YouTube Ads Launch Strategy For 2022

Let’s set up your YouTube ads launch strategy for 2022! 🚀

No matter if you’re just getting started running ads or you are running ads on Facebook and you want to transition over to YouTube, I’ve got you covered in this video I posted on my YouTube Channel.

I’m going to walk you through the entire checklist we are using for our clients from the best campaign structures, to setting up your campaigns, scripting, tracking, optimizing your ads, and more.

Video Transcript

Yo, how is it going? So in this video, what we are going to talk about is your YouTube ads launch strategy for 2022. So if you are trying to get up and running on YouTube, maybe you’re just getting started running ads. Maybe you are running ads on Facebook and you wanna be transitioning over to YouTube. This is something we’ve been helping my clients with at the agency is helping them take with their budget, that they’re running on Facebook and get things up and running on YouTube. And so what I wanna walk you through is the entire checklist. I pretty much just wrote out everything that we are doing for our clients from start to finish from strategy, set up all of that stuff. I’m gonna walk you through all of that in this video right here. And then I’m also gonna give you some resources to show you how to actually do some of these technical things.

If you want to know, like, what is the campaign structure people are using? How do you actually set up these campaigns? How do you set up tracking? How do you do the strategy? How do you optimize your campaigns? All of that is going to be covered in this video right here. And then also what we’re gonna talk about, towards the end of this is I’m gonna show you how you can get access to some of my favorite YouTube ads. So if you are trying to figure out how to come up with YouTube ads, your, I will show you exactly where I get some of my best ideas for the ads that we’re creating for our clients. So all of that in this video, let’s dive into it right now. Okay. So what I’ve got pulled up on the screen over here somewhere is the overall strategy that we are using for our clients.

And I’m gonna walk you through every single one of these steps, because they’re all very, I, but really at the very beginning here, we’re looking at how is the offer and the funnel set up. This is really important because we’ve definitely seen that. You’ve gotta make sure that you are set up in the right way for success with YouTube ads. If you don’t have the right offer, the right type of funnel, you’re just not gonna be successful. Then we’re gonna talk about scripting. So how do you actually script your ads? How do you do it in a way that’s efficient? So you get a lot of good ideas on the table, have good options. We’re talking about how to record your videos, how to edit your videos, how to figure out what audiences you want to target doing research. How do you actually set up your campaigns, setting up tracking, launching your first ad campaigns, and then how do you optimize and grow your campaigns? What are the metrics you need to know? What are the processes you need to have all of that stuff.

In the very beginning here, one of the first things that we do with our clients is really take a deep dive into their offer and their funnel and see how things are set up, because it is really important that your offer is set up well, your funnel is set up well, and you have it set up for paid ads. Actually, one of the big mistakes we’ve seen, a lot of people make with paid advertising is they’re trying to take a funnel that was maybe built for social media. Maybe it’s something for organic, organic traffic. And then they’re trying to just start running ads to that. So we’ve seen people run ads to a VSL without a landing page. We’ve seen people have funnels with no email marketing, follow up all of that stuff, because again, it was just built for, for a different type of audience.

And when you’re running ads to cold traffic, it is very important that you build a funnel that is going to convert cold traffic. And so what we’re looking for in the very beginning is making sure that the big idea is really compelling. Your mechanism is clear and your funnel isn’t leaking anywhere. So meaning if you are trying to move people through a sequential process to buy, but that person is a cold traffic person. They have no idea who you are. They’re just seeing an ad on YouTube. You’ve just got their attention for a few seconds before they leave. How do we make sure we can make the best impression right out the gate, especially if we get them to click over on your ad. So we’ll do an analog assist and review their landing pages, or what are the pages that they wanna be driving traffic to really the MVP, like what you must have going into this is you’ve gotta have a landing page where you can capture people’s contact information.

You’ve gotta have some kind of sales mechanism. So whether that is a webinar or a via cell, something that you can do to deliver your marketing and sales message and get someone to that important action that you need to, if you are sending people straight to an order form ’em so maybe you’re running a webinar. So then you’ve gotta have an order form. So people will check out. So people actually buy your stuff. If you’re running sales calls, you’ve gotta have a way for people to apply and actually get on the phone with a sales rep and then like a thank you page and email follow up. So all of the people who don’t convert, making sure that you can follow up with them. That’s pretty standard for, for an MVP. If you don’t have those things, you’ve gotta get those set up. Really the only three types of funnels that we’ve seen work when it comes to paid ads are sales calls funnels.

So in here you’re running ads to a landing page. They’ve got like a VSR or webinar, and then you’re getting people to book a call. This is usually for high ticket stuff. So maybe anything over like two or $3,000, you’re getting someone on the phone to sell mid range would be like an evergreen webinar funnel. So if you’re selling for something for like 500 to 2000 bucks, people are still running evergreen webinars. So people sign up for a webinar, they watch the webinar and at the end, they just go to an order form and buy. They don’t have to talk to anybody. There’s just a sales page that they can check out. The last one would be like low ticket self-liquidating offers. So these are basically when you’re running, people’s straight to a sales page. Maybe it has a VSL right on the page. Maybe it’s just a sales page.

You’re running people straight to an offer. That’s probably priced under a hundred bucks, probably under 50 bucks. And that’s when you’ve got, you know, your books, your mini courses, anything that you’re selling at a low ticket. And it’s probably got, you know, a few order bumps, a few upsells to maximize that AOV. But really these are the only three types of funnels. So, uh, I have not seen, or we have not seen anybody successfully. I haven’t personally success ran any trip wires on YouTube. So I wouldn’t be trying to run any of those type, not doing product launches because you definitely wanna have time to optimize your funnels and run them over time. And, um, things that it’s just gonna take a long time to monetize. So just like general list building without really having any kind of monetary way to make your money back in the back end so that I haven’t seen that working. So those are basically a kind of things that we wanna look for when we’re looking for a really good offer that we can run with YouTube

Next, the biggest lever that you have to be successful with your YouTube ads is your ads itself. So you’ve gotta make sure you’ve got really great ads. So this is where we wanna spend a lot of time coming up with what are the hooks? What are the messaging? How, how are we going to create an ad that is really compelling? It is going to get someone to watch the ad click over and then take the action that we want on the next page. And you can definitely start these simple. So you don’t need to go into a studio. You don’t need to hire a videographer to come shoot this. You can do these talking head style with your phone. You could do these just with like a microphone. We definitely see people run like VSL style ads. So it’s just a voiceover with B roll or text on the screen, or even slide shares.

Those have worked. So no problem with like not starting with really high quality. It’s really not as important how you are it as what you are saying, what is the messaging that you’re using? That is the most important thing that we wanna start with. So what you can do is start by looking at what other people are doing, what other ads inspire you, what other people are doing in your space. Start a swipe file. I’ve gotta add that. I video that’ll link up here somewhere, but how you can start a swipe file for your own YouTube ads that you like. And, and if you, when you see YouTube ads, you can save them. I’ve also got this resource here, video towel. So this is the most complete YouTube ads library that I’ve found it’s actually free. So you can just go to their website and sign up and you can search for all the ads that people have run, get estimates on how many views it’s probably had.

So you can make an assumption on how long it’s been running. Usually people don’t run ads for a really long time if they’re not making money. So this is a good way to do some research and then just keep your own swipe file. You’re gonna be constantly coming with a lot of ideas. So it’s a really good idea to start doing research and then keep like a living doc of all of the ads that you like. So you can go back to that when you’re trying to come up with ads, but this is the biggest lever to success. So when you are coming up with these ideas, you definitely want to see how you can come up with lots of hooks and lots of engaging body content. So you can put into the middle, uh, and then good CTAs by CTAs. I mean, calls to action.

So when you’re actually sitting down to record these videos, which you can do is batch record a bunch of videos. So what we’ve done is record a bunch of hooks in the beginning. So write like five or 10 hooks hooks being like, what are the five to fix 15 seconds of your video? What are you gonna do to capture someone’s attention, record a bunch of those, and then record a few bodies. So then record what comes next. After that first 10 to 15 seconds, write three or four of those. And then what you’ve got is a bunch of combination of ads. If you do 10 different hooks and three different bodies, now you’ve got 30 ads. So you can record it that way, bring your best energy, right? If you’re gonna be on camera, make sure you’re in a good mood. Make sure you’re feeling like you’re in a place where you can bring high energy to the camera because that’s probably what’s gonna work best for your videos.

Try to get some movement in your videos. So don’t just sit in the exact same spot, move around. Maybe you can change locations a few times. I’ll even show you some examples of ads here in a little bit, and you’ll see that they’re moving around. They’re not shooting. ’em all in the same place. There’s a lot of movement going on. So what you can do is get your scripts, sit down, record a few hooks here, record a few hooks there, record one body here, record one body there. If you’re at your house, you can just move around. If you’re in a studio, you can move around. If you’re outside, you can walk around. The really important thing to think about with these videos is Audi audio quality is critical. So, so you can definitely record YouTube ads when you’re getting started with your, if it’s not the most crystal clear picture, people will deal with that. But audio quality is critical. You can’t have wind in your audio. You can’t have something that sounds like it’s far away. Really good. Audio is essential. And then, you know, you could use your smartphone or whatever camera you have to shoot the video

Where you can really make some magic happen is with the post production. And so let’s look at a YouTube ad that I think is done really well and let’s watch it even without the sound on. So you can see a lot of the editing and stuff that they’re using. And then what we’ll do is come back here, kind of break down how they did it.

You know what? Everyone is sick of. The hard charging pit bull salesman who just wants to close, close, close regards. If the prospect is interested or not, your people really want an N 50 base salesperson who understands the needs of their prospect. And doesn’t use old school sleazy sales tactics. Give me 30 seconds and I’ll show you how to be the salesperson. People actually want to listen to follow me. Hey, my name is Jordan Bell. Okay.

So that was just the first 35 seconds of the, this ad. And what you can see they did really well is they made the video move a lot. There were texts popping up and sound effects and switching to B-roll and moving around and using effects to really engage you. So even if you went back and watched that without sound and I’ll encourage you, like go back and watch that even without the sound and you’ll know exactly what’s going on in the ad, it’ll really feel engaging and move. And then you’ll even notice they moved spaces. So just like they moved locations. So just like we talked about, uh, in how you can record, they film this outside and then they moved inside. So there was a lot of movement going on. They had text popping up on the screen. And one other thing that I wanna point out that pretty much every really good YouTube a does is they have a countdown timer here at the end.

So you can see here this last 10 seconds is just a screen pop up, giving people the opportunity to actually click on the call to action. And, and I would even suggest having like an actual countdown timer up here, that’s counting down from 10 cuz we’ve seen that work really well. And we’ve seen that really bump up our, uh, clickthrough rates when we just add that final countdown timer screen at the, in the back of our ads. So what you can do is look at other ads that you think have done really well. Go check out that swipe file that I shared with you and, and I’ll even share with you how to get access to my swipe file and go look at what they’re doing really well. And you can share that with your video editor, you can make some ideas, but really figuring out how you can use post production to make your ads really engaging, uh, is a great way to improve the quality of your ads before you even get into launching ads on the ad platform.

The next thing we need to do to get everything ready is just find a bunch of audiences. And in order to get started with your YouTube ad campaigns, you really only need a bunch of really good keywords. So what I mean by that is there’s a few targetings that are greatly this to start with YouTube ads, you’ve got placements, which is basically like running ads on other channels or other videos. You’ve got keywords. So targeting people based on the keywords they’ve been searching for on YouTube. And then you’ve got custom intent, which if you’re coming from like Facebook, it’s kind of like the lookalike audiences of keywords. You can give Google a collection of keywords or a single keyword, and it will find people who have searched for that keyword and keywords kind of like that. And so this is where we’ve been able to get started with campaigns really easily is using placements, keywords, and custom intent.

The thing is pretty much all of these are gonna be based on words that you find that your audience is probably searching on YouTube. So you can actually start for free just by doing a bunch of research on YouTube. What you can do is just go to YouTube and go to Google and start Googling. Like you’re your prospects start looking for the keywords that they would look in order to solve some of the problems they have or learn, or keep up with industry stuff, publications, and all that stuff. And what you can see is, is what are the suggested keywords that pop up? What are the channels that start to pop up? What are the videos that start to pop up? And you can start to make a list of those and just do a bunch of research and kind of go down the rabbit hole as you were your prospect and keep track of all this stuff that keeps showing up.

There are some tools you can use to help you do this. So tube sift is a really good option. If you wanna spend a little bit of money where you can look for placements, channels, keywords, and other things you can use for targeting, you don’t have to do that to get started. You can definitely do this for free just with YouTube and Google. And what you can look for is like educational resources, news sites, industry publications, blogs, associations, software tools, tutorials competitors. We found a bunch of keywords by little looking for a particular industry. So we started Google searching. What are the best publications in this industry? We got a list of 50 and that became some of our best keywords for one of our clients. So you can really just do a bunch of research and find 50 or a hundred keywords that you might wanna start with. Some can be really broad. Some can be really specific because throughout the next couple of months, you’ll be able to test a lot of these and figure out what works and what doesn’t for your campaigns.

The next step, if you don’t already have an account is just go to ads.google.com. And what you can do is set up an account for free. It’s gonna ask you to add a credit card at probably verify your account, set up a few of the basics. You’ll also need to come here into the up and link accounts. So you’ll wanna link your Google analytics and your YouTube account so that it’s all connected. And you can use these tools in order to optimize your campaigns over time. Once you’ve got all that done, you also need to make sure you come in here and set up your conversion. So conversions is gonna be how you actually let Google ads using their tracking pixel know what convers actions are taking place. Are they actually your campaigns actually converting? And what are they optimized for you? Come here and do that under measurement conversions.

The way that we always do this is with Google tag manager. But because this is a little bit more of a technical detail thing, what I’m gonna do is link up another video right up here in the corner where I’m gonna walk you through how to do that. We’ll do that another video, cuz it’s a little technical and I don’t want to get too much into that right in this one. But again, that resource will be right here also, probably in a description and also in this launch checklist that I’m gonna give you right here at the end of this video. So all of that, check it out. But here you need to make sure you come and set up your conversion tracking cuz you can’t run ads without conversion tracking. And then one really important thing you need to do is come here to placement exclusions list because ever since the new YouTube update where they’re now forcing you to run display, responsive display YouTube ads, which means it’s not just running instream before videos, but it’s also running on the display network. The way that most of us are dealing with it is just by having massive exclusion lists to block out any kind of mobile traffic app traffic junk traffic. So we have a list of about 5,000 different placements that we will neg out right at the very beginning of a campaign that is junk traffics kids channels on YouTube apps, mobile traffic, bad websites, all of this stuff. So you definitely use exclusion lists to manage where your ads are gonna be shown.

Then the next thing we gotta do is actually just upload your ads to YouTube. So you can upload your videos. The important thing here again, after this update is you’ve gotta make sure that your ads now have thumbnails titles and descriptions because before when people just so all your ads in stream, they would never see those things. So it wasn’t an issue. But now because of these new responsive display placements, people could end up actually watching your video on YouTube if they came from like a display network placement. And so having a good thumbnail, having a good title and a link back to your landing page that you actually wanna drive traffic to is really important. So you can just upload your files here. You wanna make sure you have a good title, a good description with the link to your landing page and upload a thumbnail here.

At this point, we have already done a lot, but a lot of this really important work is what is going to get you to be successful with YouTube ads, clicking buttons on the ad platform. Isn’t as important as all of this stuff that we have already talked about. And so you’ve got your funnel set up, you’ve got really good ads. You’ve got a bunch of options. You’ve edited them. So they’re actually really good and compelling and engaging. Now what we can do is actually go set up our ad campaigns. So the basic ad structure that we have found works well for us is really just one campaign. One ad set one to four ads. Well we’re getting started, we’ll put three or four ads in an ad set, but biggest thing we wanna figure out is the audience message match. So is this message and is this creative actually resonating with this audience?

That’s the only thing we care about at this stage. And so what we try to do is reduce as much of the noise as possible and just test one audience with a few creatives to figure out what works best with that. So what you can do is come here to Google ads, create a new campaign and we’re gonna set up one shell campaign. So we are gonna set up one campaign where we’re gonna do all of our settings, make sure we have our placement exclusions, the right conversion actions set up our ads, all of that stuff. And then what we’ll do is just copy that campaign over and over again, change out the targeting. And then what we’re sure is we’re keeping everything consistent. The only thing that that we’re changing out is the audience. And we’re trying to figure out what audience is, could potentially resonate best with the ads that we have created already doing a lot of the work on the creative side, cuz again, that’s the most important lever that we have and we’re gonna figure out if any of these come within KPI or close to KPI based on the metrics that we’re looking for in order to be profitable.

We set these campaigns up for sales. We wanna make sure that any of the conversion goals that are actually in our funnel are actually set up here. So if you are running a sales call funnel, that would be leads that would be booking calls. And that would actually be sales. If you’re running a webinar funnel, that would be people becoming leads and people actually. So you don’t wanna use account wide settings. You don’t wanna let any conversion optimization event that’s happening inside of the account. Count for this campaign. What you wanna do is make sure that everything that’s included in this funnel is set up in this campaign for the campaign type we’re gonna do video. We wanna drive conversions, having good naming conventions is super important inside any good account. So anyone can jump in and, and see and know what’s going on. We’ll use a naming convention, kind of like this. We wanna know what’s the campaign type. What is the optimization setup? What’s the targeting type. Uh, what are we targeting? When did we launch it? The bid strategy. When we’re starting out max conversions, the daily budget, we can set that for 10 bucks. Again, this is just gonna be a shell. We’re not actually gonna launch this campaign. Where do we want to target? What is our language standard inventory?

We do come in here and remove embedded YouTube videos and live streaming. We will want to come through here and add site links to these YouTube ads because in any of the different placements, if there’s any opportunity that we could actually get a little bit of better clickthrough rate, it’s definitely worth just having them in here. The targeting I’m gonna leave empty for now is again, this is just our shell. So what we’re gonna do is set up all the settings in this and then we can copy and paste this campaign out later. And now what we’re gonna do is add in a add to this campaign. So any ads that we wanna run, we’d be adding them in here. What we need is the link to the YouTube video. That’s attached to the channel that we’re gonna be running it from. And then you can see what we have in here is we need a display lay URL, a call to action, a headline, a long headline in a description.

This is because now with the new display placements, this is how it’s gonna show up on the different places that it can show up online. So no longer is just showing up on YouTube. Now there’s an option for display. What we’ll do in a lot of our starting campaigns is remove any kind of mobile traffic so that we’re just doing desktop. We try to push as much as we can to instream, but the reality is you can get some display placements. Now with these responsive video ads. So setting your ad up in a way that has the best per chance for getting engagement on all the platforms, definitely the best idea in the end, your ad, when you’re setting it up will look something like this. I actually need to go to the channel and switch out to put an actual thumbnail here because on a display play, it would look like this and that’s kind of ugly, but I didn’t do that yet.

But what you can do is you can do that on the channel. Everything else is right here. So again, what you’ve gotta have now is you need your URL. You can upload it as unlisted, so it doesn’t have to be public on your channel, but it doesn’t have to be listed on your channel, your URL, your call to action, your display URL, your headline, short headline, long description, and an ad name again, name the conventions being really important. So we basically use the number of the ads. So how many ads we have in account 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, wherever we’re at the hook, the headline, the CTA. Once you’ve created all your ads, you’ve got everything set up. Then you just come here and hit create campaign that will get your ad campaigns up and live and in approval. I’m gonna pause this right now because now what we go wanted to do.

If we were scaling this campaign out, we can just make a copy of this control C control V, paste it back into the account and then jump in and change any of the audience targeting and setting. And basically what we’re gonna do is just do that a bunch of times to roll out any of the initial tests that we wanna run. So we’ll start with four or five campaigns, the budget between like 10 to $25, depending on where we’re at with the campaign, how confident we are in the, the funnel and the ads and what kind of budget sensitivity we have to get started here is actually a checklist kind of everything I just ran through. And so I will actually include this down below so you can get access to this, but this is basically the checklist that we just ran through together.

Once you have done all of that, congratulations, you’ve done all of the hard work in actually coming up with the ads. Again, the ads are the most important part doing the audience research setting, getting started. And you’re just starting to test your ads with a few different audiences, looking at all the keywords you came up with and just using one campaign with one ad set and a few ads and just duplicating and launching at 10 to $25 each letting it run for a few days, getting the data back, seeing if your ads are resonating with people, see if your funnel’s converting, see if you’re generating leads and hopefully all already starting to generate some sales to go forward from here while you’re optimizing again, we’re just looking for this proof of concept with our core audiences, our creatives, or like our actual ads themselves on our funnel.

And so once we have that, meaning we’re getting leads. Hopefully we’re having good conversations. We’re running a sales call funnel, and hopefully we’re getting sales, especially if we’re running well on any funnel, you know, we’re actually generating leads. Once we have that proof of concept, then what we wanna be doing is testing our creatives, optimizing our landing pages, filling any gaps with retargeting so we can be running retargeting on Google. We can also be running retargeting on Facebook, on Instagram, making sure that we’re moving people through that funnel and then testing new audiences. So we wanna be improving our ads, improving our landing pages and improving our audiences as we go forward. The metrics that we’re watching while we’re doing this, obviously ROI matters most. If a campaign is generating money, that’s what we wanna be doing. But while we’re checking to see if we’re moving in that right direction for the ads, looking at a view rate of like 20%.

So we want at least 20% of the people viewing our ad. We want, at least the 2% clickthrough rate. 1% would be like a good benchmark. If you’re not getting more than one, maybe we’ve got an issue with the audience in the message match. Hopefully we’re getting towards a 2% clickthrough rate. And again, we wanna be making sure that’s not happening on the display placements, but that’s actually what we’re getting on YouTube landing page conversion rate baseline 10%. If we’re not doing 10%, we’re doing something wrong. If we’re running for like a webinar or a sales call funnel, something where people have to opt in. So hopefully what we’re doing is testing different headlines, different copy, different ways that we can improve our conversion rate. And then if we’re actually trying to generate sales calls. So if we’re running a sales call funnel, at least 5% of those leads are booking a call with our sales team, hopefully more.

And hopefully we’ve got some follow up sequences to make sure those people are booking calls as you’re going forward. Since you just have one audience and a few ads per campaign, if a campaign is generating sales, great, keep it on. If a campaign is not profitable, meaning you’ve been running it for a while, you’ve got a super or low clickthrough rate, a super high CPC. You’re not getting leads. You’re not getting sales, kill it, launch a new audience. We have definitely seen that. We have ran through a lot of different A’s ideas before we’ve really found what works. So one of our most recent campaigns that we launched, I think we launched probably about 35 different campaigns in the first month. And out of all of those, four of them were winners, cuz we were just trying a bunch of different keywords. We were taking those keywords and putting them into custom intent and we were also testing different placements.

And what ended up being the winner was a few keywords and a few custom intent audiences. But once you’ve got a few winning audiences, now you can start to scale up the budget and you’re in a spot where you’re starting to move forward with your campaigns. So that is it. You guys, that is the entire, your plan that you can use to start launching ads on YouTube. That’s everything you need to do from checking out your offer, making sure your funnel is right, actually making the ads, which is again the most important part, setting up the account, setting up everything inside of the campaigns and what you can start doing to optimize your campaigns. If you make it that far, you are in a really good spot. And at that point you’re really just optimizing the funnel, the customer experience and the ads on the ad platform in order to make your campaigns profitable and even more profitable as you scale.

So I hope you found this really helpful and I hope this gave you a really good insight of the way that you should be approaching your ad campaigns. You definitely don’t want to just jump into the ad platform and set up any random ads and a few random audiences and that you find success. This is the actual process that you can use. This is actually what we’re using at my agency in order to help our clients get up and running on YouTube. What I will do with this checklist is link it down below this video. So down in the description, I will have this down there and in there I will link any other resources that I add that could help you get this done. I will also add in there YouTube ads that I have down. So my swipe file will be at the bottom of that document right down there at the bottom.