Ep 252: The Art & Science Of Youtube Ads with Justin Sardi

Jaryd Krause:

What if you could run ads to everyone who has visited your competitors' websites? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast. And today, I'm speaking with Justin Sardi, who specializes in bootstrapping software companies.

He started helping entrepreneurs and businesses build audiences, collect leads, and make sales through the use of YouTube and YouTube ads. He's a former founder of TubeSift and Video Ad Vault, which are software tools for YouTube advertisers. And now he's been marketing online since 2011 and has helped thousands of businesses and entrepreneurs increase their revenue with his software and training courses.

And in this podcast episode, Justin and I talk about how to build a successful YouTube channel. We talk about what a good video looks like on YouTube for your YouTube channel and how to create it. We also talk about how to run ads to your YouTube channel videos to grow your channel organically, but with a little bit of a mixture and play on words there.

We also talk about the difference between a YouTube channel video and a YouTube ad or an in-stream YouTube ad, what the differences are and why they're so different. We also talk about how to create a winning YouTube ad that is an in-stream YouTube ad that actually gets you leads and more sales.

We dive into targeting on YouTube and how you can target almost anyone you want with YouTube ads based on Google. And then we talk about some tools that Justin has built that I mentioned just before, how they work and how they can help you crush it on YouTube.

And there's so much value in this podcast episode. Video marketing is not going away. It's only getting better. And it's such a great place to build relationships, harness relationships, build trust with your audience and make more money online through your online business. Enjoy.

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Justin, welcome to the pod.

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, dude, thanks for having me.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, thanks for coming on. Mate, YouTube's a beast and it's so damn good for building relationships with your audience, which builds trust and more sales, right?

Justin Sardi:

Sorry about that. The umbrella was—

Jaryd Krause:

So people starting—

Justin Sardi:

The sun's getting—

Jaryd Krause:

Sorry?

Justin Sardi:

Oh, sorry about that. I'm going to switch channels real quick. The sun just blasted me. So there we go. Much better.

Jaryd Krause:

Cool, cool. Yeah. So I just wanted to chat about YouTube and YouTube channels because starting YouTube channels is a very profitable venture for businesses. But at the start, there's a fair bit of work that goes into it, right? There's a lot of video.

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, man. I mean, just making a video in general, I feel like it is a hurdle for a lot of people, specifically if you're going to be on camera. I know that a lot of people don't like being on camera.

Jaryd Krause:

There's so much that goes into a good YouTube video. So much. We could record a full podcast series on that. So I'll dive into that in a second. But I first want to ask you, when somebody first starts a channel, I've heard consistency is quite good.

So how many videos should they be putting out regularly? I've heard where people will do 100 days of 100 videos and bank them all up, which is pretty gnarly. But what does that look like when starting a channel in terms of consistency?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah. So on one of our channels, I think we're sitting at about 115,000 subscribers, and it was slow in the beginning. I never put out more than two or three videos a week, though, personally. Because essentially, what happens is that one of those videos will end up taking off. And that's really what happened to us. One specific—or you'll have like a couple of videos that are driving most of your subscribers.

So by putting a video out every day, you have a lot more opportunities to have a video go viral, if you will. And so that's definitely a thing. I think we were about a year in and one of our videos got shared by a major blog. And all of a sudden, just like that one thing, it just really started catapulting us up. And we just thought we went from 1,000 subscribers to 10,000. I was like, “Whoa, that's crazy.”

And that's when we really started posting a lot more. But I do know there are a couple of reasons you would do that. Number one, obviously, you post a lot to hope that one really takes off. And then once you do get a lot of subscribers, you want to keep them engaged and really keep your watch time, your views, everything up.

So we've been to different YouTube events and things like that. And they at least recommend posting on a schedule, right? So whether it's every day, or every Tuesday and Thursday, or something like that, just like people watch their favorite TV programs, they're watching their favorite YouTube creators.

Jaryd Krause:

Absolutely, absolutely. People that are on my email list and my audience open the emails every Thursday, go to YouTube and watch the podcast, which is probably why they’re watching this right now. Quite meta.

So yeah, I'm curious. Have you noticed that when you get to a certain level, it's worth trimming down the number of videos in your video library on YouTube where it's worth deleting some? Is there a good case for that?

Justin Sardi:

I've never done that. But honestly, I've never heard of somebody doing that. Because yeah, I mean, I guess if you're changing your brand or something along those lines, maybe. But I don't really know the benefit of that.

Unless a specific video is not performing well, maybe, like, hey, that's an older video, and you're kind of digging into your analytics. And you can see, hey, if somebody starts watching this, they're leaving; everybody’s leaving the video after a minute; maybe that's not the best video to keep.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. I was seeing the same thing—underperforming videos. And also, when I was thinking about the experience of somebody going through your channel, say, they click on all your videos, and you've got, say, 30% that are not the best videos.

Maybe they're old and don't perform as well. And then you've got 70%, which is good. Would it be worth cutting off that 30%? So you don't have the possibility of people going to those not-so-great videos and getting the worst experience consuming your content versus only going to the top ones.

That's just my thinking. But I have heard people talk about, like, being careful if you are going to delete videos because you don't know that it could just take off in a year's time. It could just get really popular—that keyword or what it's ranking for. It could just take off, right?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah. I mean, so the video that really did take off for us was horrible. And half of it was out of focus and it was bad. But there wasn't much content like that. So people really enjoyed it. But what we ended up doing instead of deleting it, because that video was ranking, was literally building our channel.

We just ended up making a new video and throwing a card or whatever up and just saying, “Hey, click here to watch the updated one.” And for whatever year it is. And we just remade the whole video—better production value, all that. And then both of the videos really helped.

Jaryd Krause:

Cool, cool. Yeah. Did you find a lot of people would click on the card and move over to the updated video?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah. People love updated stuff.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, there's so much that I want to talk about with you in terms of what makes a good video. There are different types of videos, though, and videos within each of those brackets. And I'm talking about there's YouTube specific content videos, and then you get videos for ads.

We'll talk about ads in a second. Because you can go down so many different ad creatives. And that's fascinating to me. And I know that you've got a lot of experience with that. But for a video on YouTube that you want to rank and get organic traffic to, what makes a good YouTube video?

Justin Sardi:

Honestly, they just look at a lot of things, but a lot of it is engagement. YouTube really wants people to stay on their platform. And if you have a really good video that gets people watching the majority of the video, they’re going to reward that, right?

So something that we always looked at when we were building our channel was percentage watched, right? So how much of the video are people completing?

And then you start to see trends as you're putting these videos out. You're like, okay, our audience, or the people in this space, particularly like this kind of content. And you can start to tailor your content strategy toward that.

And I think that's like the organic side of things. That's one of the biggest things you can do. Just have a video that people really like to watch and then watch a lot of it, and YouTube will reward that.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, APV, right? The average percentage view is something you can check in your studio in the analytics on YouTube. And what I have found is that when you find those videos that are doing really well, they have a high average percentage viewed, and then it's easier for you to know. Okay, hang on, let's replicate what's working in this video and backtrack where those spikes were in the video.

Or when you're looking at analytics, as they watch the video, where did people drop off? And how can you prevent them from dropping off and then do more of what they do with the spikes? And the spikes are typically where people will watch something, and it was really good. And then they'll click back on the video to replay that section again, right?

And that's like the formula for how to use the videos that you already have that are doing well is to use the data there to make your next videos better based on what people on your channel are liking, right?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah. And also not liking. You can see where people drop off. They have that curve, and you can see where people are dropping off. We've had videos that I thought were going to do fine. And all of a sudden, it's just like, no. And we were like, Okay, what's happening here? Let's not do that again.

But at the same time, if you want to keep people on YouTube, just throw up another recommended video at that point in the video. And people are like, “Well, I'm going to leave.” Then they see that thing pop up. They're like, “Oh, maybe I'll watch this.” So you can keep them on your channel as well.

Jaryd Krause:

Oh, I like that. So would you have a card there? You put a card in and say, “Hey, watch this video just before they start to drop off.” So you keep them on your channel. I love that.

Justin Sardi:

Yeah. That's what we did. And we were able to keep people engaged with our specific content instead of looking at somebody else's and being like, “Well, maybe I'm going to go over here.”

Jaryd Krause:

That's brilliant. That's brilliant. And when you did use a card, would you choose something that's relevant to the video that you're already discussing? Or would you choose something that's just really good and clickbaity that you think I would like?

Justin Sardi:

So a lot of times, we would just push them to our most successful videos, the ones that were getting the most subscribers. Because in your studio, you can check out which videos are driving the most subscribers and things like that.

And we would just push them to our most popular videos or YouTube lets you see the video that's most popular, or whatever is best for the specific viewer or whatever. You know, I don't know how they know.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. So I mean, in terms of keeping people engaged, is there any other way that you've worked out that helps keep people engaged other than getting them to another video and looking at the data?

Justin Sardi:

I mean, really, just a lot of it is that we were publishing videos for years and years, right? And if you really pay attention to the analytics—what's happening in your videos—you'll start to see trends, right? What does this audience like? Certain videos will get a lot of views, while others won't.

And it comes down to what kind of trends you're seeing in the content you're pushing out, what people are watching, what's getting the most views, and what's getting the most searches as well. That keyword research, all that kind of stuff.

And then also checking out other people's channels in the space. We would do that. We'd be like, “Oh, that was a good video. We don't have a video like that. Maybe we should make a video like that.”

Jaryd Krause:

I was doing this just yesterday on a coaching call. A client of mine is wanting to grow their YouTube channel in the college ministry area or niche. And competitive research works in all different aspects of business.

See what your competitors are doing that's working really well for them and how you can create content that people are obviously liking. How do you create a similar type of content? Obviously, I am not copying. But how do you create a similar type of content that is valuable to your audience?

And we're also looking at titles. We're looking at the thumbnails and seeing what's working in that specific niche, in that specific industry. Because the YouTube videos that I would do for my channel and the thumbnails that we would use are going to be completely different from what the thumbnail should look like for a different channel, right?

Justin Sardi:

Right, right. And also, I mean, if you find other channels that are putting out good content, I end up—once you start to build up your channel a bit more, other creators are very open to collaborations, right? So I did a lot of collaborations where we would just film content separately. It'd be like the top five tools that we use or whatever.

And I'd do three, he’d do two, whatever it might be, edit that stuff together and just be like, Hey, we both post that video to our channel, same video, and be like, “By the way, this is a collaboration with so-and-so, check them out here.” And that drove quite a few subscribers as well. And it really helps build your audience.

Jaryd Krause:

Love it. Tapping into other people's audiences. Yeah, it's really, really cool. So growing a channel with ads, I know that there's two different types or a few different types of ads, right? You can have ads that can help you grow your YouTube channel.

You can have ads that can help you grow your business revenue more directly, right? You're more leaning and you're more focused on helping people drive leads with ads. Am I correct in saying that?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we do a lot of different things. I've built up a few different channels by running. They're called in-feed ads now. But basically, those are the ones where somebody searches for a keyword, and you'll see those ads or those videos at the top. Those are more content type videos.

So those work really well to build a channel. And basically, if you want to rank for a specific keyword, you just target that keyword and have your video show up. And hopefully people enjoy it, subscribe, and all that kind of stuff.

But we do more direct response stuff with in-stream ads specifically. Those are those pre-roll ads or whatever. And, yeah, that's kind of been what I've done for a long time now.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. So that's why I wanted to get you on. I wanted to dig into those in-stream ads. There are so many different types of ad creative, but it seems like there's a bit of a formula for some of the things that you should do psychologically and call to action at different points in the video. So what are some of those ways to script or run through an ad creative?

Or what are the must-haves if you're wanting to get people to click away from YouTube and opt into something or buy something? What are the top things a video would need in that ad creative?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, obviously, the number one thing when you're creating a video ad is the hook. You need to hook somebody up. We all know you have those first five seconds where you can either skip the ad or continue to watch.

And truth be told, you actually kind of need to re-hook people every, whatever, 10 or 15 seconds or something because people have—

Jaryd Krause:

Short attention span?

Justin Sardi:

I always said people have short attention spans. But I was just at an event at Google, and they brought something up that I was like, man, that's a really good point. They were like, “People don't have short attention spans; they have short consideration spans.” And I was like, yeah, that makes sense.

Jaryd Krause:

It does.

Justin Sardi:

Because they're like, “Dude, people will sit down and watch 30-, 40-minute videos.

Jaryd Krause:

True. True.

Justin Sardi:

But you have to give them a good reason for all that. So I have a YouTube Ad Library and we study a lot of what's working with YouTube ads specifically. And we've basically analyzed a bunch of different ads from the same channel, going to the same landing page, the same offer, everything. And a lot of times, the difference between an ad that really takes off and an ad that doesn't is the hook. So those first 15 seconds or whatever .

If you can come up with something that really is going to relate to your audience, that’s going to be huge. Hitting on any pain points, making unbelievable statements, and coming out with proof works really well. Like, hey, I want to show you how we got this result or how these students got this result. Flashing some up there that way they're like, “Okay, I want that.” Things like that.

So the hook and then we have the body of the ad as well. And that's just a little bit of education, what do they need to know, knocking out objections, anything like that. And then obviously the call to action. We used to have to throw a really hard call to action and like, “Click the link on this video.” Now, people know, I mean, there's buttons everywhere.

Back in the day, there weren't. They're like, “Oh, okay, I can click this,” and you get your call to action on the button and you get a companion banner and a few other things as well. So you can use all that to your advantage as well.

Jaryd Krause: That's awesome, man. Thanks for sharing that. I want to talk about the hook. It seems like it is the most important thing. What I have noticed is calling out your audience at the start with a hook and also sort of having them pre-qualify whether they’re your audience or not.

For example, if you're selling a surfboard or if you're talking about surf coaching or something like that, we're talking about snowboarding before we recorded this. If you're talking about snowboarding and snowboard coaching at the start of the video, would something like this work? “Hey, if you want to improve your snowboarding, make sure you understand these first three things.”

And then anybody that skis or anybody that does not snowboard, they're not going to continue with the ad, right? They're going to click away and you won't need to pay for the ad being shown. Am I correct in saying that?

Justin Sardi:

Oh, for sure.

Jaryd Krause:

And are there any other strategies that improve upon that basic thing that I just mentioned?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, I mean, you pretty much nailed it right there. The hook is to pre-qualify the right people, but it's also going to push the wrong people away. And obviously, you don't want everybody to skip your ad. If everybody’s skipping your ad, your targeting is off, right? And there's this bunch of different metrics you can look at when it comes to that.

Because you only pay when somebody watches 30 seconds of your ad or the whole thing, whichever comes first, or if they click on your link, right? Well, that being said, Google doesn't want to just give away a bunch of ad inventory that they could be getting views and be getting paid for.

So there's a thing called view rate. And it's like the number of impressions versus the number of views. And the higher your view rate, the more people are watching; the better your targeting is; the better your ad and your hook; Google's going to reward that and give you a little bit lower cost per view as well, right? Which is a good thing.

But if everybody's skipping your ad, Google’s going to start to see that they're going to be like, “Well, maybe we shouldn't be showing this person's ad all the time. Because, nope, everybody's skipping it, we're not getting paid.” So there is a fine line; you've got to balance that.

But yeah, ultimately, the hook does push the wrong people away; it hooks the right people. Yeah, I'm really just calling out your audience. And there's a lot of different targeting options you can use. But I like to make ads specifically for targeting options that we're going with and really calling out specific groups of people just with the hook.

If I'm targeting ClickFunnels users, for example, I might mention funnel hacking. And they're going to be like, “Oh, I know funnel hacking,” it resonates with them. And we've actually done that. And it did extremely well. But yeah, just different things like that. Just keep in mind who your specific audience is and really try to speak to them and good things will happen.

Jaryd Krause:

How much education is needed now in a YouTube video ad? Can you just go straight into, “Hey, if you want to learn to be a better snowboarder,” go straight into coaching? Is it sharing value? And proving how big that is?

Or is there a better way to do it nowadays? I haven't run YouTube ads in a while or a couple years. And I've been out of the YouTube ad game for a little bit now. Are there other ways to do this?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah. I mean, there's obviously straight up curiosity based, where you're just like, “Hey, I want to show you—” I had an ad; we were doing an affiliate promotion. And it was for a make-money-online program or whatever on ClickBank. And I just took a bunch of testimonials from their sales page.

And I was like, “Hey, I want to show you how so and so's making this much money from home without any prior experience and how so and so's doing this and blah, blah, blah, and how you can do the same. And we're going to teach you on this webinar, whatever. Click the link on the video, and I'll show you more.”

That was it. We shared literally nothing except for proof, right? And knocked out some objections. Even if you have no prior online experience or whatever. So that works pretty well. I still see that working.

Testimonials work great. Because again, that's the same thing. If you can lead with proof, you don't have to sell them that much. So just going to be like, “Well, if all those people are doing it, that seems pretty cool. Maybe I could. That sounds good.”

So there are a lot of different things you can do there. But for the snowboarding example, or whatever, that one, you might want to kind of be like, “Hey, there's three specific reasons that you're not getting better at—"you know.

So you go out snowboarding, whatever, however many times a week, and you just don't see your tricks improving or whatever it might be. We've been coaching X number of students, and we found it comes down to three specific things.

And then just kind of giving a little bit of value there. And then, just like hitting on three common mistakes that somebody trying to learn this trick is making or whatever, And be like, “And we have a whole other video where we'll dive into that.” That way, they're kind of like, “Okay, maybe I should listen to this person.”

Jaryd Krause:

Love it. Love that. And so what percentage of people that you work with get people to a piece of free value or opt-in for something for free versus a straight up money grab sale?

Justin Sardi:

So, I mean, it depends on the price point, I would say. YouTube ads are great for lead generation, so they work amazingly well for coaches, consultants, and anybody that has a webinar to book a call funnel.

Those things work extremely well. And I think a lot of the reason that works is because people resonate with you when they see you on video, right? And they're like, “Yeah, this person seems good,” whatever there is.

But I mean, we've run a lot of just direct to sales pages and things like that. It works well with a little bit lower ticket offers. And I see lower ticket offers are coming back a lot now, with funnels behind them. But, yeah, I mean, I guess it kind of just depends. It really does work for anything.

But I will say that if you have a lower ticket product, you do need a funnel behind it. You're probably going to spend a little bit more on the front-end sale than they could just not be profitable off of a $47 product. You need a couple upsells, some kind of backend or whatever it might be.

And I think that goes for more than just YouTube ads. That goes for anything. The cost of ads is only going up; it's not going to go down. It's becoming more and more competitive. More people are doing it. Back in the day, you could throw a YouTube ad up and run it to whatever and you'd be like, “Oh, man, we're making six times our money back on the frontend with one single product.” It’s not quite like that anymore.

Jaryd Krause:

Sometimes. And that's a really good point that you bring up. Because if people are trying to make money straight away from the get-go on the ads and they're not, they could give up. Whereas if they understand they have a good remarketing system, say, an email remarketing system, maybe it will take them five months until they get ROI on the ad spend, right?

I mean, I’ve spoken to brands that will say, “Hey, we'll lose money for a year,” and keep them in our system. And then we know that our customer lifetime value will be high, and we'll get an ROI after a year, and we'll continue to do so but they'll lose a bit of money on the frontend. Do you see that becoming more regular?

Justin Sardi:

It depends. But I mean, the quicker you can recoup, obviously, the better. But it all comes down to knowing your numbers. We sell recurring software, right? I know that I can spend four times a monthly sale on one of my softwares and I'm still making money. It sucks. I'm like, “Well, there goes, whatever, 400 bucks to make a 100-hour sale, but I'm still profitable at that.”

In newer businesses, you're probably not going to be able to know that right away. And I still don’t like doing it. I'm like, man, that sucks. Which is why we're constantly rolling out new offers and lead magnets, providing value upfront and really working to get that sale sooner.

But that being said, I think it is definitely something that I see in a lot of businesses, specifically businesses with higher ticket backends and things like that. And even a lot of people that are doing webinars now, they're not used to being able to just run a bunch of traffic to a webinar and you're profitable on the frontend, basically.

You spend 1,000 bucks. You're making like $1,200 back or whatever. Now it's probably a little more spend $1,200, make $1,000, whatever. But there's more people working on the backends, yeah, all that kind of stuff, and up to the cross sells, whatever you can do to maximize that customer value, really.

Jaryd Krause:

Absolutely, absolutely. Increase your AOV, or, really, average order value.

Justin Sardi:

Definitely.

Jaryd Krause:

By adding more value to them. It is a tricky one, right? And I've done it with our membership as well. Running ads to a membership and it’s really important to know how long people stay and why.

And your retention rate and your customer life value to know how much you're going to spend and also the lead time that it might take for them to be on your email list until they actually decide to join. There are so many factors to consider.

And you mentioned you have that with TubeSift. For people who don't know what TubeSift is, what do you guys do? How do you guys help video creators and people who do ads?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah. So TubeSift is targeting software. So there's a number of different ways that you can target on YouTube. One of those is putting your video ad in front of specific videos you know your audience is going to be watching.

Those videos have to be monetized. And Google made some changes to that, but it's still doable. I 've heard a lot of people be like, “Oh, they got rid of the placement target.”

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. They started changing it a little bit, didn't they? But yeah, it can still be done with placements.

Justin Sardi:

Well, I mean, they moved it around and changed the way it works, but it's still a thing. So it was just a little different than it was. So the TubeSift does that. And it helps you build custom audiences for things like that. So yeah, I think we started that in 2000 and rolled it out at the end of 2014, maybe. So it's been a minute.

And then we have Video Ad Vault, which is basically a spy tool. It's like a Facebook ad library, but for YouTube. And that one's a lot newer. But I enjoy studying ad creatives and, like we've been talking about, what makes a good video, all that kind of stuff. So that's the one that really gets me excited now as well.

Jaryd Krause:

So Video Ad Vault can check out all the different creatives that have been successful, break them down on why and then reverse engineer them to be able to use them for their businesses, right? Is that correct?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, yeah. Or ads that didn't work, right? I mean, you could search by advertiser; if you're like, “Okay, I want to find all the ads that are going to whatever webinarjam.com, clickfunnels.com,” you can find all of the ads linking to specific domains.

You can find different keywords and all that kind of stuff. So you can really see all the different ads in any niche. And then, by looking at the ones that are getting the most views, you can see average daily views and all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of analytical data in there that we have.

Jaryd Krause:

Awesome.

Justin Sardi:

And you can start to analyze what's going on, what’s working, and what's not, and then kind of apply that to what you're doing and have a much better chance at having a successful ad right out the gate instead of, “Well, it didn't work. Is this going to work? Is this going to work?”

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. Especially because creative recording ads can definitely stack up on the cost of production.

And I can't ask you about the ad placements or video placements. How have they changed that? So before you could actually go away and look at your competitor and say, “Alright, cool, I want to put my video ad on their video. It can be an in-stream ad, or it can be something at the end of the video," you could easily do that in the backend of YouTube Ads or Google Ads. How has that changed now? Is it just technically harder? Or how do you do that?

Justin Sardi:

So basically, what they did was remove content targeting, which is placements, keywords, and topics. That's it. They removed content targeting from campaigns with a goal. And essentially, what a campaign with a goal is is that you tell Google, “Hey, I want you to optimize for this specific conversion.”

And their AI kind of takes over and they will get a couple conversions. And then Google will be like, “Okay, cool, this specific placement was working,” or “this targeting is working with this ad.” So it'll kind of shift your budget for you automatically.

So they removed that. You can still set up campaigns without a goal. And I mean, campaigns with a goal are within—I think maybe three years ago is when they first rolled those out anyway. So it's still a pretty new thing, even having Google manually or automatically optimize your campaigns.

When I first started running ads, I was going in every day looking at the different keywords. How many views did this keyword get? How many views did this placement get? Pausing them, adjusting bids, all that kind of stuff.

Jaryd Krause:

Negative keywords.

Justin Sardi:

Google made—

Jaryd Krause:

All that stuff.

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, yeah. And so, essentially, in a campaign without a goal, it's just like it used to be three years ago.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, yeah. Spot on. Yeah. That's really good stuff.

Justin Sardi:

So, yeah, it still works; you just have to do a little more work.

Jaryd Krause:

The goals you want to optimize for opt-ins or leads or whatever they are They're the different types of goals you can choose from in the YouTube ads. But by setting up one without it, you'll still personally have a business that has a goal for the ad.

But you're not just claiming to YouTube that this is what you want them to optimize. You can manually optimize a bit more yourself, right?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah. And you can still track conversions. You just have to manually—you have to go in every day and be like, “Okay. This is good. This is not. Let's delete this placement,” whatever it might be. So it's definitely still a thing; you just kind of have to dig in a little bit more.

And then what we've been doing is basically setting up a campaign without a goal, using placements to train a pixel, and getting a bunch of pixel fires. Because you're still getting great conversions and everything with placements. It's just that they're not quite as scalable anymore.

Because with Google's AI, what happens is they'll start to learn, Hey, these kinds of people are buying, opting in or whatever your goal is. And then they'll be like, “Let's get more of those people.” And they'll put your ad in for you; they have optimized targeting where they basically start to throw random people—not random people, but they start to throw people at your ad then throw your ad in front of the right people. So you're not getting that whole thing, but you are still putting it in front of the right people.

Jaryd Krause:

You mentioned training a pixel, which makes me think about TubeSift. You mentioned you help people create custom audiences. Is that one of the ways? And what does that look like?

So I guess to somebody that's new to this whole thing, they're like, “Why would I want a custom audience?” So what sort of custom audiences you’re creating, say, for somebody selling snowboarding coaching? And then how do you help them create that with TubeSift? What does that look like?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, yeah. So essentially, with these custom audiences, there's a number of ways that you can build these things. And one of them is that you can build audiences of people who have visited specific websites, right? Or people who Google says browse websites similar to.

So people might be looking at things like snowboardermagazine.com or whatever, Burton, Ride, all these different companies—hey, these people are obviously snowboarders, right? So basically, what you can do is compile all those URLs, put them into a custom audience, and Google will build you an audience of people who have visited those websites and similar websites.

And one of the newer features we added to TubeSift is basically the ability to type in a keyword and it will spit out all of these websites that people would be visiting. And then you just throw those into Google and then you create your custom audience. So those work extremely well, as we found.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. Because you're targeting website viewers, not just YouTube viewers, right? And then when those people say, I’ve viewed something or looked at Burton, maybe I'm buying a new snowboard. On the website, I'm looking at it. When I go to YouTube to watch something completely different, maybe it's an educational video on a different sport like surfing, then I can get an ad still in front of me for how to become a better snowboarder, right? That's so awesome.

Justin Sardi:

Yeah. Yes. I mean, it's essentially being able to retarget other people's websites, which is kind of absurd.

Jaryd Krause:

It's crazy.

Justin Sardi:

But, I mean, you can do it because Google has all of that first-party data. I mean, how many websites have Google Analytics, right? Like Gmail, everyone uses it. Google search, right? They know exactly what you're searching for. And not only what you're searching for—

Jaryd Krause:

It’s on Chrome.

Justin Sardi:

Yes. What websites are you going to visit after you do a search? They know all kinds of stuff about everybody. And that's what you're buying when you're buying Google Ads, you know?

Jaryd Krause:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why people are getting such great ROI. I think it would be a good time to mention about third-party cookies. I'm not sure if you know too much about third-party cookies, Justin, but that's how Google tracks and puts ads in front of people on websites when they're scrolling through a blog. And a lot of people listening are people who are buying these sorts of blogs and are worried about the third-party cookie being removed.

Whereas the third-party cookie isn't the only way that Google is tracking you, right? And you menmentioned that you've got Chrome, if you've got Gmail, if you've got Google Analytics attached to your site and all these other sites, there's—

Justin Sardi:

Or you have an Android. Sorry.

Jaryd Krause:

Android, yeah. And a Google phone, yeah. They can remove Google. They can remove these third-party cookies. And what they're doing is for privacy issues. And as soon as they remove them, they're going to have some other way to release them. Like, actually, probably just better targeting, right? Do you know much about this third-party cookie thing at all?

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, a little bit. I've kept up to date on some of it. I know that's like a big part of the reason Facebook had to remove all kinds of stuff, right? So Facebook was buying data from other people and things like that, buying third-party data. Google doesn't have any third-party data, really. Like we were just talking about, they are collecting all of that data themselves.

Jaryd Krause:

Not a third party, yeah.

Justin Sardi:

And to even use any of their stuff, you have to agree to that. And so, I mean, they know every search that you're doing. They just know. So that's the cool thing—I don't know if that's a cool thing. But it's cool as an advertiser.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, it's definitely cool as an advertiser. And it can be cool as a consumer as well. I'll give you an example. I don't like going on social media. And when I want to buy something, say, a specific thing, I'll go to Instagram and just type in a couple of things, or I'll yell into my phone a few keywords.

And then what will pop up on Instagram are all the things. So I don't have to use Google to search through things. I can just use Instagram for shopping. I use it that way. I think it can be beneficial if you use it the right way.

And Justin, such a fun chat, man. I know we went down a bunch of different rabbit holes, but yeah, guys, check out TubeSift and Video Ad Vault. I'll put links to those in the show notes, guys. Because that ability to get a big list of your competitors, chuck them into YouTube, and target them is phenomenal. I love that tool. It's cool. Thank you.

Justin Sardi:

Yeah, man. And thanks for having me. And yeah, we gotta get out. If you're from Colorado, hit me up. We can go snowboarding. I know all the mountains around here.

Jaryd Krause:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Maybe next season I'll come up and we'll go for a shred. It'd be fun.

Justin Sardi:

For sure, dude.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah. Everybody who is listening, thank you for listening. If you know somebody who has a business and is thinking about running YouTube ads or growing a YouTube channel, make sure you share this podcast episode with them. There's so many rabbit holes we went down that it's going to be fascinating value for your friends that you share this with. So thanks again and I'll speak to you soon.

Hey, YouTube watchers, if you thought that video is good, you should check out this video here on 2 Types of Websites Beginners Should Buy. Or check out my playlist on How I Made My First $100k Buying Websites and how to do due diligence. Check it out. It's an awesome playlist. You'll enjoy it.