Some AdWords Questions & Feedback (Kids Channel)

[Kesler's Dad]

So I blasted off my first two AdWords campaigns yesterday and it's been a fun little experiment so far playing around with it. Seems like I've been getting a fair amount of extra views from it (ex. received about 550 total views according to analytics since I started the campaign and I've only paid for about 200).

Some questions for the seasoned vets...

1. Earned Views... I noticed that it's higher than the view count for one of my campaigns. How can it be more than the view count if, as they describe it, "multiple views from the same person will each be counted as a single earned view"? Would seem that the earned view count can never exceed the view count.

2. If you have two identical campaigns and you increase your daily target, will that increase the number of impressions AdWords gets you? I'm struggling to hit those daily targets. Maybe my bid is too low (0.02 to 0.03 per view).

3. Any metrics I should target? For example, $/sub, earned views/views, total views/paid views, ...etc...

4. Is there a delay on when new subs are measured? I got an email notification of a new sub but the total didn't change. Also noticed it shows more subs on my channel than on my analytics.

5. With respect to the cost per view that we pay. Are those "hard" set or would YouTube allow lower bids to get more impressions if those videos have good metrics as they related to retention/session watch time? I ask because almost none of the channels I picked gave me any impressions at 0.01 when I started. At 0.02 early on in the campaign, I barely got anything. Now at 2 cents, things are flying!

Things I've learned...

1. Need a stronger call to action (no subs yet - spoke too soon, just noticed 3 new subs. How about that?)
2. Need to reduce my intros to make up for the slight downward bump in retention at the beginning of the videos.
3. Tweak my content so that I can incorporate some trending topics.
4. The US market is expensive or AdWords doesn't want to show me there.

Anyhow, really greatful to all the guys like KidsCorner, ToysforKids, KiddieToyReview, and FamilyToyReview who've shared their AdWords tips over the last while on these forums. Did a lot of reading and it didn't feel that intimidating to jump in.

It's all going to be about tweaking now!

 

[KiddieToysReview]

1. multiple views refers to the same video - if they chain watch 5 videos that = 5 Earned Views, as opposed they re-watch the same video 5 times, which = 1 Earned View but sweet watch time.

2. If I run multiple videos in 1 campaign, 1 video usually has 70% or more impressions, usually up to 90% of the total impressions. I assume the system gives highest impressions to the ads that perform the best. You can put the same video into multiple campaigns to do A/B/C testing if you like.

3. I have found Earned Views and Subscribers are the most valuable stats for me. "Video played to" is interesting to monitor. Overall subscriber acquisition cost is a good target to aim for, generally $1-$2/sub. I have been known to put more $ into campaigns that have the lowest sub acquisition costs.

4. That's all over the shop. It changes depending where you look. Usually Subs as shown in Dashboard are delayed 6-24 hours for me. There's no way I could correlate subs obtained from Adwords with Dashboard.

5. I do strictly 1 cent/view. You'll get this with fairly loose targeting. The more you target, the more you have to pay. Say you have keywords, full demographics, target top channels, time and day target, etc, you'll probably be looking at 3-5 cent/view before anything gets shown. I pretty much trust the backend, it knows we're a kids channel, the videos are tagged for kids, it's more than likely they'll be shown on kids channels, and at 1c/view, what more could you want?

...

1. Absolutely - how do you get kids to subscribe?
2. I've pretty much dropped intros, seems to be the trend on some top, fast growing channels. Get straight to the point. Your intro is good though, it's part of the story.
3. Absolutely. Could not emphasise this enough.
4. Summer vacation - Pixar is eating up slots with Cars 3, all the summer kids toys, Disney vacations, etc. You may need to bid higher for US, add 25-50% bid adjustment from 1 cent campaigns in non-US markets.


Ps: Can I borrow one of your cameras??? You've got some serious quality shots there!

 

[ToysForKids]

5. I do strictly 1 cent/view. You'll get this with fairly loose targeting. The more you target, the more you have to pay. Say you have keywords, full demographics, target top channels, time and day target, etc, you'll probably be looking at 3-5 cent/view before anything gets shown. I pretty much trust the backend, it knows we're a kids channel, the videos are tagged for kids, it's more than likely they'll be shown on kids channels, and at 1c/view, what more could you want?

Can you give an example of such campaign where you trust the backend? What would the targeting criteria be?

Something like this perhaps:

22-35 years old
male / female
tablet / phone
parent
keyword: kids

?

 

[KiddieToysReview]

Can you give an example of such campaign where you trust the backend? What would the targeting criteria be?

Something like this perhaps:

22-35 years old
male / female
tablet / phone
parent
keyword: kids

?

For demographics, make sure the user is logged in, so there is greater chance of them subbing if they wish. So deselect all "unknown" except for salary.
Parents and non parents are fine - these days 8 year olds have their own Yt accounts (where they select their age as 13 I assume).
Common Keywords are kids, toys, kids toys, toys for girl, toys for boy, etc. Put in toys and select a few of the top auto suggests.
You can increase bids on tablets or phones if your analytics show more users are using those. I always increment in 25%.
The way I figure it, Google have been doing this for over 20 years, they know their audience pretty well.

If I want to target a channel and specific video, set the bid to 1 cent then increase up by 25% until it starts to hit. It may hit at $0.0175 or $0.0225. Either way it's cheaper than just choosing 2 cents or 3 cents. I still filter off "unknown" in demographics, as I want only logged in users to get served ads.

 

[Kesler's Dad]

1. multiple views refers to the same video - if they chain watch 5 videos that = 5 Earned Views, as opposed they re-watch the same video 5 times, which = 1 Earned View but sweet watch time.

2. If I run multiple videos in 1 campaign, 1 video usually has 70% or more impressions, usually up to 90% of the total impressions. I assume the system gives highest impressions to the ads that perform the best. You can put the same video into multiple campaigns to do A/B/C testing if you like.

3. I have found Earned Views and Subscribers are the most valuable stats for me. "Video played to" is interesting to monitor. Overall subscriber acquisition cost is a good target to aim for, generally $1-$2/sub. I have been known to put more $ into campaigns that have the lowest sub acquisition costs.

4. That's all over the shop. It changes depending where you look. Usually Subs as shown in Dashboard are delayed 6-24 hours for me. There's no way I could correlate subs obtained from Adwords with Dashboard.

5. I do strictly 1 cent/view. You'll get this with fairly loose targeting. The more you target, the more you have to pay. Say you have keywords, full demographics, target top channels, time and day target, etc, you'll probably be looking at 3-5 cent/view before anything gets shown. I pretty much trust the backend, it knows we're a kids channel, the videos are tagged for kids, it's more than likely they'll be shown on kids channels, and at 1c/view, what more could you want?

...

1. Absolutely - how do you get kids to subscribe?
2. I've pretty much dropped intros, seems to be the trend on some top, fast growing channels. Get straight to the point. Your intro is good though, it's part of the story.
3. Absolutely. Could not emphasise this enough.
4. Summer vacation - Pixar is eating up slots with Cars 3, all the summer kids toys, Disney vacations, etc. You may need to bid higher for US, add 25-50% bid adjustment from 1 cent campaigns in non-US markets.


Ps: Can I borrow one of your cameras??? You've got some serious quality shots there!

Thanks for the awesome feedback. Since we started our campaign, we've got an earned view figure of about 100% and gained about 30 subscribers at about $2/sub so not bad to start off but there's definitely room for improvement.

I'm actually surprised at how many suggested non-paid views we received from our campaign. They're about 125% of paid views (so I guess that's the earned views figure + repeated watches). I've got two $0.02 campaigns going and one $0.01 one going. It's interesting how much bang for your buck you get for the $0.01 campaigns! I didn't know you could go between $0.01 and $0.02. Again, such a great tip, thanks!

Any way to tell what campaign subscribers are coming from? I checked out the analytics for each ad and it shows 0 subscribers. Would be an obviously good metric to have to determine which campaign is pulling in the subs.

For the price of going out to dinner one night though, you can really make a good push with AdWords that gives you a nice return.

So I appear to have doubled up on my views since I started AdWords and now crossed that 10,000 view threshold for AdSense to kick in. Does that 10,000 have to be organic views? Or is it just 10,000 cumulative views from anywhere and its now queued for review to have AdSense kick in?

Anyhow, time to tweak and see how the market reacts! Game on! To the pursuit of 100 subs and beyond!

If you're ever in Western Canada and want to collab, the RED cameras will be waiting for you, heh heh.

 

[Derrick Toys]

Thanks for the awesome feedback. Since we started our campaign, we've got an earned view figure of about 100% and gained about 30 subscribers at about $2/sub so not bad to start off but there's definitely room for improvement.

I'm actually surprised at how many suggested non-paid views we received from our campaign. They're about 125% of paid views (so I guess that's the earned views figure + repeated watches). I've got two $0.02 campaigns going and one $0.01 one going. It's interesting how much bang for your buck you get for the $0.01 campaigns! I didn't know you could go between $0.01 and $0.02. Again, such a great tip, thanks!

Any way to tell what campaign subscribers are coming from? I checked out the analytics for each ad and it shows 0 subscribers. Would be an obviously good metric to have to determine which campaign is pulling in the subs.

For the price of going out to dinner one night though, you can really make a good push with AdWords that gives you a nice return.

So I appear to have doubled up on my views since I started AdWords and now crossed that 10,000 view threshold for AdSense to kick in. Does that 10,000 have to be organic views? Or is it just 10,000 cumulative views from anywhere and its now queued for review to have AdSense kick in?

Anyhow, time to tweak and see how the market reacts! Game on! To the pursuit of 100 subs and beyond!

If you're ever in Western Canada and want to collab, the RED cameras will be waiting for you, heh heh.

I'm looking to start an adwords campaign. Can you share your tips for a newbie?

 

[Kesler's Dad]

I'm looking to start an adwords campaign. Can you share your tips for a newbie?

Remember that I'm completely new at this so take any advice I give with a grain of salt. Here are my Cole's Notes based on hours of initial research thanks to folks like KiddieToysReview who've posted some fantastic stuff on this forum...

1. I did a Video Discovery ad (the one that shows up on the side, not the overlay on the video one). Typically I title my videos something like "Toddlers at a Table Drinking Milkshakes | The Ultimate Blueberry Milkshake Mess" but for the ad, I titled it "Mega Purple Smoothie Mess and Mustaches - Watch these cousins make the most epic mess while twin sister laughs" since it seems consistent with the videos that my audience is watching.

2. My max CPV is $0.02. I tried $0.01 and while I did get some impressions, they came nowhere near the daily budget I set for my campaign. I tried between $0.01 and $0.02 like KiddieToysReview recommended but it doesn't seem to allow me to do that. Maybe because I'm from Canada? Who knows.

3. I'm not using any keywords in my AdWords campaigns. I'm just using the Placement function and targeting as many popular kids/family lifestyles channels as I can that have content that is consistent to some degree with what I'm producing. Earlier when I said that I wasn't getting many hits on $0.01, I'm sure I can get better results by tweaking my placements and geographical targets.

4. As mentioned by KiddieToysReview, I unchecked "unknown" for the age, sex, and parent status to filter out people who aren't signed in to their YouTube accounts. Left the "unknown" for income checked though.

5. For countries, I picked about a dozen or more. Certain countries like Ireland, Mexico, UK,...etc... seem to get more exposure to my ad (probably because of my low CPV - which explains why no or very little exposure to the US).

6. I've been getting a lot of impressions from RTR and his family channel so I've tweaked my thumbnails accordingly to try improve my view rate.

7. The two metrics I've been following closely are earned views and new subscribers. I've spent $80 so far in just under a week on a few different campaigns and gotten 45 new subscribers (started with 40 - now at 85) and about 5,000 non-paid views.

Funny thing, got a huge surge last night of unpaid views (about 500) and a bump in subs (maybe 4 or 5) over the course of a few minutes so I suspect YouTube put me on an organic suggested video slot for a popular channel. Not sure which one and I can't seem to be able to figure it out with the metrics from Analytics but it sure was fun to see that graph spike.

I started another thread a month or two back asking when to start an AdWords campaign (got great responses, you should search for it) and decided I'd wait until about 30 videos to get a few campaigns going. I had 29 when I jumped in.

To be honest, I'm fairly happy with the results. I'm ending the campaigns when I hit 100 subs (likely over the next few days if things remain consistent). Then I'll evaluate all the results, tweak, and setup test campaigns to further test different settings.