K-Pop Daisuki - Creating an Youtube Ads campaign for a Music Video
Many people wonder: Who can create an Advertisement (ad) campaign on Youtube with a given Music Video?
The answer is simple: Anyone.
Youtube really doesn't care who pays for it. You, your Fansub or your Company can pick any Youtube video and promote it as ads. You can either promote it for views (Awareness, which is what most Music Video Ad-campaigns aim for), or some other goal, like click-thru to get to a website or product (although even when using awareness campaigns, you still need to set where clicking the ad will lead to, in which case you can just set for the video itself)
On this article, a step-by-step on how to create an Youtube Ad-campaign for any video. We will, obviously, use a Kpop Music Video with appropriate settings as an example. All screenshots are on how Google Ads looks as of April 2024 and will certainly change with time, but the general idea remains the same.
1. Access Google Ads
All you need is a Google account, you probably have one anyway. If not, go ahead and create one since its free. Google ads is at ads.google.com
The Google Ads front page (as of Apr 2024) looks likes this:
2. Set up some budget
You should add some budget to your Google Ads account before creating a campaign, this is necessary because Google does not allow you to allocate budget you don't have (or rather, I never pushed for it). For that, go to Billing > Summary and "Make a Payment" to Google. As of 2024, you will pay about ~USD 0.0005 per view, or USD $1 per 2000 views (depending on your options, optimization and reach, the actual value varies between $0.0002 to $0.0005 per view). This is the minimum views and usually you get more if you allow Google to have time to optimize how it serves your Ads (I managed 5000 views per USD running a highly optimized campaign, with AD quality about 50%, in May 2024). Poorly managed or forced ADs campaings will cost you more.
3. Start up an Ad-Campaign
Go to Campaigns > Campaigns and add a new one (+)
In this start up section, you will set a goal. While you can create an Campaign without a goal, its best to set one since it will improve how Google optimizes your Ads. In this case, to promote an MV, we will go with the goal of Awareness > Video > Views.
4.Set up your Campaign
Now comes a big form to fill, the more detailed you are, the best the Google services will be in optimizing your Advertisement to your goal and target. Don't try to over-reach and add more targets than you need, your Ad will be punished for that. Google have an "Ad-quality" system that tracks if your Advertisement is "good". This is mostly detected by how much people are skipping and ignoring it. While it is normal to have a very high skip rate, if it gets above average for your each specific category, Google will consider your Advertisement not good for that particular Category, and it will start costing you more to "force" your Ads into that category. Therefore, serving on appropriate categories where you will have a more normal rejection rate is optimal. A good Ad-quality (~50% skip or less) is a lot cheaper to serve because your Advertisement is being accepted (people don't skip as often) and thus Google will prioritize it over others for the same price. If you want to force a low quality Ad (or poorly optimized), you will end up paying more
When creating your Ad, set up your budget and the dates to be used to serve your Ads. It is very important to keep in mind that Google will spread out your budget inside the time you alloted, which means that if you set a big period, you will get small daily impressions because Google is not even trying. The end result should be the same number of impressions and views, it will just take exactly the duration of your campaign to reach it. With that in mind, don't set a higher period thinking that will increase your chancesof getting your ad served: the chances are always the same, it will just spread them out on your period.
Pick appropriate categories (Music related, maybe leisure and hobbies), topics and keywords (If you paste the video's URL to get "suggestions" it will usually give you great keywords). Don't forget to always add the artist name and song name as keywords as well.
You will need to upload a 300x60 banner, usually taking a good screenshot of the video and selecting the appropriate part is best. Don't forget to add at least 2 "recommended videos", it will work best if it is related (same song or same group), and also don't forget a description and text (these are small fields, if you are lazy just use the song name)
At the end of the set up, you have to set the target Cost per View (CPV), Google will suggest the optimal value, don't stray too far from it. Less investment might result in you ending your campaign and not using all your budget (ads), more might result in serving the ads faster and running out of budget sooner. There is no reason to stray away from Google's suggestion.
5. Review your campaign
Once you complete your set up, you will be offered a screen to review it. If it is ok, just continue, otherwise return and change what you want.
6. Wait for analysis
Your campaign must be analysed by Google (they will check the video, titles, descriptions, banner etc). If everything is fine it should take less than 24h to be approved.
Once approved, your campaign will appear as Enabled: you are now serving ads. You can see the statistics any time in either Overview of the Campaign tabs.
7. Monitor your performance.
Note it might take some hours to get the statistics to update for the first time. Also, at the time of writing this, every time you visit any of the overview/campaign/ad pages, the time period to display information is stored (saved) and will not be the most current, be sure to check if it is indeed displaying the most up-to-date data (on the top right, select Last 30 days or something).
Once the time runs out, the campaign will stop serving ads with little warning, and it will remain as "enabled" in your profile (it is just not inside the distribution period - you can set campaings in the future for instance). It is a good idea to change its status to "paused" or remove it all-together so Google Ads won't bother you warning "one campaign has ended, fix it"
And there you have it, in this article we covered creating a campaign with a random Music Video on Youtube, we have no affiliation with that channel or with the artist involved, but still managed to promote that Music Video for $USD 10 (~30000 views). With a cost between $0.0002 and $0.0005, coming at $0.0003 shows our optimization and optios were pretty spot on.
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