Justin Sardi discusses why the hook is the most important part of a YouTube ad. 
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Video Transcript:

Create an Effective Hook

Hey, Justin Sardi, CEO and co-founder of TubeSift.com here. And today we’re going to be talking all about how to create a highly effective hook for your YouTube ads. Now, we do have a full scripting guide and it breaks down the entire scripting process that we use here. However, today I want to break down the very first and honestly the most important part of the ad, which is the hook. So let’s go ahead and dive right in. Now, as I mentioned, we have a full scripting guide and you can actually get that by clicking the link below. I’ll link to that scripting guide. We have a whole post on exactly how to script an entire ad. But today I want to dive deep into actually crafting the hook. Now, the hook is the most important part of the video ad. And if you think about it, it makes sense.

Now, when you watch a video ad obviously that ad pops up and you have five seconds before somebody sees the skip ad button. So you have five seconds to really effectively capture your audience’s attention. And there is definitely a right and a wrong way to do this. Now real quick, I just want to talk about how if somebody skips your ad before 30 seconds. So five seconds goes by, the skip ad button pops up. If they skip that ad anywhere before 30 seconds, you as an advertiser do not pay for that video view. Which is a great thing. So in your hook, you want to do a couple of things. Number one, you want to hook them and make sure they don’t skip the ad. Because honestly, you’re running ads because you want people to watch your ad. You want the right people to watch your ad.

You Have to Hook the Right Person

So you need to hook them, but you can’t just hook everybody. You have to hook the right person. And there’s a very specific way that I like to do that and we’ll talk about that in a second here. But just keep in mind that if somebody skips you don’t pay if they skipped before 30 seconds. Now, that brings me to my next point. If you get somebody to watch, you want it to be right person, right? You don’t want somebody that’s not the right person to watch for that 30 seconds and then be like, “Oh, okay. That was a cool intro, that was funny, it was engaging. But this isn’t for me. I only watched because that was engaging.” You want to make sure that your hook is either funny, engaging, shocking, something along those lines. You just want to hook people, but you want to hook the right people not just everybody.

Now, I’ve seen some really great ads out there that make everybody watch. And that’s one thing if you’re going for branding, but if you’re going for direct response and maybe you don’t have the biggest ad budget, you can’t afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get your brand out there. You need to make sure you hook the right people. And by hooking the right people you’re also going to push the wrong people away, it’s a win-win. So with your hook, you want to capture attention, but you want to capture your audience’s attention that you actually want and not just everybody. So that’s the first thing I wanted to talk about. Now, when it comes to actually hooking them, one of the best ways I’ve found to do that for let’s say webinars, right?

Consider the End Result People Want

Ensuring you hook the right people with your ad is what leads to sales.
Ensuring you hook the right people with your ad is what leads to sales. 

So I run a YouTube ads webinar where I teach people how to effectively run YouTube ads. And then I demo Tube Sift and try and get them to buy Tube Sift. Now, what I like to do is I start by thinking what is the end result that these people want? Right? So if I’m running an ad to people who want to advertise on YouTube well, what do you want when you’re running an ad on any platform not just on YouTube? Well, I think about it for a second. Most people want a positive ROI. They want more money out than they put in. Right? So knowing that I’m like, okay, that’s going to be my hook. So I might start off or I actually do one of my best performing ads. I actually do start off by saying, I want to show you how so-and-so.

And one thing I like to do in my hooks if you have testimonials or anything like that is I like to throw those testimonials out there. So I might say something along the lines of, I want to show you how Jenny over here was able to turn $5 into a hundred dollars using my simple YouTube ads formula. And I want to show you how Tommy over here was able to get a 500% return on his ad spend by using a simple YouTube ad just like the one you’re watching right now, right? So instantly I have shown some proof in there which that’s great. And it’s not just my proof, it’s somebody else’s proof. And I say, Hey, I’m going to show you how this person has effectively gotten this specific result that you also want to get. And then I jump into and I’m going to show you how to do it on a free web class today or something along those lines.

So in the hook I’ve already told them what they’re going to learn or essentially shown them the end result, right? Told them how I’m going to get them there. And then they’re hooked. If they’re already interested in running YouTube ads, they’re like, “Oh man, I do need to run YouTube ads. And you know what? These people got results, seems doable. I’m in.” Right? While at the same time if people are like, “Well, I don’t really give a shit how this guy runs YouTube ads. I don’t want to run ads.” They’re going to skip the ad. So it’s a win-win there. And there’s a lot of really creative ways you can do this. And Brady, on the Tube Sift team actually did a couple of case studies and we’ll link to those below. One of them is like the Dr. Squash, sorry I’m slaughtering that.

Study other Ads to see what Hooks Work

But it’s a soap company, right? So we have a couple of case studies on that as well as a few other case studies on some other very interesting ads with amazing hooks. So I would recommend checking those out, watching those, just kind of brainstorming some ideas for exactly how you’re going to hook your audience and how you’re going to do it the right way without hooking everybody because that’s something that is definitely a problem. You want the wrong people to skip, but you also want the right people to not skip. Now, another thing I want to point out is that first five seconds is crucial because you only have that first five seconds before that skip button pops up and everybody has to watch that five seconds. You’re not paying for it, so you’re going to want to make sure that you utilize that five seconds to really get their attention.

You can link to our case studies on ads with successful hooks below in the Resources section.
You can link to our case studies on ads with successful hooks below in the Resources section. 

Have an Engaging Ad

Because most of the time a lot of people will skip and if it’s not engaging or even if it is engaging, a lot of times people just skip ads, right? And that’s not a problem for you as an advertiser because you don’t pay. However, there’s a thing called view rate, which is views versus impressions. So an impression is when somebody skips your ad and a view is when somebody watches 30 seconds or the entire thing, whichever comes first. Now the higher your view rate, the happier Google is going to be. Because if you’re not paying for these specific video views, if your ad’s being shown a lot and everybody’s skipping it, Google’s not going to want to show your ad because they’re not making money off of it. And that’s their moneymaker is showing ads. So you want to make sure you have a high view rate, which is a view to impression rate.

And you want to make sure that you do that by hooking the right people. Now obviously people are going to skip, it’s not a big deal and you do want the wrong people to skip. But you want the right people to watch, which is going to drive your view rate up which is also going to make Google happy, show your ad more often and get you lower costs on your ads. So that’s it for this particular video. Like I said, be sure to check out those case studies. Those will really help you wrap your head around best practices, some really good ideas. Those are some amazing brands behind those ads and they’ve performed extremely well. And we’ll also link to some of our videos that I’ve used personally below this also. So if you liked this video, please give us that thumbs up, subscribe to us on YouTube, leave us a comment, all that good stuff. And as always, you can jump over to TubeSift.com and get yourself a TubeSift membership where finding monetized videos will be a breeze. So that’s it for me on this one. Bye for now.

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