Adwords Test - What $5 Can Get You

[Talooka]

I decided to test out just how beneficial Adwords could be to the growth of my channel.

I paid $10 (The minimum payment allowed) to adwords and created a campaign of $5 to span 2 weeks for one of my videos. I accepted the default settings and disabled the in-stream feature, and only had the in-display feature.

Here are those results:

Before Ad:

After Ad:

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As far as how much of the video they actually watched...here's the audience retention. The orange line are views from the ad:

It looks like 50% of people stopped after the intro played (which is about 5 seconds long) and seems to hold true with YouTube's general "Catch the audience in the frist 20 seconds of the video" rule.

I plan to try this again but with more targeted keywords and locations.

So, here's the TL;DR:
Gained 318 views, 12.877 impressions, and half of those views didn't watch more than 15 seconds of the video.

Take from that what you will, if you're able to hold the viewers attention within the first 10 seconds $5 could help you get a lot of subscribers!
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[John Baxter]

Thanks for the heads up as well as the valuable information on how to do it. I'm definitely going on a campaign after the new year.

 

[DemendraHD]

Hey Talooka,

It's great to see this tested out. I've been meaning try Adwords one day and now I feel prepared for what I have to do. A lot of people seem really finicky regarding video introductions, it seems content creators are starting to not use intros or have them play once they've captured the audiences attention. Those first few seconds of the video seem the most important in this aspect, will have to deliver in this time.

I'll have to try this out on the channel trailer once I make one.

Thanks for the time and effort,

DemendraHD

 

[Painter]

Yikes. That definitely hurt your audience retention. You can get the same results posting a video on reddit and it's free. You need better tags that will bring in views and improve audience retention. Add "zombie apocalypse" "zombie invasion" "the walking dead" "the walking dead zombie" "zombie survival" etc. to your tag box and try to incorporate some of them in your description. Those tags should be at the top. Once your audience retention/watch time improves, you'll rank higher in those search terms.

 

[Talooka]

Yikes. That definitely hurt your audience retention. You can get the same results posting a video on reddit and it's free. You need better tags that will bring in views and improve audience retention. Add "zombie apocalypse" "zombie invasion" "the walking dead" "the walking dead zombie" "zombie survival" etc. to your tag box and try to incorporate some of them in your description. Those tags should be at the top. Once your audience retention/watch time improves, you'll rank higher in those search terms.

So wait, the order of my tags has an effect on my videos' ranking? Did not know that.

 

[Painter]

So wait, the order of my tags has an effect on my videos' ranking? Did not know that.

Not really. Out of habit, I always place my most effective tags (high search volume) at the beginning. Build up your audience retention and your videos will rank really high in search.

 

[SuperSurpriseFun]

Not really.

The tags are weighted in order, I had this confirmed by my partner rep at YouTube. It's probably a minimal difference but every little bit helps. He also mentioned having beyond ten tags is kind of pointless, but like that is going to stop me

 

[JZilla1995]

Wow! I did not know about the tag ranking system!

 

[BackToTech]

Great information

 

[Entityofsin]

Google AdWords has always been something interesting that I've wanted to try out for a marketing strategy.

Basically my entire strategy behind that is to build advertisement videos that kind of look like channel trailers and then just run the ad campaigns on those videos.