I’ve been exploring strategies to accelerate YouTube channel growth. To date, the growth on our channel has been entirely organic, driven by systems I’ve implemented to consistently publish content and YouTube Shorts. This steady approach has led to several viral videos, resulting in sporadic growth spurts. However, the most significant impact has come from the daily, incremental growth achieved through sustained effort. While this approach has been effective, it is also time-consuming, and growth has been gradual. Reaching 100,000 subscribers is a significant milestone, and even at a rate of 1,000 new subscribers per day, it would take over three months to reach that target.
To expedite this process, I’ve decided to leverage advertising, and I’ve discovered an innovative way to use YouTube conversion ads to acquire subscribers.
Overview
The core idea of this campaign is to use a website traffic campaign with video ads to direct viewers to your YouTube channel. The key to maximizing the effectiveness of this strategy is appending specific tags to the URL, prompting viewers to subscribe upon arrival. Each subscription click is tracked as a conversion, allowing the Google Ads algorithm to optimize the campaign for subscriber acquisition. As the campaign progresses, this optimization can drive down the cost per new subscriber to under $0.50, which is highly advantageous.
How to set up the campaign
Create a New Campaign: Log in to Google Ads and create a new campaign.
For the campaign objective, select “Website Traffic.”
Ensure that conversion goals are enabled, specifically selecting “Engagements from YouTube” as an option. If this option isn’t available, link your YouTube account to your Google Ads account. This is a crucial step, as the campaign needs to optimize for conversions. Without conversion tracking, you’ll still gain subscribers, but you won’t have precise data on how many, and you’ll miss out on Google’s powerful optimization algorithms.
Then select video ads.
Name your campaign whatever makes sense. And pick out appropriate locations and languages.
For the bid strategy, select “Maximize Conversions,” as this will help reduce the cost per conversion over time.
Set a budget within your means. While a larger budget can help the algorithm learn faster, a smaller budget can still be effective if the campaign runs longer.
You won’t be able to select Networks, so just move over that. This is potential controversial, but I don’t think you should add site links to your ad. We have one goal and that is YouTube subscribers. Adding site links to other pages will not help with that. All site links do is improve the Click through rate(CTR). We don’t care about CTR. We care about conversions. So don’t give the ad any site links. No matter how hard Google pushes them on you.
At this point you’ll create your ad group. For audience I always try to target channels that look like mine or that have an audience I want. At the same time, don’t over optimize the targeting. These are Google conversion ads on a Google Platform. Google has so much data on what’s going on in this particular campaign, that you want to leave the audience broad enough for the algorithm to do its work. There are times to target narrowly. I don’t think this is it.
Now it’s time to make your ad. Select one of your videos that has a great introduction and use that for your ad. Is it ideal, no. But it’ll work, and it’ll get you started. You can add multiple videos, I personally don’t like doing that. I do one video per ad. And now the magic happens. The URL is everything.
Input the YouTube channel URL, BUT use the tag below.
?sub_confirmation=1So the URL you put into Google Ads should look like this:
https://www.youtube.com/@RenaissancePeriodization?sub_confirmation=1So what does this tag do? The URL takes the person to the desire YouTube channel. And the tag autoprompts the user to subscribe. like the picture below. And that subscribe click will be recorded as a conversion. Pretty nifty, right?
After you input the URL with the tag, fill out the Google Ad like you always would. And then create the campaign and wait for approval.
Once your ad is approved, it will start running, and the Google algorithm will begin optimizing. Depending on your budget and the video content, you can achieve impressive cost per conversion rates. Initial costs may start around $1.00 per subscriber but can decrease to below $0.50 per subscriber as the campaign continues.
Additional Considerations
- Optimize Your YouTube Channel: Ensure that your channel is visually appealing and follows best practices. Strong, compelling copy is essential throughout.
- Ad Copy: Clearly communicate that viewers are being prompted to subscribe.
- Select Opinionated Content: Since we’re using broad targeting, choose a video that resonates strongly with your target audience. Avoid generic crowd-pleasers; instead, opt for content that speaks directly to your viewers.
- Test Multiple Videos: Include several videos in your ad group and test their performance to identify which yields the best results.
By following this approach, you can significantly boost your YouTube subscriber growth in a cost-effective mann