My AdWords Experiment - Cost per subscriber of £1.50

[Darren Taylor]

I thought I would share the results of my AdWords YouTube experiment with everyone.

I recently ran an AdWords campaign for 2 weeks spending £78 in total - so nothing big.

I promoted 1 video (about optimising Facebook ads - I am a marketing education channel)

The campaign got the following results

7,882 views

£0.01 cost per view

298,030 ad impressions

2.64% view rate

216 earned views (views you get AFTER people click or see you ad, when they are interested and browse your channels other vids out of choice)

40 Earned liked (likes you get AFTER people click or see you ad, when they are interested and browse your channels other vids out of choice)

51 earned subscribers (subs you get AFTER people click or see you ad, when they are interested and browse your channels other vids out of choice)

This made the cost per sub £1.52 - which isn't bad considering the scale of the experiment and that I haven't really run ads like this before (though I have run hundreds of AdWords search campaigns)

If you're a small YouTuber like me, are those numbers good in your eyes? Would spending £78 / $90 for 51 subs in the early days of your channel work well? If so, I'll share my campaign setup with everyone.


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JUST ONE WORD OF WARNING BEFORE YOU REPLY

The retention rate and watch time of people who clicked my ad was disastrously low, even though some liked my content. This meant that as a result of promoting that video via AdWords, it lost all organic rankings (it was in like position 7-10 consistently for my chosen top tag before the ads begun) now it's gone completely, so it kills your organic, but at the end of the day, it was getting maybe 8 views a week organically, so I would rather have had the 51 subs

Again, let me know your thoughts and I'll share the setup if the numbers work for you

 

[Crown]

That's a lot of money to pay for a sub. If your goal is to earn more money from adsense than you're spending on adwords, then £1.50 per sub isn't going work at all.

Let's assume a RPM of £1 on adsense. In other words, for every 1000, views, you will earn £1. That's pretty accurate I think but if you have other data, you can use that.

Taking that RPM of £1, let's work out how many views would be needed to earn £1.50 -

1000 views / 1 x 1.5 = 1500 views

So you would earn £1.50 for every 1500 views. That is your break-even point. In other words, for every sub that you acquired by spending £1.50, you would need them to generate 1500 views on your channel to get your money back. That's just not going on happen. Even pewdiepie wouldn't have those sort of results.

If your goal is to use adwords to get over 1000 subs, then it's going to cost 1.5 x 1000 = £1500 Using the same RPM of £1, you're then going to need 1.5 million views on your channel to pay back the £1,500

It just doesn't seem like a good investment to me. Like you said, adwords campaigns usually have terrible retention. That's the big drawback. So you gain in paid traffic, but you lose all your free traffic because the low retention kills the search rankings. That means it's going to take years to get those 1.5 million views via free traffic after the adwords campaign.

 

[Ezrider92356]

interesting. if those are 50 loyal subs who will watch all your video's then it may have been worth while.

I too am doing a little experiment with one video on ad words. I have several video's that are doing quiet well on organic views. a recent one I made though. I thought appealed to a slightly larger but related audience than my normal. the video does have some competition. I promoted it on a on topic discussion forum was well received and came in at 86% audience retention from those views but that particular video wasn't doing much for organic views so I thought It might be a good candidate. running a very small sample on It. too soon to get any data back on retention so forth. I have gained two subs sense I started it but not sure if they came from adwords views or not and not a unusual amount of sub growth for me either. basically just running a small sample and then going to go over the data of what if any benefit it was to me.

 

[MyBigBrain]

Having previously tried Adwords, I have come to the conclusion that it is a total waste of money for YT videos.

If a retailer spent $1.52 to attract a customer who bought a tangible product, resulting in a tangible profit to the retailer, then that is money well spent.

A view or a subscriber provides no tangible profit - you have not sold a product or a service. Your money goes down the Adwords drain and you make no tangible profit.

 

[Darren Taylor]

That's a lot of money to pay for a sub. If your goal is to earn more money from adsense than you're spending on adwords, then £1.50 per sub isn't going work at all.

Let's assume a RPM of £1 on adsense. In other words, for every 1000, views, you will earn £1. That's pretty accurate I think but if you have other data, you can use that.

Taking that RPM of £1, let's work out how many views would be needed to earn £1.50 -

1000 views / 1 x 1.5 = 1500 views

So you would earn £1.50 for every 1500 views. That is your break-even point. In other words, for every sub that you acquired by spending £1.50, you would need them to generate 1500 views on your channel to get your money back. That's just not going on happen. Even pewdiepie wouldn't have those sort of results.

If your goal is to use adwords to get over 1000 subs, then it's going to cost 1.5 x 1000 = £1500 Using the same RPM of £1, you're then going to need 1.5 million views on your channel to pay back the £1,500

It just doesn't seem like a good investment to me. Like you said, adwords campaigns usually have terrible retention. That's the big drawback. So you gain in paid traffic, but you lose all your free traffic because the low retention kills the search rankings. That means it's going to take years to get those 1.5 million views via free traffic after the adwords campaign.

Thanks for the detailed response! I would 100% agree with you, however I don't really care about the monetization or AdSense. I have a few websites with AdSense on and they get a decent amount of traffic, but my AdSense payments are about £120 per month, which is really poor. I am in this to byuild a community which builds my credibility and allows me to directly (from subs) to get consulting gigs, or indirectly as social proof that I have an active and engaged marketing community.

Although I spent £78 for 51 subs, if one person works with me on marketing consulting, it leads to an annual revenue of around £8-10k depending on services rendered.

I think I could have been clearer in my post (my bad) that this is NOT a model to grow a channel for AdSense revenue, but to help build a community to generate business away from YouTube (consulting, training, product sales, affiliates etc)


Thanks!

 

[TYTD]

See; I found I had the opposite problem with what experiments I've done with adwords. I get loads of views and a really good retention time (Most over 40%) but I get little interaction in the way of comments and I'd be lying if I said i'd had more than 5 subscribers in the month i've been trialling it...

 

[Darren Taylor]

See; I found I had the opposite problem with what experiments I've done with adwords. I get loads of views and a really good retention time (Most over 40%) but I get little interaction in the way of comments and I'd be lying if I said i'd had more than 5 subscribers in the month i've been trialling it...

It all depends on the setup in reality. If you run "in stream" ads (skippable and non skippable videos) then you'll generally get decent retention (if targeting is set up well) but not large numbers of subs. However, if you run "video discovery" ads, then your YouTube ads will appear in relevant search results and the right sidebar, but when clicked, the person will be taken to your channel page, where they can find out more.

To highlight again what @Crown said, as long as you aren't expecting to use ads for future YouTube revenue, but only to grow a community in which you can monetize in other ways, then go ahead. But if you're trying to get subs to get AdSense money, it's not a good idea

 

[TYTD]

It all depends on the setup in reality. If you run "in stream" ads (skippable and non skippable videos) then you'll generally get decent retention (if targeting is set up well) but not large numbers of subs. However, if you run "video discovery" ads, then your YouTube ads will appear in relevant search results and the right sidebar, but when clicked, the person will be taken to your channel page, where they can find out more.

To highlight again what @Crown said, as long as you aren't expecting to use ads for future YouTube revenue, but only to grow a community in which you can monetize in other ways, then go ahead. But if you're trying to get subs to get AdSense money, it's not a good idea

Thanks for the advice I accepted a while ago that my channel was more setup as a marathon than a sprint in terms of subs. but I'd love to grow my audience a bit (Even if I could get it up to 100 I'd be extatic) so I might look into Video discovery and see if with some specific targeting I can maybe bring my numbers up a bit

 

[Ezrider92356]

as data is starting to come in on my little experiment I am starting to see the same thing others have said. average view duration dropped from 3.xx mins to a mere 1.03 average view duration from YouTube ads is a mere 34 seconds. adsense is showing 5 earned views 0 subscribers. I have had a good last few days for subscriber growth but it does not seem to be due to the YouTube ad on the one video. the add still has not run its duration limits are set very low. I paused it for now ill let the next couple days pass for data to come in then look at it again and decide if I want to resume the ad or not. I don't mind spending a couple dollars for some more exposure early on. but I'm not paying for 30 second views that are just going to hurt me more than help.

also the number of views that video was bringing in (had it set to advertise a single video rather than channel) has still been less daily views with the ad campaign than some of my other video's do organically.

 

[SvenInMotion]

Thanks for posting this, very interesting.
IMO it wasnt worth it unless the video doesnt have potential for the future growth, because that view rate almost completely kills its chance of getting picked up by youtube's algorithm. I coould be wrong, but I believe that watchtime and the retention is what youtube looks into the most, and 3% of the viewtime tells youtube something is wrong with the video.

Still, 50 subs is still good