click through at a high propensity, like in a skippable app. So again, it’s got to be, I think a consumer that is either engaged or been to your website. And then I think the value is in the low CPMs and the high volume that you can reach inside of that small audience.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so it sounds to me like that might even be useful in this COVID era where a lot of things have been closed.

And I honestly have no clue at this point what’s open, where I can go again. And that’s even for where I live. I mean, God forbid, I take a trip to New York, the other side of the country. Like I’d have absolutely no clue. So, so have you done anything? Related to helping your customers like recover from COVID using YouTube and maybe these short re engagement type ads?

Cory Henke: I’d have to say no, unfortunately, unfortunately, Fred, because, you know, you, you work with a lot bigger clients, you know, than I do. And so we had more clients of the of the idea, you know, let’s stop, you know, our ad spend and let’s focus on, You know you know, what’s going on in terms of COVID. So we had a little bit of that.

We had other advertisers, you know, increasing their spend because they were seeing value with everybody being at home. We have a couple of products that are, you know, more in home type of products and those were doing really well. So we saw people spending more and actually testing more into YouTube.

I think I didn’t see much of a difference in view behavior, which I thought I would. I thought people would be spending longer time with videos. You know, on YouTube and that necessarily wasn’t the change. I think the biggest change that we saw was there was more value in the system and YouTube, you know, things were cheaper, people were clicking through more and conversion rates are better.

But again, I think it was specific to the industry that is e commerce versus some of the others that I think were more heavily impacted negatively.

Frederick Vallaeys: And we’ll talk about e commerce in a minute. And Joe, I see you, you’ve shifted rooms. I

Joe Martinez: had to switch. So hopefully this is better. And I think this is going to hold up.

Frederick Vallaeys: Did you go to your neighbor’s house? Yeah, I

Joe Martinez: went from my dungeon basement office to the upstairs. So see if the kids could keep quiet.

Frederick Vallaeys: You sound really good now. So this is fantastic. But the question was, so we’re talking about bumper ads, right? And Cory was saying that basically you can’t use these really short five, six second ad formats to get a new customer.

It’s mostly to re engage with someone. Who’s at least been exposed to your brand. And that made me think like right now, like a lot of the stores that I like to go to, I have no clue if they’re open. Like is YouTube been something in your arsenal to get people aware about what shifted due to COVID and where.

People can go and spend their money again.

Joe Martinez: Yeah. YouTube is, has definitely been really important for a few of our clients. We haven’t used the bumper ads specifically for that re engagement. It’s always been discovery. So we’ve had a few clients discovery, meaning like the motion of it, but we’ve had a few clients who have used it for more top of funnel type aspect of it, where they were so focused on the bottom of the funnel, using, you Called action extensions, true view for shopping, which we might talk about.

They were so focused on that word. They’ve actually shifted back to more just, Hey, we’re here. We exist, you know, just when the time comes again, that you want our product. We’re just keeping in mind that we’re still here. We’re still selling. You can now buy online now instead of going to the store. So it’s just kind of been the shift of positioning, but they have.

always used YouTube. It kind of depends on the industry. We have a sass client who is always use it never stopped and their approach is the same because they’ve always used it for pure awareness and top of funnel and they’ve just maintained that same metric. It’s, it’s been so cheap that they just never stopped because there wasn’t any point to.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And I suppose with the shifting and messaging, like we’re talking video ads now in many cases, right? And these are not For most people, the easiest things to build, it’s not like a piece of text where you change out one call to action to another call to action. So let’s talk about the YouTube video builder beta.

It’s fairly new. I did want to roll a clip first to show people a little bit about what this is. It’s about a two minute clip, but it’s from Google. Give us some context here.

YT Video Builder: So you want to reach your customers on YouTube, but what if you don’t have a video ad or the resources to produce different video ads regularly?

Meet video builder. An easy, fast, and free way to turn your images and marketing messages into compelling, high impact video ads. Each video created through Video Builder has been designed to meet a high bar for creative quality. We also make it easy for you to follow YouTube’s guidelines for effective ads.

Follow these steps for making a video with Video Builder. First, select the layout that works best for your goal. Next, add your brand color and logo. Now the fun begins! Use the storyboard panel to help construct your story and see how your images and text will map to different points in the video. For example, image 3 will appear here and your call to action will appear here.

When entering images, we’ll recommend the right style Size and orientation. And when entering text, we’ll recommend the right amount for each field. All based on our creative guidelines and your layout’s pacing and structure. Next, pick a font. Use a recommended font or find a new one using the Google Fonts Catalog.

When you find one you like, come back here and type in the name. Then preview and pick a music track that helps set the tone for your video.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right, so we get the gist of it, right? And the beauty of live video is you can see people dropping off. So it’s like, ah, no, don’t show us the Google stuff.

Like we’re going. So let’s get back to the chat here and hear from you guys. Like how, what do you, have you used this feature? How do you build video ads? And by the way, Vital Consumer says great session so far. So thanks for watching. Got some other people watching us from different places here.

Vancouver Island, Pennsylvania is present. Jim from Orlando. I got a few folks from Utah or so thanks everyone for watching. So let’s get back to the discussion, creating video ads.

Joe Martinez: Yeah, I think this tool is, is fantastic. To me, it’s, there’s no more excuses anymore. I don’t, I don’t have that. That’s what we hear all the time.

I was like, Oh, I don’t have anyone to do video creative. Like we don’t have, we don’t have the right assets to do it. And I was like, well, now you go here. It is. It’s extremely familiar. If you remember guys, like three years ago now YouTube had a director’s app that was only available on the phone.

And it was, it’s pretty much this this is extremely familiar with it. So you can hear my kids. Sorry about that.

This is it. It’s you can go in, look at, there’s dozens of templates to look at. If you’re looking to promote products, a service, a mobile app and then you can run through the templates. And if you pick one, you like, it’s going to show you exactly what images you need. The format and the size of those images.

So as you’re going through, it’s just a, pretty much a template builder. And then as the thing showed, you just pick your music, which is royalty free against something else you won’t have to pay for, and then you can make your own video and we’ve tested out a few ones. I had, I did a few demos on my own, just so I can get something ready to show clients and for free, it’s, it’s pretty good.

Cory Henke: I can’t wait to reach out and you know, ask about the results, Joe. I’m so excited to see what this does because it is really cool. And I think you know, all the platforms have been trying to figure out how to, you know, make a, turn a video into just custom variables, right? Like if I feel these variables.

Then that should make a video having worked with so many different creative agencies, I felt this virtually impossible, you know, for a lot of these different platforms to take variables from a creative and like, you know, make a spot. But I think Google’s kid is, is coming very close with this with this YouTube product that they have.

So, you know, it’s it’s still in its infancy. I’m excited to see the results from it, but you know, I think what this might do is if a lot of advertisers take advantage of this, this could quite, You know, big creative agencies or creative agencies back into that wanted category, because I think creative agencies have been kind of, you know, attacked by UGC, right?

Like, why would I go to a creative agency when I can create UGC content? Well, if everybody starts creating this type of content, that is just stock photos. You know, text overlays and just gets the message across, maybe building a creative, you know, from the start with actors messaging and like a story, maybe that becomes, you know, more sought after more applicable.

You know, it applies more feeling to it. I don’t know. Yeah. And Joe, I think you wrote an article on sort of the length, the ideal length of a video ad. Well, the one specifically from the builder, you can do six second bucket bumper ads, but then they do go up to 16 seconds. Everyone thinks, you know, like 15 seconds.

Joe Martinez: So I was like, that seems like such a short time. Well, it’s, it’s really 16 seconds where the template goes up to, which is funny. It’s not that nice round number. So it’s, it’s not. If you want to do like Cory says, tell a story or anything, it’s not going to be right for you. This, this is really where we see where kind of Google goes with a lot of other platforms.

They’re trying to get to the smaller businesses who don’t have the money to do this. I, I kind of compare this to when my clients uses. Promo. com. And this is kind of the same thing where, you know, promo is what? 30, 40 bucks, depending on a month, depending on what level you get. This is it, except it has way less features and way less stock footage to do, but it’s, it’s very template based.

So if you want to have control you know, total control, it may not be the best option for you. But. But after you’re done creating one video, you can go back and create another version and reedit it. So it does give you the option to do different versions for testing. And that is extremely important too.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And then that’s a trend we see from Google, right? I mean, they said Google ads has to be advertising that works for everyone. Meaning like to the lowest, like SMB or the smallest SMB. And that’s why they build these tools, but then like experts like us, kind of like Cory saying, you maybe want to go a little bit beyond just giving components and letting the computer figure it out, but you do have to have budget for it, just a different ballgame.

Joe Martinez: I mean, if they could take this tool and say, upload it and then almost make it like an editor thing, or that you could, they can take your current YouTube videos and let you edit it. That’d be a fantastic, but that’s my wishlist.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so we got SA 360 for the the more advanced. Search advertiser. There’s what is a video 360, right?

Is that kind of the equivalent, like for the high end, sophisticated stuff, but a lot more expensive.

Cory Henke: It’s a little bit out of my, you know, client’s budget range, you know, Fred, but with some of the the agencies that I do talk to that, that have access to it, they find the biggest value in terms of like the the inventory.

Like they see that the biggest value in terms of three 60 is the quality of the inventory. I think they have similar video tools, but I could be wrong, you know, because we don’t currently use it with any of our clients.

Frederick Vallaeys: And let’s talk about the quality a bit, right? So I don’t know which of the two of you submitted this article to talk about, but basically, so Steelhouse and which one of the two was it?

You

Ashwin Balakrishnan: it’s a great platform. I use YouTube all

Frederick Vallaeys: the time. And my God, I was like, who just hijacked,

but these guys are doing video clearly, and you go to their website and loads of video, but Cory, tell us a bit about what what this article is about.

Cory Henke: I just found this article, you know, I think it came into my email because I probably found a file you know, followed Steelhouse and you know, being in the L.

A. market, you know, and working at, you know, multiple agencies there, you know, Steelhouse came and presented to us. And you know, I just thought it was their positioning, you know, how you know, 65 percent of all users skip YouTube. It was very much against YouTube and positioning, you know, their product, you know, against it.

You know, a hundred percent of ads are served on the television screen for their, you know, CTV product. And I was just looking at the positioning. Of how ad networks and connected tv are positioning themselves, you know against youtube And so I kind of wanted to talk, you know I get joe’s opinion about it because as soon as I saw this, you know your position your opinion is well for him but as soon as I saw this all I could think about was Really?

Like how do you make the tv have more scale than youtube let alone the marketing capability? And the ability to to change out, you know, you’re creative and learn as much as you possibly

Ashwin Balakrishnan: can

Cory Henke: I mean you can convince me on scale and on the size of the screen You But if I take you into the back end of Google and I show you what’s ending up on TV screens for my YouTube campaigns, you can see that that’s growing.

And I can also, you know, segment just for TV screens. And so if you put YouTube in a fair comparison with connected TV, just on the screen, like where does connected TV, you know really. I think, you know, separate itself from YouTube and I can’t really find it. And so I brought this article to just kind of have a discussion about it.

Like, are we seeing, you know, the impact of connected TV? Because. You know, I might sit in this small little cave in utah, right? And not necessarily see, you know, the big impact, you know, Company company connected tv. And so I don’t know, you know, it was kind of trigger worthy for me And so I wanted to bring it to the table

Frederick Vallaeys: Your place doesn’t look like a cave.

Cory looks pretty nice there

Cory Henke: Thanks

Frederick Vallaeys: no, I mean, I think it’s a good point, right? So when you think about youtube and I think one of you made a point in an article you wrote is that it’s kind of A lean forward type experience. You’re usually sitting at your computer Computer consuming it on a tablet, ready to push, skip, add, or push to the next video or push to go and like something in your mind got triggered by seeing a video.

So now you’re researching that product or maybe even going and buying it. Whereas, and so that’s always kind of had a stigma almost for some reason. It’s like brand advertisers think it’s really low end, which it is in their. But now you have this whole connected TV, right? So now more and more consumers are shifting to consuming that same YouTube content by displaying it on the TV, which is across the room.

You can’t really interact with it that easily. And so from a branding perspective, yeah, like he adds, don’t get skipped because you’re just not going to walk up to the, you can’t push the TV. Right. Is there a difference here?

Joe Martinez: I always. It kind of drives me nuts when people say, but yeah, but people skip the ads.

I was like, it’s not always a bad thing. If it’s someone who’s irrelevant and skipping it, then you’re not paying for it. Someone could be extremely relevant. Still skip it. You know, if it’s a 32nd and they’re still watching 25 seconds of it, skipping it, you’re still not paying for it. They still could remember your brand, go back and search it.

We can use tools within Google to look at this. And then also. The cards, if they still click on your call to action extension, after they skipped it, you’re still driving potentially relevant traffic. They could still buy product from your ad after they skipped your video. So it, when you, when they focus on, yeah, but everyone skips it.

It was like, if you consider that a pure bad thing, you really don’t know a lot about YouTube advertising.

Cory Henke: And I think to, to add to that point, you know, a skip is an engagement. Like I know that that person is there, like prove to me that somebody is watching your connected TV app.

Joe Martinez: But I pay for the premium Hulu.

When the TV commercials on, that’s my time to leave and take a break. And then I know it’s going to be back in like a minute or so. It has changed because people used to leave their dog at home and turn the TV on for them and just go to work. But now everybody’s working from home. So there is actually a human in that house with four legs.

Frederick Vallaeys: So I did want to show an article here from Google, right? So. Speaking about this whole connected TV. So YouTube select was announced not that long ago. Have you guys looked into this at all? Any thoughts on it? I’ve, I’ve heard rumblings

Cory Henke: of it. I am beyond excited for it. And it’s because of the data attached to it.

Like the big problem I have with TV and connected TV is I can’t see the dashboard. I can’t see the data. I can’t spend a dollar tomorrow and then 10 the next day. And then back to a dollar. Right? Like I have to jump through so many different hoops. And so if YouTube select comes to, you know, video three 61st and then gets to finally the Google ads platform six years later, you know, like we will, you know, be able to, you know, buy connected TV through a platform, which I think, you know, is the future.

And in my opinion should already be here now, you know, but I think this is, you know, YouTube selected is a great way for them to draw that fair comparison against connected TV. The same way that they have that comparison against Facebook, right? Like, you know, video who’s staying longer, who converts better.

But I like the way that Google is moving because of their data. Because I can leverage their data now on a television screen through connected tv. That I think is the advantage but for connected tv providers, I think you know, it’s a scary time.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let’s take an audience question here. So Doody from israel has been asking a few so any thoughts on how you scale placements and topics campaigns

Joe Martinez: to me?

I always start as specific as possible research those placements first and then Had to tell my son to be quiet real quick. Sorry, we can look at managed placements first, you know, research the best options for your brand that and see what you get from it. A lot of times what you do is just, you know, you’re literally typing in the placements while you’re setting up the campaign, look at those recommendations, find new ones to constantly add and test those that are going to be extremely relevant to your business or your target audience.

First, then start looking at, I like to look at. Than my custom intent audiences. My custom intent audiences are the ones that are gonna be very specific because with video campaigns, they are based on broad match related search queries that someone actually typed into google dot com. That’s extremely relevant, and you can test out a variety of those custom intent audiences, and that’s where I typically like to scale.

I rarely use the super broad Affinity audience type targeting with YouTube, no matter how big the client is, because we can always do something more specific and still scale with our own custom intent audience or custom affinity audience, which I’ve seen good in the past. Then, then looking at specifically some broader topic.

So I, to me, it’s very easy because we can create our own. Custom audiences. Now I said, custom intent and custom affinity. Some people are already starting to see those merge in their accounts. None of my accounts have that merge yet. They’re still separate for me. So I would look at just creating your custom audiences first, because there’s so many different variations and ways that you can get in front of that.

It’s to me, it’s easier to scale than just focusing on the super broad options that they give you by default.

Cory Henke: Yeah. I thought I find this, this question to be interesting because we usually use our placement targeting at the low funnel. You know, we usually like to build out our placements. And so it’s kind of just like, you know, that scales as, you know, we learn, you know, more about placements and, and or channels and and videos.

So that’s more at our low funnel. And so it’s harder to scale that without knowing what works best. And then when you find what works best, you find that like, you know, that channel isn’t going to grow, it’s only going to grow as fast as that channel grows. So. Scale is very limited in placements for what we use it for topics is where we find the most scale and it usually sits at the top funnel.

And so if we can find a topic that works really well, we will continue to push on that. And a great place to look for topics to test is your Google Analytics. Like if you Google Analytics and you have e commerce, you know, conversion set up where you have your goals set up for a conversion. If you drop that into the audience area, I believe that’s what it’s called.

You can begin to find topics and find, you know, in market segments that can be very advantageous, you know, to test and run. But a lot of YouTube is testing a lot of YouTube is testing. This topic didn’t work well. Okay, let’s move on. Okay. Let’s find the scale within there. But like Joe said, we usually have topics at the top.

We find topics that work. We usually test into a custom affinity. If that custom affinity continues to do well, you know, there’s more scale in that custom affinity, so we might leave it there, but if we find insight there, we then go into custom intent. And then in market segments as kind of like that before engagement retargeting web retargeting.

So Your question about like how do I scale placements and topics? It’s like once you find that scale learn from that learn what topic it was And begin to advance into some of the other targeting aspects That google can give you

Joe Martinez: yeah, and one thing that we can do when you’re creating a custom audience in the audience manager within Google, if you select the display option first and start typing in your keywords, they’ll give you a ton of suggestions of ones that they recommend, and that can give you some new ideas when you’re doing the custom intent for by based off of Google search for your video campaigns, Google doesn’t give you all those additional recommendations for the custom intent audience.

And it only shows up when you’re creating the display one. So I would look at the display one, then use those ideas and just. Copy and paste those ideas to a video one. And that can give you some new ideas to test too.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. There was another question about the start condition feature. So I think this might be related to video sequencing and just to show folks for a second, what video sequencing is So you can basically build storylines, right?

So you can show a certain video ads first and then other ones and then yet other ones. And so this is Google’s page. It’s on the resources that we have, but there’s five sequences that Google has tested. So tease, amplify, echo, mini series, direct shot, follow up in the lead in have you guys tried these?

Cory Henke: Yes, we’ve tried the first one as well as the last two. The question though, like when we talk about like video ad sequencing, you really need to have good video, you know, the rights, the right setup. And you know, even then I think this is still very, very, very tough to analyze and still, you know, a new feature for, for, for YouTube, but we found the most the most impact in the followup.

You know, like serving a very much a long form, a two minute 30, getting people really engaged and then following up either, either via a 15 second or a 10 second we haven’t found the best, the best performance with the lead in, and that’s mainly because like, we think the long form is just a better start.

You know, to something, and it was the same with the beginning, the T’s amplify, you know, an echo, but I don’t think that we had necessarily the best advertiser for that. I think the T’s amplify and echo could be best used with a sale offer launch. And it can be great from a pre launch strategy, you know, tease with a pre launch strategy amplified with the launch and then echo you know, after that launch campaign, whether it’s one week or two weeks.

But I think starting with the long form. And then remarketing with short form is where we have seen the best performance across the majority of our clients. We have used, this is where we’ve used bumper ads. The most was purposely setting up ad sequencing campaigns. And similar to what Cory said, we kept it very close to the end because we wanted to create additional audiences based off of the longer video views in the engage users first.

Joe Martinez: And it’s, I know if you’re doing ad sequencing through, through Google ads itself, you know, not any multi. Campaigns just strictly the ad sequencing feature for your video campaigns. You need to keep in mind too, that if any video that you have as part of your sequence, any view of that video, whether it’s an ad or not, it’s going to be included in that sequence.

So if you want to start someone in a pure ad only campaign, it’s not going to work on Google. If they viewed. For whatever reason, if you have your bumper ad public on your YouTube channel, and someone looks at it, they’re automatically going to be in that step two, three, or four, wherever you had it, you’re not going to start that user off by step one.

So you got to keep that in mind too. If that’s why if you’re doing an ad sequencing on Google. Make all those ads unlisted. So you get pure data strictly from your ad of, no, they only saw this video and hit this step because it was an ad, not because they stumbled upon my organic video somehow.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah.

That’s a really good tip. Let’s put that in the make your video ads unlisted so you don’t muck up your data.

Joe Martinez: Yeah, and it just makes your organic channel look better, too, if it’s not, you know, all the different 15 second variations. I hate when I see that on channels.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Okay, let’s shift focus here a little bit.

So how does YouTube help you with your non video campaigns on Google ads?

Joe Martinez: I think Yeah, this is an article I wrote for search engine land. It’s, it’s, we want to make sure people know that they can, especially the budget conscious one who said like, Oh, I don’t, you know, how is it really worth it to do video?

Yes. Cause it can go beyond just YouTube. You can use videos in your responsive display ads in your app campaigns for your, you know, your universal app campaigns within Google, that’s a. The one that we just passed by, that’s an engagement ad. It’s another form of display. You can add video for your Gmail ads.

So it’s you can use your videos to really boost your other campaigns and boost awareness. And again, it’s still video views that we can create audience from to do potentially different next step remarketing with. Additional video campaigns. We used to be able to use video views for some awesome display remarketing, but they took YouTube user audiences away from display campaigns, which is unfortunate.

But the more we getting that user engaged, then we see better, sometimes better click through rates from these display ads as well. Just again, driving more traffic. So for me, I wrote that article to say Thank you. You don’t have to make a video once and just use it once on YouTube. There are other ways that we could enhance our other paid media campaigns within Google.

Cory Henke: Yeah, I think I want to echo what Joe said about that earned view. You know, like people that watch a video and then, you know make that organic leap to go watch another video on your channel. Like that is just such a huge, you know, metric. That we’re able to retarget from. And so it goes to Joe’s point of just being able to use YouTube, not just to serve a video, like you serve a video, you get performance, you get views, you get clicks, you learn about, you know, that consumer, what they like, what they don’t like, if you’ve got multiple variations or you’re running that across multiple, you know, channels but then you also get.

The impact, the halo effect to these other channels. And, you know, with something like display, it’s hard to see that halo effect because all a user can do is click, right? Same thing with search, right? When you go in there, all the user can do is click. So like, how did YouTube help that? Well, the thing that you have to look at is the impression volume for your brand search, right?

If you’re selling your brand via YouTube, you know, and you put some spin behind it, you should see more people searching. You know, for your brand, that should happen. You know, we usually see that. Another place to check is your search trends, you know, looking at your brand from a search trend, a search trend standpoint, if you have a unique product, maybe that product name is spiking in trends, but those are two areas that we usually check.

And then also I think, you know, where YouTube has helped a lot of our brands, especially those with longer path length, longer time to purchase is the earned view. We take those different videos that they watch and we say, okay, this is a low funnel video. This is a top funnel video. If they watch a low funnel video, we know they converted X.

If they watch this top funnel video, we know they converted X. And so YouTube begins to play very similar to your website or very similar to like Instagram, where we can retarget off of this platform. If they subscribe, if they like, if they comment, they all become different audience segments to us. Very similar to like a product view and add to cart while they might not convert as well, they are still audiences that we can learn from.

And so, you know, not being on YouTube, I think at this point is really, it is really not a great thing for your brand. Yeah. I mean, like, who do you think is a more valuable audience? Someone who maybe just visited a page once, or someone who subscribed to your YouTube channel and wants to see more content.

Joe Martinez: I mean, it’s, it gives us this opportunity to hit that more valuable user than just doing our typical, Oh, all, all page visitors. Let’s start off with that one. That’s like, why we can do a lot better than that to start off any sort of campaign. So the question is, how do you use YouTube to drive. Your other advertising efforts.

Frederick Vallaeys: How do you do it the other way around? How do you build a YouTube channel and YouTube following content content? You know, you know how it works, right? Look at you doing live video on YouTube. You know how it works. You’re reaching out to people that like know their stuff, you know, and you provide value.

Cory Henke: That’s what YouTube is. People come to this to this platform for three things. In my opinion, that’s entertainment, right? Education and inspiration, right? And I think education is the one that is really the hidden thing. There’s so much, so many things you can learn on YouTube, right? And so it’s really about the content and the value.

Now, if you maintain consistency along with that, like every single week or twice a week, wow, it goes faster. If you have like the videos that you upload longer than 10 minutes, you know, I think that helps. Hasn’t been proven, but I think you’re able to get into more ad placements, you know, for your videos.

And I think that helps, but consistency and value, but most importantly, value. And if you can do it face to camera, even better, you know, people want to see real people and talk to real people. So I think it’s content over everything. I don’t think you’re going to run Facebook or display or search and end up building a YouTube channel.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey Tim, thanks for joining us. Good to see you on the live stream. Tim’s got a question. I’m sure we all know Tim. So what’s your favorite prospecting audience strategy on YouTube right now? He’s suggesting custom intent in market or specific placements.

Joe Martinez: Mine will be a two part answer. If it is going to be a true view in stream, it will be custom intent.

Cause we, we can play around with that. You can create custom intent on your converting keywords. You’re converting queries. Cause we know how match types work now. So you’re converting keywords and queries are two different things. Take your competitors names, make a custom intent audience and check that out.

Export, you know best selling products from your CRM or Google analytics, make custom intent audiences off of those, take your site search, your internal site search from analytics. What are people actually looking for when they get to your website, find those options, and then create audiences off of those, find more people looking for things that you have that you could do better than your competitors and then hopefully drive more conversion.

So from the in stream aspect, that’s it. I’ve cooked for, for top of funnel. And you’re going to pay a little bit more for this is from true view. Discovery has really become one of my favorites just because you’re targeting YouTube search results. You do have the option to target just YouTube search results.

So if people are coming to YouTube, they’re typing in something that they want to see, and if you have a product or a solution or a demo that answers that question, you can be the first result there. So for building that initial awareness audience, I love that one. Now, if someone clicks on that discovery ad, you’re paying for it.

But, and then you’re sending them to the watch page. There’s no call to action, call to action extension. There’s no shopping card, nothing like that. You’re just watch, engage with my brand, watch a video. And we’ve done this with clients. I had a client that had recipes and stuff. More in like the baking industry, we had a 30 minute.

Video that we used as a discovery ad. And we’re paying like three to seven cents to have people watching this 30 minute, like demo and video. And they’re engaging with our brand for 30 minutes. And that is us to build this person’s engaged. Oh, they’re subscribing. They’re watching more videos. They want to see more recipes and everything.

So it’s not always about driving them to a website and convert convert. Nobody goes to YouTube for your free SAS demo. That’s not why people go to YouTube. So stop doing that. All right. Show them something. That’s be the solution, be there. And that’s where discovery has really become my favorite. Cause you can hone in on specific keywords and problems that people have be with, be there with a video and show that your solution and keep that user engaged.

Now, shut up now. That was long.

Cory Henke: No, that was great, Joe. That was great. That was great. And I don’t know much I can add on top of that. I mean, just to say that like the only thing that we do is we have affinity and you know, topics up top and then we have custom intent and end market kind of in like that next level in terms of for our prospecting.

And those are the two that we compare. You know, sometimes affinity wins, you know, most of the time in market wins just because of, you know, the targeting, but I will say there are two things that I want to add on to what Joe said, because what Joe said was perfect was sometimes when we have the volume in terms of an advertiser that is getting a lot of volume to the website.

We have the conversion pixel set or the goal, you know, whatever it is, we can use conversion probability inside of Google Analytics as well as session quality. These are two different metrics that Google gives us, and what they’re doing is they’re evaluating the probability of conversion. And how high this session quality is.

And so what we do is we take the highest session quality and we built a lookalike off of that or a similar audience inside of Google. And that is one tactic that we take to try to do, to try to reach a new prospecting audience, which is leveraging the audience that comes to our website. But only the highest value of type of users there.

And then something definitely not audience focused, but kind of is, is the new lead format is that when we use the new lead format, we find that that is working well for our prospecting audience. And we believe that that lead format is working well because we’re just giving them another option that they don’t necessarily have to click through to our website to convert, they’re more just you know, being able to fill out that form there.

And so while this is not an audience target. It’s a different way to reach your audience that could potentially improve, you know, conversion rates and performance.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, we’re showing the lead formats on the screen right there for people who haven’t tried them. I believe on YouTube that is an opt in beta or you have to be whitelisted by your account manager.

So reach out for it because it’s a pretty cool way to turn YouTube into something much more actionable. Good. Well, this has been a great conversation. There’s a couple of articles I want to show real quick that we haven’t gotten to, but they are on the resources page. So you can also get your Google shopping ads on YouTube now.

I believe Joe actually did a post on that as well on search engine land. So true view for shopping and true view for discovery. So some actionable tips in there. Joe, you did a presentation at SMX Munich last year. This year didn’t happen. No. Some really good stuff in there. So that’s an article with some really good advice that you can go through the whole presentation. And then there’s also extensions, right? We haven’t really talked much about extensions on video ads, but you can do a site links, you can do locations and call to action extensions. So a lot of ways to enhance these ads, to drive more of the interaction and engagement that you actually care about.

So those articles are posted on the show page. So again, as a reminder, go to the live page. And then at the bottom of that, we have all those articles with that. I want to give each of the panelists a moment to wrap up and maybe talk about anything they think is important that we missed and who wants to go first here?

Cory Henke: I’ll go first. I think, you know, what did we, what did we miss? I think we could have talked about lead forms a little bit more. I think we’re seeing fantastic results from that, you know, from our clients. I think what else did we miss? You know, I think we get to talk to a couple more hours, you know, we’re going to spend another hour on creative, maybe another hour on just, you know, performance.

But I think for anybody that’s listening, that isn’t testing YouTube, it’s definitely a place to be. It’s definitely a channel that, you know, you can find a great amount of engagement and a great amount of performance. It’s just going to take some work, you know, some analysis. But usually the harder things in marketing usually have the best performance attached to them.

But yeah, you know, that’s it for me, you know, Fred, I really appreciate the opportunity. You know, Joe, as always, you know, it’s a pleasure.

Frederick Vallaeys: I think you just offered to come back for a couple more hours of this, right? So,

Cory Henke: Hey Fred well, I mean, just let everybody know, you know, like so I don’t know if everybody knows this, but, you know, Fred was an all star on YouTube, you know, before anybody knew.

He was doing what were they Fred? Google, what were they called? Google Hangouts

Frederick Vallaeys: or whatever they were. I mean, we did these huge live streams for all the agencies and yeah, it was, it’s, so we had this like million dollar production studio inside one of the Google buildings and and then we get into the studio and they literally spent a million dollars on it.

And then so do

Joe Martinez: I

Frederick Vallaeys: see

Joe Martinez: me,

Frederick Vallaeys: like made the lenses wrong, like that, that one thing. And so the, the. Camera was literally this close to my face to, to make the whole thing.

Cory Henke: If anybody gets a chance, please go look up these old videos of Fred, because I used to watch these things and learn so much working at an agency.

He provided so much value to me, everybody that when I saw him at person and I was speaking at this event, I literally fangirled like I’d never fangirled before. I fangirled. Like I saw Michael Jordan for the first time, like, that’s how crazy it was. And if you remember this, Fred, I came up and said, Hey man, can I get a picture with you?

And Fred’s response was like, yeah, man, of course, totally cool. And so to answer your question, Fred, I’m always here. You know, you can always call me because I know that you’ve provided so much value, you know, to me and my career, just learning from you. So thank you.

Frederick Vallaeys: I really appreciate that. But it’s like funny when you’re like a big celebrity in a small space, this one time I got a conference for HeroConf, I think.

And I’m in the elevator because I wanted to get a glass of wine to take back to the room and like, I’m, I’m in the road, like totally like not presentable and these new guests get into the elevator with me and they start staring at me and they’re like, I’m like, And I’m like, yeah, do

Joe Martinez: you want some wine?

Frederick Vallaeys: You’re a rockstar, Fred. Oh, you guys are too. So Joe, do you have any parting thoughts for us?

Joe Martinez: Oh, to me, I love when, when people tell me or clients tell me that they don’t think that their audience is on YouTube because that that’s when I get like just a big smile and that’s, this is like. Here we go. Yeah, it’s the second largest search engine out there.

No matter with all the targeting options and custom options that we have, your audience is on YouTube. It’s such a cost effective way to engage. I don’t care how big or small your company is. I don’t care what industry your company is. You can find your audience on YouTube. And now with free video tools that are out there and everything like that, and all the targeting options that we have.

You may have to do some testing, you may have to find them, but for the most part, we’re pretty confident that we can find your audience and get in front of them and then understand why, like Cory said before, why people are on the channel. Nobody’s there to buy something right away. They’re, they’re there to learn and figure out potentially what they want to buy.

So you can be there and help them influence it. And potentially you can do it with a ton of. Free advertising and that’s something that to me if any marketer passes up free advertising, it’s it’s foolish.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well spoken Well, Joe. Cory, you’ve been amazing guests. Thank you for filling an hour with really good tips Everyone.

Thanks for watching. We’ll be back with another episode If you are not subscribed yet, subscribe that way you get the notifications, you know who the next panelists are but we plan to continue it keep it going with Amazing guests, amazing experts hopefully audience engagement. So we can answer the questions that you have, but thanks for watching.

Stay safe and we’ll see you on the next one.