YouTube Ads 101: $1.5M Revenue Generated From $312k In Ad Spend [Full Breakdown]

Over the past couple of months we’ve been scaling a YouTube ad account from $20k/month in ad spend to $150k/month in ad spend…

The ad account went from a 1.09x Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) to now generating above 4x.

So I just wanted to share how we’ve been able to scale the ads so quickly while maintaining profitability.

Here’s some context for you:

• Niche: Business/Performance Coach
• Price Point: $5,800
• Calls Completed: 1,185 (71% show rate)
• Sales: 261
• Revenue: $1,513,800
• Ad Spend: $312,291
• Return On Ad Spend: 4.84x

Let’s dive in.

When we first started working on this account we initially had an ad spend budget of $20k to work with - which is $660/day.

Since we had that big of a budget to test with, we allocated $100/day to 6 campaigns and then $50 to one other campaign to equal $650/day. (We usually allocate $50/day to each campaign)

So we had 7 total campaigns:

1. Intent Only
2. Marketing Keywords Only
3. Business Keywords Only
4. Competitor Keywords Only
5. Marketing Keywords + Custom Audiences
6. Business Keywords + Custom Audiences
7. Competitor Keywords + Custom Audiences

?? Intent Only???

This is a campaign where we only target Custom Intent Audiences.

Custom Intent Audiences are custom audiences that target leads based on what they search for on?Google?(not YouTube).

So we created 4 different custom intent audiences that were each categorized into their own topics.

The 4 topics were Marketing Keywords, Business Keywords, Sales Keywords, and All Keywords (all of the keywords into one custom intent audience)

The reason we split the custom intent audiences into their own specific categories is to test which angle of keywords work best.

We followed this same approach for the Keyword Only campaigns.

Keyword Only campaigns are campaigns that aren’t layered at all…

They’re only targeting keywords at the campaign level and that’s it.

And as I said, when it comes to the keyword only campaigns, we follow the same approach that we do with custom intent audiences.

So we targeted different categories of keywords inside their dedicated campaigns.

Now it’s important to note that when we target keywords at the campaign level like this, we’re targeting keywords that leads are searching for on?YouTube?(Not Google)...

... the keyword targeting is only based on Google searches when you place the keywords inside a custom intent audience.

We didn’t want to only have Keyword Only campaigns for the remaining 6 campaigns, so we chose 3 different keyword categories to build campaigns for.

The 3 keyword categories we chose were Marketing, Business, and Competitors.

???Marketing Keywords Only???

The keywords inside this campaign were all keywords related to marketing…

… but more specifically, they were related to facebook marketing keywords such as “Best Facebook marketing strategy”.

Because our client’s offer is primarily focused on facebook marketing for lead generation.

Meaning, that’s how he helps clients generate leads.

We started with 30 keywords in this campaign, and now we’re down to 17 keywords that are consistently converting for us.

???Business Keywords Only???

We targeted 30 keywords in this campaign as well.

All 30 keywords were related to growing a business such as “business growth tips”.

As we tested each keyword, we ended up with 12 keywords that are now consistently converting.

???Competitor Keywords Only???

This campaign only had 20 keywords in it.

The reason we didn’t start with many keywords is because we wanted to only target direct competitors.

So that whenever a lead searches for our client’s direct competitors on YouTube, our client’s ads are shown to those leads before they watch any of the competitor’s content.

This campaign now had 18 keywords because we shut off some keywords and then added other competitor keywords which ended up converting well.

For the remaining 5 campaigns we tested the same keywords, but we layered them with custom audiences.

Each campaign had 5 custom audiences that were being layered with the keywords inside each campaign.

The custom audiences that were inside each campaign were custom intent audiences, custom URL audiences, and custom affinity audiences.

Custom URL audiences are custom audiences that we built using the URLs of any competitor’s website. Because then Google populates that audience with leads who visit similar websites.

Custom Affinity audiences are custom audiences that we built using interests such as books and tools. These custom audiences are similar to Facebook’s interest audiences, except you get to create them yourself.

???Marketing Keywords + Custom Audiences???

We had the same 30 marketing keywords layering with the 5 custom audiences that I mentioned and we started noticing that the keywords converted much better with the custom intent audiences.

So we turned off all of the other custom audiences and only let the custom intent audiences layer with the keywords inside this campaign.

???Business Keywords + Custom Audiences???

We targeted the same 30 business keywords and layered them with the same 5 custom audiences, but we didn’t like the cost/conversion on any of the audience/keyword combinations…

So we turned this campaign off and allocated the ad spend to the other campaigns that were converting.

???Competitor Keywords + Custom Audiences???

This campaign was/is one of our best performing campaigns.

The combination that we found to work best were the custom affinity audiences layered with the keywords.

So we paused the other custom audiences that weren’t converting well so that the ad spend would continue going towards layering the custom affinity audiences and the competitor keywords inside the campaign.

We ended up shutting down only one of the initial TOF campaigns that we set up.

The remaining 6 are still running at the moment.

Since we were able to generate 6 sales ($34,800) within the first 2 weeks, our client decided to increase the monthly ad spend budget to $40k for the first month…

And now the monthly ad spend budget is at $150k/month.

We’ve been increasing the daily budgets incrementally and we’re also adding new keywords and custom audiences to each campaign depending on what we see is working.

For example, I mentioned that the custom affinity audiences inside the Competitor Keywords + Custom Audiences campaign were working best…

So we’ve been creating/testing more custom affinity audiences within that campaign.

And of course, we’re also constantly testing new Top of Funnel campaigns.

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I can’t cover Middle of Funnel and Bottom of Funnel without this post getting extremely long so I’ll cover that in another post.

I hope this was helpful.

Let me know if you have any questions.

- AR