Start With the Big Picture
You're about to see how to use Google Ads to promote YouTube videos and YouTube channels, and this can be a great way to promote yourself or your business locally or globally for whatever you want to do. Video ads are some of the most powerful ads you can use, which is why I'm doing them, and I'm going to show you exactly the entire stack of it, from the basic strategy to how I advertise locally, to bringing people to my channel, and even getting around difficult issues, like if you have a hard time advertising things directly on Google, and you need to kind of go around that a bit.
So you're going to love this tutorial right here.
If you want to go deeper on everything I cover here, I keep more walkthroughs like this in my my YouTube Coaching playlist.
My Five-Channel Business System
The first thing to think about is your bigger business system, like how is this all going to work, and what I am doing here, I'll explain to you exactly what I'm doing now, and this is a template that you could use across a lot of other kinds of businesses. Here's what I'm doing. I have five channels. I'm a full time YouTuber. I just started this new channel where I'm going through and doing daily vlogs about my life here in St. Petersburg, Florida, and what I want to do is to share these with my local community, and to promote myself as a local YouTuber, and then potentially get some cool opportunities out of that, and get people locally to want to schedule calls with me, build relationships, be customers for basically anything, and also to follow my journey.
I think my local.. My audience will be perfect for this channel, and I could generate all kinds of cool things happening, like people have met me before coming on the channel and following my life. Thus, I want to advertise this channel. Now, you could do this with all different kinds of setups and businesses, so it's very much interchangeable. The first thing I do is I set up the entire channel on YouTube. Thus, when one person.. Finds this channel, they could watch all the videos very easily.
Public or Unlisted Video
Next step, and this is one of the things I was really wondering about in doing YouTube ads, is do I want to do public or unlisted? I'm especially for local, I want to choose unlisted, but even for going bigger global audiences, I'd rather choose unlisted also, because if you do a public video, you can garbage up your organic traffic with the ads traffic, and garbage your whole channel up with that. So, what I've got is an unlisted video. The goal of the unlisted video is to pump my organic traffic, and then pump my algorithm from there without garbaging up my channel. The unlisted video can't be seen, as you just looked at my channel.
I learned this the hard way, which is why I now keep ad traffic separate. I wrote about it in Google Ads Poisoned My YouTube Organic Traffic for Weeks.
When you look, it's not on my public channel. It's only available if you have the actual link. So, people can still see it in their YouTube account. They don't need a password or anything. Now, what a lot of people don't do.. What I'm going to show you in YouTube ads tutorials is show you the exact video that they're advertising.
The Ad Video I'm Actually Running
So, I'm going to show you the exact video I'm advertising right now, because the video makes a difference. If you live in St. Petersburg, Florida, you're going to love my new channel, Jerry Banfield Daily. I'm a full time YouTuber with a long journey behind me, but I'm starting something brand new. I'm doing daily vlogs right here in my home near Crescent Lake. I'm sharing the raw, real life stuff. The struggles, the wins, my life as a single dad, and everything in between, whether it's playing tennis, or getting a massage, or parenting my kids. I'm filming these videos because I want to get to know you, my neighbors, better.
I read every single comment on this channel. Whether you want to share your story, give me feedback, or just say hi, I'm here for it. You might even run into me in person around town. I'd love for you to join me on this journey. I'll see you in the comments. All right, so you see how with that video, what I did is I made just a basic, simple video where I could turn that into any different format. I could run that with any kind of business. It's a very simple value proposition. For example, I could do an ad saying, hey, I'm going to help you with YouTube ads.
Here's how I do my ads. Or you could do any kind of business. I'm a plumber. Here's our team or whatever. And then watch more of our videos and go do business with us. So I've got this unlisted video now. And this is what I need before I even start YouTube ads. So I've got this unlisted video ready. And now I'm going to go into my ads account with this link ready.
Linking YouTube to Google Ads
So I'm going to go over now to Google ads and open up the Google ads manager here and start making this. Now you need to do first before you, you actually are able to do the ads. You need to go into tools and data manager. And you need to link your YouTube account so it can track the conversions. So I do that in on YouTube. I go to settings and I go to channel advanced settings. And then you click on link account in YouTube. Then in Google, you go over and do that in tools, data manager. And then you have to accept the link in the data manager.
So you go into the YouTube where you see these, you click on manage and link. You can see my two channels here that I've set up with this. When I first clicked the link in YouTube, I got a receive, then I had to go in there to confirm that. So once you're done with that, then you're ready to create your ads and link it up. What's really cool then YouTube then can track.
Creating the Campaign
So we're going to click create a campaign. We go plus campaign and we're going to go YouTube reach views and engagement. And then we're going to click on video views right here and click continue. Now we're going to start a new campaign. Because I did this tutorial the first time and it didn't come out right. So we're going to do JB daily, or we'll just call it daily St. Pete. So this is for the daily channel. Now I'm going to use the all available formats because I have a 45 second ad. So if it wants to stick that in shorts or in feed or skip a land stream, whatever, do your thing.
I'm just going to test all of these. If one comes out winning for some reason, then I will, I will change it, but, and I'll do an update video. But for a. Getting started, just test all of it out because it can, sometimes it will, change over time.
Budget, Networks, and Targeting
I'm going to put a $10 a day budget into this too. I want to just run this all the time. Now, big thing here on networks. I want to turn off video partners on the Google display network. I don't want websites outside of YouTube showing my ads because there's no telling about the quality of those clicks and then getting them to come over from YouTube. I don't want to do that. So that's, we're going to just show ads on YouTube. Then I'm going to specifically put this in another location. I'm going to just show ads around town in St. Petersburg, Florida. You can do radiuses or countries or all kinds of targeting on this.
I want to show this in my city in St. Petersburg, Florida, so that people who've seen me other places can come, who might care about my journey could come in and start watching. Now I'm going to put English in the targeting and then we're going to, it doesn't have EU ads related videos. So add videos related to your ads. To help. Increase engagement. So we're going to leave that off for now. Then we're going to click on additional settings. One thing I want to do is I want to cap impression frequency. I only want to show one impression per day. I don't want to spam the same person over and over every day with my ad.
That's annoying. And if it doesn't work the first time that day, they don't need to see it again. And if you want, like, for example, if you don't figure people at three in the morning, going to be the right kind of people, you can exclude that. Or we're not going to do that. So then we're going to create the ad group name. And this will be daily 45 second, one, we'll just call it that something, you can identify it with. We're not going to bother with audiences. We're just going to leave it on all demographics because this is a pretty wide, but you can get in here and try and narrow down things like income, parental status.
I could try and target this just to single dads. You can still have their kids watching on YouTube. So Google has a lot of data. On people, though, you can get more detailed, but for a smaller thing like a local ad, you might just shotgun it all over. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to let it show ads to everybody, see what happens. If you know people who knows who could start watching my channel and I'll just accept it. Now I could it says recommended because they want to get the most, people seeing ads and that I'll just leave it that way.
So we'll go down here now. I'm actually not going to put any keywords topics. They're placements. However, if I was going to do a global ad or a countrywide ad, then I would go in here and I would like I could target an ad, for example, if I want to target people creating course online, I could target people on Udemy and put them in as a keyword and try and show them videos. So I'm going to test that out in a lot of future videos. But for right now, I'm just doing the most basic broad reach local ad because there's a few hundred thousand people in my town. If you're weighing broad local reach against tighter keyword and placement targeting for your own channel and you'd like my eyes on it directly, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we'll map out the right setup for whatever you're promoting on our call.
Which means there's only so many. So I'm going to go ahead and hit that are going to purchase and make that a video for I'm going to go to my channel I'm going to select this video, and I'm going to go to I'm going to add a shot at the top of my channel, I'm going to select all the posts that I want to add, and I'm going to type in my name. Now, if I want to add a video, I'm not going to need this video. I'm going to just add my name. And then you will see it. A lot of people watch shorts are not my vibe anyway.
But in the future, I might test doing a shorts only ad and compare, but I don't make short videos. So people are just watching short videos. I don't want them on there. Now, what I'm going to do next, then I'm going to put the final URL will be www youtube com slash at Jerry Banfield daily. And that then is my call to action. So that is when people click on the ad. And it looks like I'm going to have to confirm on here, which that's, that's annoying. Thanks a lot for that, Google. But so I will, I'm putting that URL on there. Because this way, my website currently has an issue where it's flagged as crypto, which is ridiculous.
So I, I haven't, I did crypto, I was a big crypto YouTuber. And thus, for some reason, my site still flagged crypto. So I don't want to send people directly to my website. Therefore, I want them to go to my YouTube channel. And then from my YouTube channel, I can bring them to my website. It says get enhanced versions of your videos for better viewer experience, track their performance, it says get vertical versions of your videos, you can show examples. So I can just try this and see if it fits. We'll just see what happens and see if I can look at the data. We'll just leave shorts on and and see, I don't know, it's such a you can just test it.
The only way you can be sure is to test it. So then I got headline, and I'll put something like St. Pete, YouTuber. The headlines, you can just write those out. And I can it has automatic things generated on there. But I you want better, hi, I'm a, as you can, you can write test all kinds of different headlines you want in here. And then you put the bid, it says using a bid at just point oh four is pretty good. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna just leave it at four cents. These headlines will keep it just something simple. Like, Jerry Banfield is a YouTuber and or do you enjoy?
I like Hi, St. Pete. I like St. Pete. And then Jerry Banfield daily is or something. How about this like you will Jerry Banfield daily is a channel for my community in St. Pete, Florida, you will love. There you go. See, so just short up practical, the URL is not even going to show. And then you can preview your ad on YouTube. So you can just pop it up and see what it looks like. You'll see it's the ads not even going to show right here. So it doesn't really matter that much. But just in case, and you can click, I'm not going to put a call to action on.
And so I start off in the headline like Hi, St. Pete. And then I get Jerry Banfield daily for branding. Jerry Banfield daily is a channel for my community in St. Pete, Florida, you will love. There you go. Super simple. And first life in St. Pete daily vlogs. All right, so we set everything up on this ad. And you can, you can see what it looks like in different formats. With YouTube shorts, it looks pretty awkward right there. And it looks great in other spots. Now in the sponsored, posts, Hi, St. Pete, I'm a local YouTuber filming daily vlogs. And that does look like it needs to be shortened in that preview.
So you can look at this preview and decide what you want it to say right there. And it says the channel name down there. And Hi, St. Pete, I'm a local YouTuber. And then you can see what it looks like in different formats. Hi, St. Pete, I'm a local YouTuber filming daily vlogs. There you go. In real life St. Pete videos. So you can see the only place the headline even shows is on here. Hi, St. Pete videos. And or St. Pete stories or something like that. And there and then it's Jerry Banfield daily. Alright, so we got the whole ad set up. Now we click on create campaign.
And it what's cool, it estimates that I'm going to get like 5000 impressions a day. And those views look hella cheap.
Launch and Check Compliance
So now I just have to wait for the ads to be approved. Given I put I took the transcript and put it through Gemini. And then I put it in there. And then it Gemini is, high confidence that everything will be great. And then from there, my ad just runs. And if I start getting subscriptions, which I can then track right here, and it'll show me the cost per view. And I can look at, view through rate conversions. And YouTube, I can look at conversions, channel subs, follow on views. And that's what I'm going to be really interested in. So the ads are general are reviewed by the Google AI.
And you can see that the ads are reviewed by the Google AI. And you can see that you always want to check your ad, put your ad through the take your transcript from your video and put your ad directly through Gemini, which is Google's AI to make sure that there's no compliance issues with your ad. When you do that, then you can be confident your ads not going to get rejected and do it with your title. And all that I probably should have done it with my headline too. But that should be good enough. So my ads under review, it should get approved pretty soon.
Running my ad copy through an AI before submitting saves me from rejections, and I lean on these tools constantly in I Pay for Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini for God-Mode Business Advice.
And now this is a process I've shown you can literally just repeat this over and over, check the data, optimize this. And you've got a business potentially out of it. So if you found this helpful, I this is for my Jerry Banfield channel, which is at Jerry Banfield coach. If you want to have a zoom call one on one with me to talk about your business, your YouTube ads, your marketing, I've got over a billion views online on everything I've done. And a lot of it started with paid ads. And a lot of the views and impressions were paid ads, that then led to organic traffic.
You can also book a private call with me and ask me about your ads on our call.
So I always have fun building up something new with paid ads. And if you found this useful, I'll answer any questions you have in the comments. And I hope to see you on another video soon.