Earning $10K using YouTube Ads is simple. Understand these 5 important things and make your first $10k using YouTube Ads in 2023. In this video from my YouTube channel, I’ll also be explaining in detail the media buying math that goes behind running these ads. So, if you’re a beginner, don’t skip this YouTube ads tutorial for 2023.
So the really cool thing about running YouTube ads and getting started is you do not need to be a ninja to hit your first 10K from YouTube ads. Really what you need to know is you need to know the basics and you need to do them really well. And so that’s what we’re gonna cover in this video right here. One really important note here is that a lot of the work that goes into making your YouTube ads work is your funnel, your offer, and your sales process. And we’re not gonna cover that in this video right here, but that needs to be in place in order for you to make YouTube ads work. This isn’t like how to get started if you have nothing at all. This is how to get started if you have a really good funnel and a good offer. So what we’re gonna talk about in this video here is the five most important things that you need to know if you want to make your first 10K running YouTube ads.
So the number one thing that you can focus on that you can spend all of your time doing if you are just getting started with YouTube ads, is making really great ads. It seems really obvious, but like 80% of the success that you are going to have to hit this first 10K mark is going to be your ads. Really what you need is great ads and that is the one thing that you can focus on that is going to drive 80% of your results. Now, learning how to create great ads is a skill in itself and there are tons of people online that can show you how to create great ads. I will tell you some of the best things that I have ever done in order to make really good ads is to just go study really great ads. There are some really great resources out there.
Do searches online and then see what ads are showing up in your newsfeed. And then there’s a bunch of other databases and stuff you can look for online. But studying great ads is going to be one of the best things that you could do in order to make really good ads. And this is probably gonna be where you can spend the most of your time and get the best results. Or this could be where you could invest the most resources and money into hiring someone to help you do this because it’s going to make the biggest impact. Tom Brady has been someone that’s been super helpful for me in learning how to do this. There are a bunch of other really good people online who just focus on making YouTube ads. The really important thing to focus on next is your scripting. So how are you actually going to script out an ad that is going to get someone’s attention?
You wanna think about what you’re gonna say and you also wanna think about visually what that’s gonna look like to somebody. So what are the things you want to put on the screen in order to actually capture someone’s attention? Because again, those are the things that are gonna make the biggest impact. I really like simple talking head ads where you’re talking to a camera like this, you can record them really simply. The most important thing is whether are you able to grab someone’s attention and are you able to convey the right message to them in order to get them to watch your video and then click through to the next page. Someone is coming from trying to learn something online or your ad is going to pop up, how are you gonna grab their attention? And so you really need to go out of your way to think about like what are the first couple of seconds going to be on this ad?
So for example, a lot of people record ads sitting at a computer or sitting at their desk, which works, but you can definitely do more than that. So there was one really great ad that Tom Brady, the guy that I mentioned before, was running ads for a guitar trainer and they lit the guitar on fire. That was like the way that their ad started, which grabbed a lot of guitar players’ attention. Think about like how can you bring some energy. How can you bring something that is different than what everybody else is doing because you’re trying to grab somebody’s attention, they call it a pattern interrupt and you’re trying to figure out what can you do to get someone to stop and go like, whoa, I need to pay attention to this, right? There are other ways you can do it. You can do it with weird camera angles, you can do it with weird objects, but you’ve really gotta, like, once you get your script, think about how can you go out of your way to grab someone’s attention on YouTube.
And one of my pro tips would be to film a couple of those because what we typically tend to do and the way that we record ads with our clients is we’ll write one script, but then we will write five different intros or a number of different intros, which are really just the first 5 to 15 seconds of that ad. And then we will swap out and test which of those hooks that first five to 15 seconds are going to grab the most people’s attention. And then it’s the same ad after that. What we found is that is the most impactful thing that we can test in one sitting. We can get, you know, 5 to 10 ads out of one of our clients and then just find a really good editor. You can do a lot of magic with the post-production, the actual editing part.
So a simple talking head video like this where it’s just literally me sitting here talking to my camera in my living room can actually turn into a really cool ad. Once you get an editor that puts text on the screen and you have captions, you’ve got some music going on, you flip to a different B-roll image, and all of this different stuff, all of that can really make an ad come alive. The sound, just everything. You can do a lot with a simple talking head, just you know, it’s really focusing on life, studying great ads, finding some good people to learn from, getting a really good script, figuring out how you’re gonna grab people’s attention. What are your hooks, and what are your pattern reps? Batch record a few options and then find a good editor. If you can’t do this, this is where it’s worth spending your money.
You can go on platforms like Upwork or online, I’m sure you can find people in Facebook groups or copywriters and spend a couple of thousand dollars coming up with really good ads. And that is money well spent. Like if you’re trying to make 10K, spend two grand helping getting someone to help you run, make ads and then change your number from 10 to 12, it’s a good investment on your ads because again, this is going to be 80% of your success when you’re getting started. So the next really important thing to focus on here is what is the media buying math? If we are just focusing on our ads, we know that that’s the most important thing. The reality is that we’re spending money on an ad platform and we are going to get data back that’s going to tell us if we’re heading in the right direction.
So you want to know your math like you want to know what are the economics and what are the numbers that you need to hit in order to be successful. So these ones that I’ve got up here on the screen are like really the most important things you need to understand when it comes down to what are your costs. As you can see your ad cost is basically made up of what it cost to show your ads on the ad platform which is your CPM, they call the CPM your cost per 1000 impressions. And then what is your clicky rate? How many people are actually clicking like that? See your ad and actually click on it and that will give you your CPC, your cost per click. So the thing is you don’t really have a ton of control over your CPM.
That is not something that you can control as much because it’s an auction inside of an ad platform. And especially if you’re just getting started like there’s not a bunch of ninja things you can do to affect your CPM. There are a bunch of things you can do to affect your click rate. So how many people are actually going to watch your ad and then click on it? That is where you have the most impact. Again, this is why we’re talking about making the number of ads that you can really like test and figure out what’s gonna work best because that’s going to affect your click rate.
Those two numbers make up your cost on the ad platform and you have absolute control over one of them. The next one that you see over here somewhere is your CPA, your cost to acquire a customer. Well, what does it cost to acquire a customer? Well, that’s what you’re paying on the ad platform, which is your cost per click. And then your funnel conversion rates, depending on what type of funnel you’re running, maybe you’re running a high ticket funnel to a sales call, maybe you’re running a webinar, whatever that is, those different steps that someone has to take those conversion rates, you can math those out into a nice little spreadsheet and figure out if I’m paying $4 a click and I have all of these conversion rates, what is it gonna cost me to acquire a customer? That is a number you want to know and you want to know exactly like every client that we have.
We can tell them exactly to the penny how much they’re paying to acquire a customer every month because it’s just a super important number with media buying, that’s the number you want to know more than anything because that’s the number that is going to determine how far you can scale your campaigns in the long run. And so what you gotta see over here is that you can control your cost for click by making better apps and then you can control your funnel conversion rates by making your funnel convert better. Those are the two biggest things that you can focus on in order to make your ads work better. That’s just the math of it. So once you start to get all of this data coming back, once you’re spending money on ads, you just need to be able to see what are these metrics that are working, where is this not performing as well as it could?
And then you can literally pull out a spreadsheet and go, where is it gonna make the biggest impact if I make a change to one of these numbers? Now, some of these other really important numbers are here, so I’ve got CCPM here on the screen. So that’s your cost to show 1000 impressions CCPC. That is your cost per click CPL, that is your cost per lead, and you got your CPA. So what does it cost to get a customer, your AOV? So what is your average order value? If you are just selling one high-ticket product, it’s just your one high-ticket product, but a lot of people sell low-ticket products that might have an upsell, a down-sell, an order bump, whatever that is. Well, what’s the average order value of all the customers that go through your funnel? That’s gonna be really important to understand your LTV.
So what is your lifetime customer value? So if you have a high-ticket product they sell on the front end, but then you’ve got a backend mastermind, how do you know what is the lifetime value of your customers? That’s really valuable to know. And then what is your contribution margin? So this is really valuable to figure out because you want to know what are all the costs to acquire a customer. So not just ad spend, right? But like what about software? What are your software costs? Are you spending money on an agency, a media buyer that that guy that you hired to help you create the ads? What are all of your costs in order to run these kinds of ad campaigns? Figure out what’s your expense to cut required customers and then what’s left over. So how much of what you are getting every time you get a customer is actually going into your bank account so that you can use that on your business?
These are all extremely valuable numbers to know. So the really important number here is what is our cost to acquire a customer after all expenses are taken out and how much are we willing to spend to acquire a customer? Because a lot of people think about media buying like you know, Hey, I have a $5,000 budget this month. Let’s do the best we can with it. Really the best thing you can do is figure out, hey, I’m willing to spend $1,200 to acquire a customer. So as long as we’re getting customers for under $1,200, I’m happy to keep spending. And that will really change the way that you’re focusing on things because you might be able to spend $20,000 a month and continue to get customers for under $1,200. And so that’ll give you the opportunity to actually scale more. Rather than being like a fixed budget per month mindset, you’re really thinking in terms of like what is your cost to acquire a customer?
Now in the very beginning, you’re not gonna know exactly what this is, but you wanna start working this out. Once you start to get like data coming back and you’re running ads, if you’re really not a numbers person, you’re like, man, this is way too much. I don’t understand any of this. Find someone that can help you get this kind of tracking set up in place because there are plenty of people that can like set all of this up, build your really nice little dashboard, and then you just have to look at it. You don’t have to go actually like pull these numbers and set this stuff up. So again, if creatives are your thing and you can handle that, but you don’t wanna do the numbers, like hire someone to help you with that. If it’s vice versa, you’re good with the numbers, you want someone to handle the creatives, hire help if you need it.
Now the very next thing that you have to have in place before you can start running ads, which is not optional at all, is your tracking and analytics. So you cannot run ads if you cannot measure what is happening. And that is, there’s a shocking number of people who start to spend money on ads but they don’t actually set up any tracking or they don’t set up the right tracking and then they don’t actually know what’s working and that is literally wasted money. You’re not wasting money if you’re tracking and figuring out what’s going on. Google Analytics is another really valuable platform that you need to set up and Google platforms play really well together. So you just set Google Analytics up, connect that to your Google Ads account and then you’re good to go. And then the one thing that I always recommend for everybody is to set up a third-party tracking platform because after Ios 14 and all of these updates just add platforms don’t have the best tracking.
We always invest in a third-party platform to help us really track everything that’s going on so that we can track all of our numbers, see our LTV, see how our ads are really doing, see all of the touch points that are helping us drive sales and all of that stuff. So the platform we use right now is Hiro. I think it just does a really good job at this. So we recommend everybody set up on Hiro. And so once you have this stack, now you’ve basically got the basics, you’ve got your ads, you know your numbers and you’ve got your tracking set up. You can actually like measure what’s going on. These are really foundational to everything. This is the super important part. Don’t skip this if you want to actually make any money at all with YouTube ads.
All right, so now we’re getting into the targeting and how do you actually figure out who to target when you’re running YouTube ads? Again, when you’re just getting started, you can definitely hit 10 pay in sales by just understanding really like two targetings. So keyword targeting has been like our bread and butter to start campaigns. This is what are people searching for on YouTube that you actually want to show ads to those people. So keep in mind people are going to YouTube, they’re searching for educational searches, but they’re also searching for maybe podcasts around that, YouTube channels around that. As people are searching for that, and this is YouTube’s second largest search in the world, you can just run ads to people who are searching for those things. So this is the best place to get started. Now the next one here is custom intent.
So this one has also worked really well for us, especially when we’re trying to grow campaigns, which is basically just like taking those keywords but then expanding them out a little bit and saying like, okay, I wanna run ads to people who are searching for keywords and keywords like these that have the same intent around this on YouTube and Google. So again, broadening out the platforms a little bit, making the expanded a little bit. But what you can do is take those keywords that are working and then test them as a custom intent and you set those up in your audience’s section inside of the YouTube ad. But with these two placements alone, you can definitely find enough winning audiences to hit your first 10K in sales. The other mention that I would say is placements, an option depending on what niche you’re in.
There might be specific channels or videos that you just know like my audience watches this video and then what you could do is just go run ads on that one channel or even just that one video. We just have found those. Those are kind of hit-and-miss for us. Like we don’t really focus a lot of time and energy on them. We really focus more on what are the keywords that are in that title or on that channel and we just target those keywords. So keywords for us are like that. That’s why I say like I’ll give you two here on, I’ll give you three here on the screen, but really like the two focus ones that we would think about are like what are the keywords and what are the customer’s head audiences that we could use based around those keywords. Now after looking at a lot of accounts, a lot of people get really wrapped into like the how-to kinds of stuff come up with a list of all the things that they think their audience is searching for inside of YouTube, which is definitely valuable to do.
And one way you can come up with a lot of these ideas actually is just to go to YouTube, start typing in keywords and see what the auto-suggest is and that’ll give you a bunch of really good ideas. But don’t just think about the keywords that people might be searching for and like how to stuff. Also make sure you’re thinking about like again, brands, software, influencers, podcast, YouTube channels, and broad topics that someone might search around something. So like some of our clients do really well with really broad keywords like make money online, affiliate marketing, e-commerce, Shopify stores, that sort of stuff. So you can go through really broad topics on some of these things. Another one that works really well for us is industry publications. So thinking about what are the news sites, blog articles, uh, associations especially when we’re going for like professionals, what are the associations they might follow to stay up to date with industry news or what are some of the blogs they might read to stay up to date with what’s going on?
That sort of thing is really good targeting especially when you’re getting started with keywords. So at this point what you wanna do is just make a big list of keywords that you could go after. And having 30 or 50 keywords is a really good place to start actually because one of the things we find with YouTube, especially if you’re coming from like the world of Facebook advertising, we just find that there’s just more targeting. So now we are here at launch time and so if you’ve done everything I’ve told you to, hopefully, you’ve got three to five really good ads, maybe you made ’em yourself, maybe you got some help, whatever that is, you know your numbers generally you kind of have an understanding of how the numbers work so you can have some kind of system to start measuring what’s coming in. You got your tracking setup so you actually are going to get this data back.
You’re not just totally winging it with tracking and then you’ve got like 15, 20, 30 keywords that you could start targeting and going after. So the goal here is to figure out what ads are going to work with what audiences while avoiding all of the traps that are inside of YouTube to waste your money. So Google as a platform likes to optimize everything in order to make sure that you have the most delivery possible and they’re always gonna tell you what they suggest you do keep in mind that they’re not performance marketers trying to make you as much money as possible. They are an ad platform trying to make sure you have as much delivery as possible, which means you spend as much money as possible. And so that’s why we don’t take all of the things that Google says, we don’t do all the recommendations, we take what the reps say with a grain of salt because it’s not all about getting the best delivery, it’s about making the most money for small businesses like yours, right?
So one of the first traps that you wanna watch out for is responsive display ads. So this was an update that happened earlier this year with YouTube and so what they did was they made it so that now you can’t just run Instream videos where it is the video that shows up, you know, skippable video, but now that can also show at a bunch of different places. So there are all these other places that your ads can now show and what you wanna do is you want to use what is called universal placement exclusions in the account settings in order to remove YouTube from showing your ad on like kids’ channels, and music streaming channels. There is just one universal exclusion to removing mobile apps and there’s one universal exclusion to removing YouTube displays. And so what we wanna do is make sure that we remove those things that are gonna do is help make sure that you’re spending most of your money on Instream ads and not all of these other placements.
Because if you start running ads and you have a super cheap CPM and a super cheap cost per click and you’re not getting any conversions that what’s happening is you’re just getting all these impressions on these places that aren’t actually your YouTube instream. So that’s some of the biggest traps you wanna watch out for. Some of the other ones are like we always exclude smart TVs as a device, right? We wanna show it to people who can actually click on stuff. Imagine you’re running an ad and you’re like, hey, click on the link below this video and they’re watching it on their smart tv, they’re not gonna be able to click and go to your website, right? So that’s not very good. So we wanna remove that. We wanna watch out for YouTube’s expanded audiences. So the other one you wanna watch out for is optimized targeting.
So Google has this setting at the ad group level that’s just like, Hey, do you want us to optimize your targeting? Which is basically like, hey, do you wanna take all of that work that you’ve been doing on picking out your keywords and all that stuff, and then we’ll just use whatever targeting we think is best for you. And then that just expands out your targeting to a level that you don’t have any control over. So we definitely don’t wanna use that. The best thing that I have found to keep up with this kind of stuff is like get involved in a community of people who are running ads because this stuff changes often as they update platforms and all these things, but I think if you follow these general ones right over here on the screen, that will be a really good starting place for you.
Another thing to watch out for is making sure you have the right conversion set up for your campaign. So especially if you’ve got different products or you’ve run different campaigns, Google will kind of default to your account level conversions, which is basically whatever you have set up in the conversions level. But we wanna make sure we’re running campaigns, you always are optimizing for what are the specific conversions that you want that campaign to do. And so that’s another thing that you just wanna make sure that you have set up. So, once you avoid all of these traps, the real thing that you wanna be doing here is you’ve got everything set up correctly. You’re gonna be getting most of your impressions on instream placements and what you wanna do here is you want to set up one campaign with one targeting and then we’ll put like two or three ads in there, but it’ll be the same ad with different hooks.
So we’ve got different hooks that we’re testing out, but it’s the same core messaging. And so we’ve got one campaign, one ad group with one targeting, and then just a couple of ads. And what we wanna figure out is we wanna get an audience message like how is that connecting? Are we getting a match with our audience or message? So which one of these audiences is resonating best with which ad? And that’s gonna be the big focus for once you’ve launched your campaigns and once you’ve done everything that I’ve talked about here, really like this is the way to get to those first sales, you just wanna let your campaigns run. We find YouTube needs at least a couple of days to start optimizing and when you’re starting a brand new account and you have no conversions, it’s gonna take a few days for Google to learn what’s converting and who the right people are.
So when we launch a new campaign, we usually let it run for like at least three days. If you run 15 campaigns at once, you’ll quickly see, hey, these audiences are performing best while these ones are performing worse. These ones have the best view rate and clickthrough rate and these ones don’t. And what you can do is just start pausing the ones that aren’t working and then leave on the ones that are working best and then take whatever you paused and relaunch new audiences and you want to test those 20 or 30 keywords that we came up with in the beginning and figure out of all of those, what are the top 10 performers? And once you figure out your performers or you start to see sales, then you can just start slowly increasing the budget on those campaigns. And what you want to do is just keep increasing the budget on what’s working.
Once you’re getting calls booked, you’re getting sales, you’re getting driving ROI, increase the budget on those and then test those new audiences and make sure you test out all those ads that you created. So the metrics to watch while you’re doing this, right, like ROI matters most. If a campaign is getting sales and you’re making money, just leave it on. That’s doing great, you know, and then gradually increase that budget. If your clickthrough rate on your ads is below 1%, it’s probably not performing as well as it could be and you need to go figure out what to do there. If your view rate is less than 15 or 20%, you’re probably not hooking as many people as you could with your ad and you could go work on that first couple of seconds. Your view rate is low, work on your hooks, and your pattern interrupts.
If your clickthrough rate is low, work on your ad, like work on the conversion, work on your call to action, and figure out what you can do to get more people to engage. Because what you can do with your YouTube ad side is just keep working on better ads and keep launching those to the audiences that you see working while you’re continually trying to improve your funnel and make that work better too. So your big focus going forward from here on out is to make better ads, improve your funnel, and then become a better media buyer. Like really, if you just focus on better ads and a better funnel with everything else that I’ve told you, you can absolutely get to 10K. Again, once you’re trying to spend like $10,000 a day, then you’re getting into a lot of like media buying strategies and tactics and all this stuff that’s going to add a lot more complications to what you’re doing.
But to hit 10K in sales, I mean if you have a high-ticket offer that you’re selling for 3K, you could spend $2,000-$3,000 in ads and get to 10K. It might not be the first $2,000-$3,000 you spend, you might have to spend some money to kind of learn, but it’s like we’ve got clients that are spending 25K a month on ads and hitting 60-100K a month in sales because they’ve got, you know, high ticket offers and backend products and all that stuff. So the numbers just work out. So getting the 10K again with this model, assuming you have some kinda high ticket, offer a digital product, or like a good LTV on the backend, again, is not terribly hard to do. You just need to do everything that I told you. So that is it.
That is the whole breakdown of how as a beginner you can get started running YouTube ads and what are the five things you need to focus on really, in order to go from never running ads before to making your first 10K in sales using YouTube ads. Now running ads is awesome. Running ads is an amazing way to grow your business. Another really key part, once you have the ads side of things, is you wanna make sure you also have the organic side of things because you don’t want to just run ads in a vacuum. You wanna also make sure you have content marketing. And actually, one of the things that we’ve seen every time we run YouTube ads for every one of our clients is branded searches go up. People just start searching for you cause they see your ads and they’re like, Hey, who is this guy? Cause people are smart and that’s what they do. And so if you want to figure out the content strategy that I use that is making me tens of thousands of dollars a month with a very small following online, make sure that you click on this video right here because I will break down the exact content strategy I’m using right now. So click on that video and I’ll see you over there.
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