Membership TodaySign Up NowVideo Transcript
Get to know Lloyd Dodgen
Justin: Hey, what is up everybody? Justin Sardi from TubeSift and Video Ad Vault here, and we have another awesome, just off the cuff interview all about YouTube ads today. I’ve got my buddy and actually longtime customer, Lloyd Dodgen on the call. He is the YouTube ads guy, and he agreed to jump in and just talk about YouTube ads with us today. We were actually got off on a tangent right before I hit record and he was like, “Dude, let’s save this. This is good stuff. Let’s save it for the call.” We’ve got some awesome content lined up for you today. Thank you so much for joining us today, man.
Lloyd: Dude, thank you so much for having me here. Seriously, like you said, with Video Ad Vault, with all the software that you create, I leverage it in my company every single day. For me, this is a great experience and a great opportunity. Thanks for having me here, man.
Justin: Yeah, for sure, man. Yeah, just wanted to… I always like to start off by asking what exactly do you… Obviously, YouTube ads, but is there any specific space you focus on? And then also how did you actually get into this? How did you get started? What put you down this path? I always like to know that stuff.
Lloyd: Yeah, no. My business, we run YouTube ads called the YouTube Ads Guy, super on the nose. And we help basically any business that has a personal brand that’s typically doing 30 to $50,000 minimum per month. They have either a mastermind, a high ticket coaching program or course, and they’re typically leveraging a call funnel. Those are the types of people that we work with that we really are able to get good results with and I see YouTube really working the best for.
As far as how I started, man, my business journey has been just one iteration of a failure after another, learning new things for over a decade from starting in lowly network marketing to growing up with social and blogging and everything and creating the next business idea. But really, where YouTube ads came in is I got out of the MLM space and the affiliate MLM space per se, and what I had recognized is that I had developed a lot of skills. I knew how to run ads, I knew how to create social content, I knew how to do all these things. It’s like, okay, what can I do with these skills in order to still be able to make money, create a business? I was like, oh, let me just create a social media marketing agency because I think that’s everybody’s first intuitive idea.
Know your niche
And after doing that for a while, I was doing everything. It was the boutique agency that was a full stack. We could do it all, and that was just a gigantic mistake. Then I started breaking it down. I was like, okay, what if I just focused on paid ads? And so I was doing Facebook ads, I was learning that, I was getting results for clients, but Facebook was never really my favorite platform and it was along the lines right before the pandemic, it was 2018, 2019, I had a friend who was in the real estate industry and he does these beautiful cinematographer films of houses and stuff. They charge five grand per film, but it’s a $23 million home, a $10 million home in California. And he was like, “Guys, we’re not getting any views on this thing.” And he was like, “Can you help me?” And I was like, “Sure, yeah.” Like any guy in the beginning of his journey, you answer yes to everything.
And so I was like, well, maybe I can just, like a boosted post on Facebook, I can run some paid traffic to this and get a bunch of eyeballs on it. And then it was Billy Gene at the time was one of the very first guys to release a course on YouTube ads. I had bought it. I was already in the stuff learning from him. And so I started learning YouTube ads that way and applying it to trying to just get more visibility on their videos. And we ended up actually getting enough visibility on one of their houses and they ended up selling a $23 million home. I was like, okay, maybe there’s something with this YouTube ads thing and maybe I should dig into it more.
And one thing I noticed is I had a greater affinity for it than I did with Facebook. For some reason it was much more intuitive. I liked the fact that it combined that creative nature of creating videos with the analytical nature of running ads. And it was a perfect merger of who I am. I think if you notice in the background, I read a lot, but I also love a bunch of nerdy stuff, guitars and everything else. I was like, I’ve got a balance of both.
And so I was doing all of it, Facebook ads and YouTube ads, and I was doing it for a big ink 50 company that’s a big real estate company at the time. And at the same time, because I was living in California, everything is expensive. Everything is so expensive, and I was driving to basically make ends meet on top of my agency work. At the end of the night, I do my agency work, during the day I go make money. And I was actually doing DoorDash and one day, low and behold, I’m in San Diego and I have an order for Billy Gene.
Learn from the best
Justin: That’s funny. I was literally [inaudible 00:05:29] just texting him while I was having lunch before this call. He’s an awesome guy. I love that guy.
Lloyd: Yeah, he’s made such an impact in so many people’s lives, man. And so I saw that and I was like, no, this can’t be the same guy. There’s got to be other Billy Gene in San Diego. And then I started driving around and I’m going down to where the marina and stuff, and I know that he’s talked about, he had a condo there overlooking the pirate ships and whatnot. I was like, okay, maybe this is. I get in, low and behold it is him. I go up to the top and I start having a conversation with him. I was like, “Dude, thank you so much for everything you’ve done. You’ve taught me a lot about YouTube ads.” He remembered me from some of the trainings and I was like, “I was able to get results with this, and I think there’s something to it.”
And he had told me, he’s like, “Lloyd, if you go all in and you become the YouTube ads guy, you will never look back. You will never regret it.” That’s when I cut everything out of my business. I just was like, cool, let’s go and just call this business the YouTube Ads Guy. And that was end of 2018, beginning of 2019. And then really, 2020 is when my business, I started really taking off. As soon as Facebook did all their stuff with Apple, and then the pandemic happened, that’s really when the business had taken off.
Justin: Nice. Nice. That’s awesome. Yeah, like I said, Billy’s an awesome guy. Great teacher and I’m part of his mastermind, so I’ve learned a ton from him as well. He’s also sent me a ton of customers, so yeah. Cool, cool. Well, yeah. Love the backstory and I actually see you have the YouTube plaque in the background. I got one of those too. Nice, nice. Very cool. Not a lot of people have those.
Lloyd: [inaudible 00:07:20] Working on the other plaque that you got right next to it.
Justin: Oh, yeah. That one, right? No, to get this one, you just have to go [inaudible 00:07:27].
Lloyd: You just have to go to a Tool concert. You have to be born in the nineties, or eighties and then grow up in the nineties.
Justin: Yeah, for sure. Cool, cool. Well, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you broke down exactly what spaces you’re in, all that stuff. And I know we were talking briefly before this about the use of AI in YouTube ads, specifically scripting, things like that. And I think that’s actually something I haven’t really talked about in a lot of our content. I mean, I’ve been doing it behind the scenes. I think a lot of people are definitely interested in that. I know we’ve been using Chat GPT to help us write scripts in our business and honestly just get a good starting point. Yeah, I’d love to get your feedback on that, how you’ve been using it [inaudible 00:08:17].
Using AI for your YouTube Ads
Lloyd: Yeah, I think a lot of people are, they go and they think automatically, they’re like, “Oh, I typed in a prompt and it was terrible, so it doesn’t work.” And one thing I’ve recognized with Chat GPT and any type of AI tech, especially with Chat GPT, is that if you treat it like a Google search, you’re going to get a Google result. But if you treat it like it’s a virtual assistant who basically has jacked into the matrix and been given the limitless pill at the same time, that’s what you have as the potential. And all of it is predicated on your capacity to structure prompts in a specific way to give the context, to give the intent, to give the specific instructions and even examples of what it is that you’re trying to accomplish in order to actually get the results that you’re doing.
If you’re just like, “Hey, write me a hook,” and it’s like, “Okay, I’ll write you a hook. Are you in a car accident?” And it’s like, no, that’s not what you’re looking for. But if you’re like, “I need an open loop hook, and here’s examples of Dan Kennedy’s open loop hooks, and I need this and the context is this is the type of audience that they’re in this specific situation and they’ve run into this moment and we’re interacting with them at this time, and here’s the intent of what it is that we’re trying to make them feel emotionally in it. And now write me 10 open loop hooks that reference these things.” That’s how you start creating better ads using artificial intelligence, like Chat GPT, then versus just write me a hook.
Justin: Yeah, and that’s huge there because when I first started off, I was like, “Write me a video script for a product that sells this.” And it’s just like… I was like, this is horrible. This isn’t even a good start for me, honestly. But then I was talking to, I forget exactly who it was, but they were like, “Look, you can literally take a VSL that you like and say, store this for reference, and this is the style of so-and-so. Store this for reference. Use that style to then write me a script in that style for this, I want it to be about this long.” But you got to get very specific with it. And it does take some time [inaudible 00:10:35].
Lloyd: You’re not talking to a person, you’re talking to a machine and you have to remember you’re still talking to a machine. We even go so far as, okay, you know the stored reference, you know the audience that we’re trying to capture in our ideal customer avatar, which everybody in advertising always needs to go back to and understand. If you don’t have that, don’t run an ad. And if I have that ideal customer avatar, I even go and be like, “Hey, I want you to be hyper-critical of the hooks that you just provided for me. Provide me three reasons why these hooks would attract this customer and provide me three reasons why someone would hit the skip button.” And so then you can go and analyze that and go, “Oh, you know what? It’s probably right. This is a reason why someone would not be interested in it.” And I can go back and I can go back to the drawing board.
This is what Video Ad Vault can do for you
And it’s really a Socratic method of just you ask better questions, you focus on the intent of the question you’re asking, and then you eventually get better answers with the ads that you’re writing. And like you said, not starting from a blank slate. Writer’s block happens to all of us, especially when we’re working in a vertical that we’re not a hundred percent familiar with and we have to do all this research, find out what’s going on in the niche and stuff like this helps bypass a lot of that additional work and really gets us to a place where we can write something.
Justin: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And while we’re on the subject of learning a little bit more about a specific niche or whatever, I know you’re a Video Ad Vault user, I’m just curious. I always like to know, and we are sending this out to all our customers, all that. I always like to know, how specifically are you using the tool? What do you get out of it? Because I always learn things as well just by asking this because I love to know how some of our best customers are obviously using this and all that stuff.
Lloyd: I use it in about three different ways. One, I’m using it to understand a vertical, like who’s the competition that’s out there? I’m getting a sense of how much money they’re spending as well in those niches based on the amount of views that I know that they’re able to have. If I’m approximating 10 cents a view, which is gracious, I can estimate whether a person spent a million dollars last year or not, and I can have that real conversation.
And then I use it also for prospecting too. I’m in there and I’m looking, I’m like, who’s running ads? I look for people who are running Facebook ads. I look for people that are running Google Ads, but I never had a tool that was able to tell me who’s running YouTube ads and who’s running crappy YouTube ads that I could potentially help as well. When I see their ad and I’m like, “This is terrible. I think we could help improve them.” And it gives me a way to have a conversation and it also gives me an edge in those conversations and I’m like, “Dude, I already know where your ads are. I already see what you’re doing.” They can trust me as a greater authority in that niche, and at least in that conversation, than they would be if I just came out of the blue being like, “I want to run your YouTube ads.”
Justin: Right, right. No, and that’s something that we actually do or teach to some of our students is you can find out people who have ran their first ad recently within the past X number of days or whatever, and you can just watch that and clearly see, hey, these people need some help. I mean, I’ve come across ads that are US based businesses and you’re definitely only doing business in the US and they’re showing their ads everywhere. I’m like, dude, easy fix, easy value. Just things like that. Very cool.
The best method for split testing
Lloyd: Yeah, and like you said, it helps out too with just, I think it’s Russell Brunson who talks about it where he’s like, “Look for the people with arrows in their back.” When you’re funnel hacking, you’re not really looking to go reinvent the wheel. If I know specific hooks and specific ways of communicating in an ad are working right now because they have a million views, I’m going to try to model that and then I’m going to take that hook and I’m going to go back into Chat GPT, and I’m going to help create some variations of that so that I can test that out and mold it to our own offer that we’re running for clients.
Justin: Yeah, definitely. And speaking of hooks, I always like to know, because I actually just shot a piece of content recently about how I’m using… My specific method is one body and one call to action. I mean, you can change those up a little bit, but then usually when I’m split testing, I’ll sit down, I’ll be like, all right, here’s five hooks I want to test. I’ll shoot those five hooks, shoot the body in my ad, and then just literally have my video guide bolt on the different hooks. I’m curious, what is your process for testing different hooks and ads?
Lloyd: That’s exactly the way that I do it too. I try to create one that’s a control, and then I try to create some variations of that hook. But then the same thing where I’m like, okay, just record the body of the ad. And then sometimes we’ll create different call to actions and we’ll bolt that onto the backend just to see what type of call to action works. But really, more 90% of the time, we’re focusing on the hook because it’s a YouTube ad. And if they have the option to skip in the first five seconds, if they’re not hearing anything, it doesn’t matter what goes on with the rest of the ad.
Yeah, no, we’re doing the same thing. We’re 10 to 15 hooks that we’re getting, we’re trying to create several sets of variations and then seeing, okay, we have this idea of we’re talking about a person who was in a motorcycle accident versus a car accident. Okay, what hook styles are there? We’ve got open loop, we’ve got closed loop, we’ve got a myth buster. We’ve got all these different kinds of hooks types that we can use, and we try to reflect that within the hooks.
Justin: Nice, nice. Yeah, it seems to be a pretty common [inaudible 00:16:17].
Study your competitors’ ads before shooting yours
Lloyd: Yeah, I think it’s an easier way because I remember before I started doing that method, I’d have clients record ads from soup to nuts, one shot, and they would break their back in an eight-hour day trying to just record five ads perfectly without any error. And I’m like, we have editing, man.
Justin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s how I used to do it too and I would just, at the end of the day, I was just like, I never want to shoot another ad again, just because there’s so many times where I have to take it, stop. Okay, no, redo that. Nope, start. Now I’m constantly pausing and I’ll just go back to where I know I messed up for a line before that. I’m like, all right, we’ll just cut it and…
Lloyd: And if you think about YouTube itself, YouTube created the jump cut. We got used to jump cuts as a style of editing and as a style of consuming content. It’s like stylistically, why wouldn’t you stick with something that’s also something that people are used to on the platform? If you’re going to do a TikTok ad, you’re going to do it just like people are as checking out a TikTok ad. You’re going to do the same thing with a YouTube ad and a style that people are familiar with on YouTube.
Justin: Yeah, and that that’s something I’ve always talked about. I’m like, hey, try and make it not seem like an ad. Just know what platform you are putting this content on or this ad on and try and make it fit that in the… I actually will go out and watch, before I even script ads, I’ll go watch what type of content, what are the top videos ranking for specific keywords in the space that I’m in? And then I’ll go out and I’ll watch those videos. What types of edits? Is there music in the background? What types of thumbnails are these people using? And really-
Lloyd: Is that [inaudible 00:18:02] now?
Justin: Yeah, especially when they combine the… Made them whatever, video action campaigns or whatever they’re calling them now. They’ve changed it too many times. I can never remember [inaudible 00:18:15].
Lloyd: Whatever confusing name they have.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah, now that your ads can show either way, it’s more important than ever to have a solid thumbnail.
Review the analytics from your ads
Lloyd: Yeah. Well, going back to your point about searching keywords, one of the things that’s great about that too is that in those titles, in tags and descriptions, we have a chance to find more keywords than we would’ve. And if that video has a ton of views, there’s a reason for that. It’s got retention, and if it’s got retention, that means it’s got a good hook. There’s something to be able to draw from the way that they’re communicating with their audience that you’re like, okay, maybe if I communicate with my audience in a similar way for these first 30 seconds, I’ll have the same retention on my own ad.
Justin: Right, right. Yeah, and I mean, that makes a ton of sense right there. And actually, and I’m sure you know quite a bit about this as well, but we built up an organic channel to what, I think we have 110,000 subscribers or something. And a big part of being able to get there was digging into the analytics on YouTube specifically, because I wasn’t running ads for that. They actually wouldn’t let me because of the space we were in and we had got demonetized, all kinds of cool stuff, but…
Lloyd: It’s a journey.
Justin: Yeah, it’s great. It’s great. But a big takeaway that I took from growing an organic channel to bringing it to the odd side of things is actually digging into the analytics. Where are people dropping off? Obviously with a YouTube ad, after five seconds, you’re just going to see that big [inaudible 00:19:52]. It happens, don’t worry about it. But you can then see it’ll pretty much level off and you can see certain spots in your video where people are dropping off. Go watch that specific spot and be like, what am I doing? What’s the difference between this and something that I’ve done that has a good stick rate? And just start to see those patterns, and then slowly you can start to apply those to your ads and make way more engaging ads and content as well for growing an organic channel.
Lloyd: That’s probably the most clutch thing that I think anybody’s really ever talked about with YouTube ads that not a lot of people talk about. It’s like the video’s on YouTube, man. You can go check the data and everybody’s just focused on their Google Ads platform and the dashboard and everything. They’re not like… And you could see the video ad view, you could see where it drops off at 25, 50, 75 and a hundred within your columns, but being able to go back to YouTube itself and look at what’s really happening.
Results of setting up a campaign without a goal
Justin: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a huge thing that I actually don’t even really talk about it that much. Just because we were on that, I was like, oh yeah, we actually do that. And it’s not something that I’ve never really talked about except for when I’m talking about organic stuff, but it’s definitely something I do.
Lloyd: Well, it’s like everybody’s talked about it in such a way, they’re like, “Oh, you should never run ads on your channel because you’re going to screw up your channel.” And I was like, “Well, yes, if you’re running poor ads that have poor retention rates.” You can potentially add another traffic source to a video that’s doing really well as long as your retention is matching what your traffic source is doing. If you’re running ads and you’re still able to get that 50% retention rate, congratulations, you can run ads to it and it’s not going to kill the video. It’s not going to kill the channel.
Justin: Right. And something that we’ve actually been doing recently with our channels is setting up in feed ads, campaigns without a goal. We’re obviously using tracking links and things like that so we can track, hey, are we getting clicks here? But we’re treating those like organic videos and then just boosting those and then retargeting everybody who watches our content, they have no pitch. There might be a very soft pitch at the end, like by the way, if you liked this, we do have a software that’ll help you do what we were just talking about, check it out kind of thing, and we’re giving away lead magnets and things like that. But for the most part they’re just straight up value and we’re promoting those using just keyword targeting because yeah, Google took away keywords and placements, but they didn’t really.
Lloyd: They didn’t really, yeah.
Justin: They actually didn’t. They just took it away from campaigns with a goal, which actually have a really cool workaround, which I’ll fill you in. We’ve actually been testing it. It’s been working awesome with placements, and you can actually use them with a goal still. But we’ve been just setting up campaigns without a goal, boosting specific content, retargeting those people within stream ads with our direct offer. And I’ve actually seen that working extremely well on platforms like TikTok. That’s why I was like, wait, why is nobody doing this on YouTube? I was like, let’s try that. And our ads have been performing amazingly well to those retargeting audiences specifically.
Lloyd: Yeah. You got some reciprocity right out of the gate and trust.
Justin: Yeah. [inaudible 00:23:11].
Lloyd: You know someone is actually willing to listen to you, they know that they’ve already gotten value from you, they’re going to be willing to listen a little bit further. Yeah, that’s a really clutch strategy right there.
Best kept secret for your custom audiences
Justin: Yeah, we’ve been working on… I literally just sat down the other day and mapped out 20 pain points that for a new offer we’re going to be rolling out. And then I sat down and was like, okay, I’m going to make a video on all 20 of these, just content. We’ll boost all of those for the right keywords, build a retargeting list, and then here’s the direct call to action video pushing them to our funnel.
Lloyd: That’s brilliant.
Justin: Yeah, it’s been working cool. I mean, we’ve just been gaining subscribers from it as well, which is very cool.
Lloyd: Yeah. Now with the integration for the conversion action of subscribers on the dashboard and them moving away, they’re moving towards, what are they calling it? Display ads or they called it… They have a specific name of what they’re calling it now that it basically removes the fear of running your ads on your channel because it understands the difference between the organic and what you’re doing and also understands that your ad is doing this.
Justin: Exactly. Yeah, and that was one thing, the reason we were always like, hey, don’t run ads from an organic channel that you’re growing because it will overall, just because people are skipping after five seconds, it will drive your overall retention rate down, which is actually not that great for a YouTube channel. That’s cool they’re definitely doing that.
Lloyd: Yeah, they’re trying to really make that more streamlined.
Justin: Yeah, for sure. Oh, and so speaking of using placements still, one thing that I actually found that we’ve been testing with some of our students is you can create the custom audiences and you can do people that visit websites similar to whatever. We just put placements right in there.
Lloyd: Oh, shit.
Justin: Dude [inaudible 00:25:14].
Lloyd: Dude, I didn’t even think about that, man, because I mean, obviously custom segment URLs, it’s fantastic and if you got the right URL, but I didn’t think about doing that with just placements. That’s such a great idea.
Justin: Dude, the click-through rate on those. I actually, I had a client do this. I was like, “Look man, here’s what you’ll do. We’ll do campaign without a goal with the same placements, take those same placements, put them in a custom audience website visits. Run those side by side.” Now we actually found that the… What was it? I’d have to dig exactly into the data, but basically the click-through rate with just the placements, it was still good. It was 1.8% or something like that. But the click-through rate with the placements in the custom audience with a goal was four point some percent. Same ad, same audience. I was like, what? That being said, the cost per click was slightly higher with the campaign with a… But a couple cents higher. It wasn’t a big deal. But that one where he actually was using the goal had way more conversions because Google is using that AI to optimize for people who are actually going to convert just because they know. It was basically only serving… Dude, it was absolutely insane. I was like, why didn’t I think of do- It was just a random thing [inaudible 00:26:46].
Learn new strategies every day
Lloyd: How many URLs are you typically leveraging within that custom segment URL?
Justin: What was that?
Lloyd: How many URLs are you typically, like the placements, are you typically [inaudible 00:26:54]?
Justin: Oh, yeah. With that, we’ve been keeping them very tightly grouped just because it doesn’t show you all of them. It’s just [inaudible 00:27:01].
Lloyd: Are we like five or 10 or two or three?
Justin: Maybe 20 is what we’ve been putting in there. [inaudible 00:27:09] 20 very… For instance, how to run YouTube ads, how to set up YouTube ads, very close things. There’s definitely some overlap, but yeah, 20 or so videos and doing that specifically, because we talked to our Google rep, because originally I just thought, I was like, man, if I just put this in there, it’s just going to be people who visit sites like YouTube. That is not the case. I talked to my Google rep. They’re like, “No, no. If you put in a specific URL, like whatever, webmd.com/diabetes or whatever, that’s going to be a different audience than if you just put WebMD.”
Lloyd: Got it. It really is going down to the sub domain, beyond the root of it. That’s fantastic. [inaudible 00:27:50] That’s really, really good information to know.
Justin: Yeah, and that’s something we just figured that out a couple wee- I feel dumb for saying this, but we just figured that out a month or something ago because-
Lloyd: I mean, dude, everything’s been changing so much. We’ve had so many changes in the past 365 days. It’s been very tough. When they took away our capacity to just serve YouTube ads, that wrecked everybody. And then when we ran placements and they were basically putting in that sneaky place, like YouTube underscore whatever that placement URL, had to have that as an exclusionary URL.
Justin: Adsense without YouTube or whatever it was.
Lloyd: Yeah, it was like, what is this? But it ran $500 out of a thousand dollar campaign and you had to go back to your Google rep and be like, “Hey, I need you to give me this money back.” This clearly was not the placement that I said where it needed to go. And then with the updates now about removing keywords, placements, topics from conversion-based ads, not from Google, not from YouTube itself, but just from conversion-based ads, like you talked about doing things with no goals now. Even the way that they’re building out audiences now has fundamentally changed. You got to build out the segment and then you build out the audience from the segment versus we used to be able to just do that in the campaign itself.
Justin: Yeah. Well, and half the time it doesn’t… There’s those cool combined audiences where you can be like, I want to target people who have visited these websites but who are also using these apps. You can do the and or whatever.
Pay attention to your creative
Lloyd: Now it’s just or. Now they’re forcing or with that, there’s no stacking in those kinds of audiences. It’s like we’ve been having to adapt a lot. When I hear these cool ideas that you’re like, “We just figured out a couple of weeks ago,” of course, because everything changed just recently again.
Justin: Still, I felt I was like, why didn’t I test this immediately? I was like that’s just…
Lloyd: Immediately, right? Why didn’t I test [inaudible 00:29:46]?
Justin: Took us a while to get to that point.
Lloyd: I’m asking myself the same question, Justin. Why didn’t I think about that?
Justin: Yeah. [inaudible 00:29:54]
Lloyd: But for me, I’ve been focused more on the creative because everything’s been changing so much. I’m like, if the targeting platform is continuing to evolve in a way that becomes less, it allows me for less choices, then the only choice that I have the most control over is what I do with my video.
Justin: Yep. Yeah, and honestly, I do think that is… I was talking to my buddy Brett Curry the other day just with all of the changes and clearly they are… I think what they’re really trying to do with all of this is make it easier for just the end user to go in and set up their ads, especially the Performance Max, things like that. They’re like, “Look, upload all your creatives. We will take it from there. Don’t even worry.” And so I do see them making more changes. They’re not going to stop making these changes. Like you’re saying, they’re constantly doing it. And I do see them removing more and more things and just being like, “Hey, we have it. We got it. You upload your video, tell us your ideal website, whatever, your ideal visitor, answer a few questions and boom.” Bottom line is that yes, your creative is going to be and it currently is… It’s extremely easy to target people on YouTube. Always has been. Just the amount of first party data that Google has is absolutely absurd.
Lloyd: I know. I mean…
Justin: Because literally, they know everything about you. They can tap in to that.
Lloyd: And they’ve been knowing everything about you for years.
Justin: Yes. Yeah. And so-
Help Google know what you like
Lloyd: It’s more than just you going to a Facebook page and liking something or commenting on a friend’s stuff or clicking an ad. It’s like every website you’ve ever gone to, every app you’ve ever downloaded, every YouTube video you’ve ever watched, everywhere you’ve ever driven, every store that you actually go and shop at because it knows where you’re going on Google Maps and keeping a record of that. Your emails that you’re sending out.
Justin: [inaudible 00:31:49] I get popups on my phone that are like, “Oh, you’re at this restaurant? What do you like about it?” I’m like, “Hey, hey. Stop that. Don’t do that.”
Lloyd: They’re like, “Your reviews have been in the top 300 reviews. Would you like to leave another one for the place that you were just at?”
Justin: Yeah. But [inaudible 00:32:08]
Lloyd: It’s Big Brother, man. They know everything about you. But that’s the beauty of it, that you can trust more about who they’re getting you in front of because they know people down to the hairs on their head.
Justin: Yeah, for sure. For sure. Or if those hairs are falling out.
Lloyd: Or if those hairs are falling out and they’ll send you a keeps for men ad.
Justin: Yeah, yeah. Dude, they’ve been sending me those. I’m like, I don’t know.
Lloyd: You did. You got hair for days, man.
Justin: Maybe not the best, but oh well. Cool man. But yeah, but long story short, I think that video creative and your actual ad and your copy and how well you can communicate your marketing message or just your message to your ideal audience that long term, that is never going to be something that they can replace. I think focusing on that specifically is a great call.
Lloyd: Yeah.
Justin: Cool, cool. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess I always like to ask also, any specific tips or tricks that you’ve been seeing working recently? Obviously tons of changes. As far as anything that’s been standing out to you recently that you’d like to share with the audience?
Lloyd: Yeah. Shorts ads. YouTube shorts [inaudible 00:33:27].
Justin: Are you setting those up by just making sure they’re super short, targeting mobile only and then…
Take advantage of YouTube Shorts
Lloyd: Yeah, mobile only, under a minute, but we had a client where we were getting, it was $18 leads for their local business, and they’re nationwide, so they have multiple cities that they target. And then we basically took their TikTok ads, basically loaded those as their shorts ads, and those ads were getting from an $18 lead to a five or $6 lead to a third of the cost. But the weird part was is for me that I still can’t make heads or tails of it yet, is that the click-through rate was low, like 0.2%, but everybody that clicked opted in. There wasn’t a single person that didn’t get onto it that actually ended up not really opting in. The opt-in rate was just insane and that’s why the lead cost had dropped so much, even though the click-through rate was atrocious on it.
But shorts ads right now, they’re obviously, when TikTok’s on the horizon of being banned, they’re passing legislation on it right now, we’re probably a year out or at least one president entering into office from it being completely wiped unless it gets bought by a US company. With that being said, YouTube is doing everything they can to make sure that they’re the dominant force when it comes to those types of video content, short form content. Yeah, they’re finding more real estate to be able to run ads. It’s like when people had YouTube lives, when they had YouTube lives and you run a YouTube live and immediately Google was like, “We love you. Get more views and more reach.” And it’s like, I’ve noticed when wherever we do shorts ads, shorts ads tend to have a better ratio of leads than we see with regular long-form video.
Justin: Nice, nice. Yeah, when you had mentioned the click-through rate being terrible, that’s always… I know that’s one of my benchmarks to see, hey, is this ad doing well or not? But at the same time, you really do need to look throughout your entire sales process and really see what is going on because I’ve seen ads where I was just looking at that data, I’d be like, oh, I’m going to kill this ad. But then I was actually looking at it, I’m like, dude, the actual cost per sale is significantly lower. Or I’ve had ads where I’m like, wow, these are the cheapest leads ever. We’re going to do so awesome. None of the leads bought. I’m like…
Lloyd: And none of the leads bought. Yeah. [inaudible 00:36:11] Dollars in, dollars out matters the most and at the end of the day with anything we do as an advertiser. But yeah, I would highly recommend adding that as a strategy, testing those within ads because it’s becoming more recognized on the platform. People are… Even I find myself scroll- I will prefer to scroll on shorts than I will on TikTok any day. I deleted TikTok a while back and shorts became the way, because it still feels like YouTube and the ads still feel like they’re integrated into there. But like I said, yeah, we’ve been testing them and they’re definitely doing well.
Hire the best agency for your business
Justin: Nice. That’s great news because I literally just last whatever, Tuesday, I shot 10 different shorts as I was like, here’s our best-performing ads. Let’s make those shorts. [inaudible 00:37:03]
Lloyd: Yeah, and you’ve got your great ads to begin with. Now you just have to edit it down less than a minute. 30 seconds, really.
Justin: Yeah, yeah.
Lloyd: And it’s like hook audience, small snippet, call to action, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Justin: Nice. Cool, man. Well yeah, I mean, I think that’s about all I got, besides asking if people do want to get in contact with you, I know you mentioned what kinds of businesses you work with, all that stuff. If you want to share a bit more information about maybe ideal people who you would work with and then just let us know where to get in contact and we’ll put all those links below this video as well.
Lloyd: Nice. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Once again, thank you so much, Justin, for having me on and just being able to have the conversation. I love nerding out about YouTube ads and just doing things like this. Yeah, like I said earlier in the interview, we typically work with personal brands that have a high ticket offer that are typically using a call funnel. And so if you’re a business that is doing at least 30K, you’ve got a proven offer, those are the types of companies that we work with trying to basically mitigate their need for Facebook by expanding them into YouTube ads. And yeah, you can go to my website, TheYouTubeAdsGuy.com. I know, very on the nose, but we have an application page there and you can check out some more information about me and what we do and yeah. Thank you so much, man. Really, really appreciate you having me here today.
Justin: Yeah, for sure. And also, I’ll link to your YouTube channel. I know you got some pretty cool content on there as well.
Lloyd: Yeah, and that’s growing right now.
Justin: Yeah, definitely will drop that below if you want to see more of what Lloyd’s got to say. Cool, man. Yeah, thanks so much and we’ll talk soon.
Lloyd: Thank you.
Membership TodaySign Up Now
Comments are closed.