Facebook & Adwords Advertising - My Results

Hey all,

There doesn't appear to be much on these forums about paid advetising (I could be wrong), so I thought I would feedback on my efforts so far. This is all new to me, I'm no expert, I hope my experience will be useful.

My channel is only a month old. It's content is a vblog, talking news, television and general observational humour. My aim is to make my channel my job and sole income. I originally thought it was a pipedream, but feedback has been really positive - so maybe it's do-able.

The advertising I paid for, was hoped to give my channel a little jumpstart. Primarily I was looking for YouTube subs and Facebook Page 'likes' to gather a bit of a regular following, rather than a quick-hit of views.

Adwords.
My views are low, prior they were 5 or less per day, but around 50-80 on episode upload day. These are organic, due to friends and family enjoying and sharing. So, Sunday 23rd I paid Adwords £25. The next four days returned 22, 64, 11 and 42 views at a budget of £6 per day - hardly worth it at all. So I thought about the advert/video title, it was previously 'Lindsay Lohan takes up Celebrity Knobspotting' (a play on Trainspotting), so I changed it to 'Lindsay Lohan loves Celebrity Knobspotting' and suddenly I was averaging around 130 extra views. An amazing change simply by making my title more positive. On the 31st I stopped the advert. Adwords reported a total of 370k (sponsored) search impressions.

See attached images:
Traffic Source.png - to see the viewers were coming from.
Adwords.png - to see how effective it was.

Facebook.
Despite being on there, I've never been a fan of the site. But lately, I've had to approve and learn to use it to my advantage. So I setup a dedicated 'Page'.

Together with YouTube I set up a Facebook advert campaign too, with a daily spend of £3.50. The advert was a shared post/YouTube link from my channels Page.

Now I find their reports to be very detailed, but also rather hard to use. So I've simplified my interpretation of it.

- Facebook delivered over the same period 41k impressions, around half of those were unique. (sounds like people scroll up and down their newsfeeds).
- 113 clicks/views
- 119 Actions (though I'm not 100% sure exactly what these are) Shares, post likes?

I also tried a 3 day 'Like' campaign, which I think was £3 a day. Thinking that a page 'like' is similar to a YouTube sub, every time I post they get alerted. This returned 11 page likes.

Conclusion
Okay I got a short sharp blast of viewers, which did bring on a regular personal interest to my count, averaging nearly 100 a day. The advertising brought me a few extra viewers and plenty of impressions - but failed in converting them into extra subscriptions. Facebook however did return a few 'Likes'.

The biggest thing I noticed is how few of the new viewers were 'quality'.

Look at the attached 'Views.png' and 'Minutes.png' to see that despite the viewers going up, the minutes watched doesn't really go up in proportion.

So I believe that if you want a short sharp (pointless) blast of viewers, go ahead advertise, and get a good 'intriguing' title. But otherwise don't.

Sadly I doubt that this has given me any long-term improvement to my channel viewer/sub count. I've paid around £40 which is hardly a real campaign, but a little experiment into it's benefits.

I would of course be very interested to hear of anyone else's experience, whether or not it's believed that I did something wrong, and anyone's opinion on paid promotion of (non-commercial) YouTube channels.

If my feedback got your interest, or if I've steered you what to do not to do (like I said I'm no expert), if anyone would like to take a look at my channel, I'd really appreciate some feedback on my efforts so far.

Many thanks!
Alex
 

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My experience with Facebook advertising was pretty bad. I spent $20 overall, got 0 page likes (1 liked and immediately unliked, so it was probably an accident), and my channel got something like 5 views in that time.

With Adwords, I had a $1 a day budget for somewhere around $10-$15 overall, and my video got over 800 views, and although there wasn't a lot of noticeable action on that video, I did start gaining a few more subscribers and I figure the advertising has something to do with it.

If only Adwords took PayPal as a payment method, I would probably go with it on a regular basis.
 
Cheers DeathJohnson,
Interesting, I can't be sure where my best result came from. YouTube of course brought views, but my aim was long-term, and Facebook delivered a handful of 'Likes'. (maybe the next best thing to a sub), whereas I can't be sure whether YT actually brought any subs.

Fortunately, Google has credited my Adwords with an extra £75 (an offer), so I'm still to use that. I'd certainly be interested in using it in a way to gain quality subs rather than views.

One thing that has made me nervous (it's still early days for me), is my understanding on 'Minutes Watched'. For example my best day so far (27th March) was with my 3rd episode with 134 views (advertised), but with just 81 minutes watched. Then last thursday evening I uploaded episode 4 (not advertised) and got 44 views with a far nicer 176 minutes watched.

I wonder if the advertising could have ruined the ranking/presence of my video (Ep3) due to the big dent in the views/minutes ratio?
 
I think it only works on channels that are already getting a good amount of traffic. Used as reinforcement . besides that it's pointless in my opinion
 
Totally my opinion currently. Great for a short blast of views, but pointless otherwise.


This may sound harsh but you're using Adwords wrong. :)

Adwords is a bidding system. The higher your bid, the more likely you will get the views. However, the more well targeted your ad is to your content (tag matching, etc) the more opportunities you will have for those ads to be shown. If you really nail down your ads, and it will take some time to do for sure, you can get the bids down much closer to that elusive $0.01 per view. I max out $5 daily budget at no more than $0.01 per view because that's my max bid. We're not advertising a product where conversions matter or where a single view can be worth real cash, so going with any kind of higher bid numbers is a huge mistake. YouTubers advertising their channel want volume above all else.
 
Veritasium made a great video outlining the flaws of Facebook advertising and paying for campaigns to bring traffic to your page. In fact it concludes that it can very well work against you.

Look up 'Facebook Fraud' on YouTube and it's the first result.
 
I tried the google adwords advertising. I didn't see much improvement at all, granted I only used about 10$ and didn't really know what I was doing. Tho I think I set it up rather well.
 
This may sound harsh but you're using Adwords wrong. :)
What a thing to say!! ...nah I totally agree with you, the chances are I probably did it very wrong.

I'm going to produce a advert solely for the purpose, rather than use a regular episode. Thanks I'll see where a £0.01 click budget gets me.

In think possibly one of my mistakes might have been talking about tagged celebrities and then joking about why we all hate them. I might have been better keywording for a different market, my videos are satire of a very british nature and that's perhaps how I should have marketed it to get quality viewers.

WOW VANCITY!!!
That is a real eyeopener!!! Got to love the BBC's none-bias nature, Rory did very well not to accuse Facebook of anything untoward there.

Interestingly I can't see much in the way of global reach, fortunately my FB likes have only come from the UK, but I can't see where the post impressions came from.
And I totally believe (my assumption) that getting false views/subs/likes can damage how you channel/account is seen. Because despite having so many subs, no-one clicks on your stuff, and if they do immediately clicking away.

The more I read about Google and YouTube, they're very clever in watching every little detail, the viewer, videos and looking for patterns to decide what is quality content and what not to promote organically. Very clever people.

I have a friend who's good at data/SEO/adwords, who has also suggested a specific ad. I'll aim to market in the form of the channel, humour, satire etc... rather than slating celebs people are probably happily searching for.

- Freezedown, I imagine you've got to be an Adwords expert to get much from a small budget. Mine was £20, got a bunch of views. But I aimed in the wrong place.

Thanks for the comments everyone so far, really prompted good thought, just what I was looking for. I'll post back how I get on with ad campaign number two. Thanks Google for the extra £75 credit, fingers crossed, with good advice it could really get something started.

Here's hoping!!
 
I think given what kind of content you're talking about, the first set of targets would be UK demographic primary and probably AUS secondary. 26-35 age demographic. It definitely needs to be a video specifically recorded for the purposes of being a trailer. What the channel is about, what kind of content, what your upload schedule is. All the reason why subscribing is a good idea and of course like any good ad, to mention your channel name and the call to action of "subscribe" at least twice, possibly 3 times in a no longer than 60 second ad. It all comes down to thinking like an advertiser rather than a YouTuber. You're selling the channel to the viewer so you need to know who exactly your viewers are (analytics can help with this) and how to sell to them. :)

The real beauty of it is that you're selling a $0 product to them. All they have to do is click a button which is a much lower barrier to entry than actually buying something.
 
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