Paid Promotion - Has it Worked for You?

Maxemole

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Hey all - I've been testing out YouTube's paid promotion service via Google AdWords for my last few videos. Not sure I like it.

Yeah, it's great for an initial view boost but retention and other engagements tank and I'm simply not a fan of that. Have you guys had any positive experiences with paid promotion?
 
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It hasn't. In fact, when I took Tim Schmoyer's Video Labs masterclass, many of the students and some of his clients reporting it made things worse for the channel.
 
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Most people said that even though they got the boost during the actual promotion, all their vital analytic stats were down after the promotion and were very difficult to return to the pre-promotion normal.
 
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I think the trick is to keep promoting for a long time until you have a sizeable subscriber base. If you promote and get 5K subs, and then you stop, the sub base is still too small for constant growth. But if say, you promote until you got 50K or 100K, or 500K, and you stop promoting. That's enough subs to generate alot of likes and recommendations and leaving enough comments on your vids to generate organic growth. But I don't think Google Adwords is suitable for a YouTube channel to start with. If it was, everyone would be doing it.
 
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Maxemole

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I think the trick is to keep promoting for a long time until you have a sizeable subscriber base. If you promote and get 5K subs, and then you stop, the sub base is still too small for constant growth. But if say, you promote until you got 50K or 100K, or 500K, and you stop promoting. That's enough subs to generate alot of likes and recommendations and leaving enough comments on your vids to generate organic growth. But I don't think Google Adwords is suitable for a YouTube channel to start with. If it was, everyone would be doing it.
This makes sense, but it does seem to kill retention which is pretty bad for a channel. Maybe if you're trying to promote an actual product that long-term would work more. I'm not sure honestly.
 

Matthew Ferber

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Have you tried promoting on other platforms such as Instagram or Facebook? I haven't tried it before, but it seems more likely that retention would improve if you had someone's favorite influencer say a few good words instead of forcibly having your ads/videos placed infront of the user based on a algorithm. I'm assuming it would work like a shoutout and everybody seems to love those.