How to get subscribers for YouTube channel using Google Discovery Ads?
As we’ve written a few times before, there are two ways to promote a YouTube channel. The first way is organic. The second way — paid.
Organic promotion of YouTube channel by publishing trending videos
You publish useful content, on popular subjects, i.e. ones with a high demand, you have a nice design, images of the video, good CTR, people start watching, you have a good video view depth, i.e. people do not switch your video, they watch until the middle, until the end, they leave likes, YouTube analyses all these actions and starts recommending your video to more people, so the video gets more views, which increases the overall rating of your channel and the number of subscribers.
In addition to quality content, you can also create collaborations with influencers or invite an influencer to be the host of your channel, post links to the video on your social networks so that people start to watch the video and share it with their friends.
Paid promotion of commercial videos on the channel in order to grow the subscribers base
Let us make it clear right away that in the first case, you still have to pay for the promotion of your channel, you just have to use different methods and channels. In the case of the second method, you have to pay more attention to the work with Google Ads than to collaborations and "organic" promotion, which is also not free of charge. To see an increase in subscribers and channel metrics, you need to link your YouTube channel to the Google Ads ad cabinet you created. Next, set up an ad campaign like Video Discovery, which shows your video in recommended lists and on the YouTube homepage.
You can access the standard settings for showing ads - Gender, Age, Country, City, Language - as well as additional advanced settings:
- Interests - what types of websites people are watching
- Topics - what topics they're currently watching videos about on YouTube
- Keywords - what they're searching for on YouTube or in a Google search
- Specific videos and channels - you can have your video appear when only certain YouTube videos or channels you've identified are viewed
- Custom audiences - based on your data, similar audiences, etc.
We took the second approach for our client to test and compare different approaches. The client has an app called Workport for finding jobs in Poland. The app has its own YouTube channel with 32,000 subscribers and not a single penny has been spent on Google Ads.
Personnel Service
However, the client also has another partner brand - Personnel Service - a company that also employs Ukrainians in Poland. There is a website, social networks, through which the client attracts job seekers. We have already written about its advertising.
At the end of 2022, the client asked us to help with paid promotion in Google Ads, when it decided to develop a new direction, YouTube, to publish useful videos about living and working in Poland.
hyper targeting by adgroups
age, gender, audiences
4000 subscribers
in 3 months
€0.56 per subscriber
As you can see, thanks to Google Ads we have managed to attract 4,000 new subscribers to the channel in just 3 months.
At first we tested all the above advanced targeting, but after further analysing which ad groups bring more and cheaper subscribers, we chose general targeting for this channel - country Poland, MF 18-65, Google interface language Ukrainian or Russian.
We set the minimum bid of 0.01 for each video that we place in different targeting groups. Then, based on the statistics that we receive only in the Google Ads Editor application, we change the bids in order to get the maximum number of subscribers for the minimum price.
Key points
If you are interested in the topic of hyper-accurate targeting and changing bids via Excel, we have already written about it and shared our template file for uploading statistics and changing bids here.
With this client we tested the targeting, stopped at the optimal for us, we run each video in advertising, gain 2-4 thousand views of each video and reallocate the budget for a new video, while every day we look at the results of each active video in the advertising in the context of targeting groups and change bids to get more subscribers.
In total we promoted YouTube channel and collected more than 4 thousand subscribers for 3 months at the price of 0.56 € per subscriber.
