Our Brief Adwords Experiment - What Happened??

[FamilyToyReview]

If you are a toy channel, then you should not be doing keyword adwords advertising. Kids rarely search on youtube for videos. They choose videos based on thumbnails through suggested videos. You can get endless views for .01 on adwords by targeting a big channel. Uncheck youtube search on adwords as those ads will get served and clicked by youtubers that consider toy channels to be cancer. They will click the ad to charge you and dislike the video. Remember the majority of your views will come on mobile and in-display ads don't work with mobile. You want the ads that appear as suggested videos. It will make your video look like a suggested video to a kid and if they like the thumbnail, they will click it.

Ive been having a tough time appearing on suggested vid section of popular videos. I have some dinotrux videos that get the most views from suggested. But not very prominently and not from any big channels. Im working on improving my thumbnail and doing seo on title tags description. Are there any other tips for having more success in suggested?

Adwords arent so bad if you can make the most out of targeting. On a decent campaign i can get about 300 additional free views (earned views) if i pay for 1,000 views and maintain retention rate around 30% (my normal average) for those views and the rate of subscriber growth goes up (hard to quantify). my weekly natural views seem to have gone up steadily. I used to get 2,000 then 2,500 views per day, last week it was 3,000 per day and hopefully it stays that way this week or goes s little higher. I only do adwords like 3 days a week and try to get the momentum to bring up the rest of my views for the week. my views have steadily gone up but not sure if cuz of my adwords campaign or some other things im doing, or all of the above, or just luck. The growth is kind of slow though, incremental on a weekly basis. But yeah it can be a waste of money if not managed right and not something you want to leave running.

 

[Redterrors]

Ive been having a tough time appearing on suggested vid section of popular videos. I have some dinotrux videos that get the most views from suggested. But not very prominently and not from any big channels. Im working on improving my thumbnail and doing seo on title tags description. Are there any other tips for having more success in suggested?

Adwords arent so bad if you can make the most out of targeting. On a decent campaign i can get about 300 additional free views (earned views) if i pay for 1,000 views and maintain retention rate around 30% (my normal average) for those views and the rate of subscriber growth goes up (hard to quantify). my weekly natural views seem to have gone up steadily. I used to get 2,000 then 2,500 views per day, last week it was 3,000 per day and hopefully it stays that way this week or goes s little higher. I only do adwords like 3 days a week and try to get the momentum to bring up the rest of my views for the week. my views have steadily gone up but not sure if cuz of my adwords campaign or some other things im doing, or all of the above, or just luck. The growth is kind of slow though, incremental on a weekly basis. But yeah it can be a waste of money if not managed right and not something you want to leave running.

I am certainly far from an expert. I have only had three videos get a substantial amount of views and almost all of the views came from suggested video on mobile. One video is almost at two million views. I always start videos that I think can be popular with heavy adwords for the first 7 days (8,000 to 10,000 views). I think with a family channel it is hard to make any sense of it though. I think you have to focus on content that is popular, but nothing already done by other youtube channels. I appreciate any adsense money, but I make the videos for the purpose of family fun. Ideally, I just want to be able to get the free toys and promotional items that are sent to more popular youtube channels. Particularity the Moose Toy boxes. I have no desire to turn this into anything profitable.

 

[FamilyToyReview]

It sounds like you have another non family channel you are running the adwords on. What happens when you run the 7 to 8k adword?

Right now im running an ad on my last video. 2,000 views a day to philippines only. I had an idea from one of the superhero channels that maybe i could adword my way onto youtube trends of a foreign country. But i dont have the balls to spend too much on the idea. Today is the 2nd and last day ill be running the ad i think.

 

[Redterrors]

It sounds like you have another non family channel you are running the adwords on. What happens when you run the 7 to 8k adword?

Right now im running an ad on my last video. 2,000 views a day to philippines only. I had an idea from one of the superhero channels that maybe i could adword my way onto youtube trends of a foreign country. But i dont have the balls to spend too much on the idea. Today is the 2nd and last day ill be running the ad i think.

If I run an adword campaign and the average view duration is weak, it seems to kill the video for good. I have learned to stay away from allowing ads on search results as you will get a lot of spammers and negative people. I target specific videos from major channels only. If the average view duration is good, the video seems to take off. I have only had three videos exceed the 500,000 mark and they all had decent average watch times when I advertised. I have seen advice on here that says adwords hurts your channel. I can attest that all three of my videos that exceeded 500,000 views including one approaching two million views was started by adwords seeded with 10,000 views. I would love to show my channel, but I have a fear that showing the channel may result in someone deciding to click bomb or sign me up for bots. It seems like no matter what you write, someone will get offended.

 

[FamilyToyReview]

If I run an adword campaign and the average view duration is weak, it seems to kill the video for good. I have learned to stay away from allowing ads on search results as you will get a lot of spammers and negative people. I target specific videos from major channels only. If the average view duration is good, the video seems to take off. I have only had three videos exceed the 500,000 mark and they all had decent average watch times when I advertised. I have seen advice on here that says adwords hurts your channel. I can attest that all three of my videos that exceeded 500,000 views including one approaching two million views was started by adwords seeded with 10,000 views. I would love to show my channel, but I have a fear that showing the channel may result in someone deciding to click bomb or sign me up for bots. It seems like no matter what you write, someone will get offended.

I think I guessed the channel the other day because I had video on similar topic. And I think what also helped your videos was that they were on a topic with rising interest but less competition (until recently). Also you actually had a product to show before others did and I thought it was a pretty cool product with all the extra features. If that sounds about right, then congrats on your channel I think the growth is pretty impressive. Sometimes I'm a little cynical when I see random channels rise quickly, but not when the channel is doing something sincere and with real effort or creativity.

I haven't had as much experience with spammers and negative people yet. I've done search and placement for specific videos like dinotrux with moderate success. but no taking off. turns out dinotrux has a smaller audience. but i think i figured out how to use adwords without hurting retention. took a lot of trial and error to find the right exclusions to help with my ads. but i spent very little, like usually no more than 2,000 views a week on variety of videos so each video got fewer views.

these last couple days is the first time i turned up the spigot a little bit and did like 2,000 views a day for 2 days on my one hatch n heroes disney balut video and i think there's merit to what you're saying about seeding. ive stopped the ad this morning and im still getting a little traffic each hour. the other day i was getting no traffic during nonadword hours. but now its currently my #3 performing video with adwords turned off. and it landed on the first page of hatch n heroes search. so thats pretty interesting. now I need to wait 2 days for analytics, to see where this nonadword traffic is coming from! i don't think seeding will work for any video but I think you're right it does seem to help if done right.

 

[Redterrors]

I think I guessed the channel the other day because I had video on similar topic. And I think what also helped your videos was that they were on a topic with rising interest but less competition (until recently). Also you actually had a product to show before others did and I thought it was a pretty cool product with all the extra features. If that sounds about right, then congrats on your channel I think the growth is pretty impressive. Sometimes I'm a little cynical when I see random channels rise quickly, but not when the channel is doing something sincere and with real effort or creativity.

I haven't had as much experience with spammers and negative people yet. I've done search and placement for specific videos like dinotrux with moderate success. but no taking off. turns out dinotrux has a smaller audience. but i think i figured out how to use adwords without hurting retention. took a lot of trial and error to find the right exclusions to help with my ads. but i spent very little, like usually no more than 2,000 views a week on variety of videos so each video got fewer views.

these last couple days is the first time i turned up the spigot a little bit and did like 2,000 views a day for 2 days on my one hatch n heroes disney balut video and i think there's merit to what you're saying about seeding. ive stopped the ad this morning and im still getting a little traffic each hour. the other day i was getting no traffic during nonadword hours. but now its currently my #3 performing video with adwords turned off. and it landed on the first page of hatch n heroes search. so thats pretty interesting. now I need to wait 2 days for analytics, to see where this nonadword traffic is coming from! i don't think seeding will work for any video but I think you're right it does seem to help if done right.

Yeah I figured you guessed my channel when you messaged me last Friday. My channel says started in 2006, but that was just a video I posted for a contest that actually won me a $1,000. I converted that into a family channel in November 2015 so I am fairly new.

 

[Gamayun]

I tried adwords and got a lot of views, but they were such low retention I had to delete my video. How is your retention looking?

I have 2.44 min retention out of 10.00 min video in average