You probably know him from the YouTube ad that begins with "YouTube beats Facebook every time…"
In this episode, I interview Aleric Heck, founder and CEO of Ad Outreach and KeywordSearch.com, to discuss how eCommerce businesses can leverage YouTube ads for growth.
Key takeaways include:
- Aleric's journey from creating a successful YouTube channel to becoming a YouTube ads expert, focusing on coaching and consulting businesses.
- The importance of crafting compelling YouTube ad creatives using a "hook, educate, call-to-action" framework.
- Leveraging YouTube's unique audience targeting capabilities, such as custom intent audiences based on search behavior and affinity audiences based on interests and URLs.
- The power of Google's vast data in audience targeting and the potential for even more advanced targeting options in the future.
- An introduction to Aleric's AI-powered tool, Keyword Search, which streamlines the process of finding the right keywords and creating custom audiences for YouTube ads
Here are a few quotable nuggets from the podcast:
"If you can give people an "aha" moment in the ad and actually provide them genuine value, they are far more likely to take action."
"Google knows everything about everyone, essentially. And so I do think they're holding back on targeting somewhat to protect the user and to protect themselves."
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction and Background
(08:26) Pivoting to Coaching and Consulting
(12:22) How To Approach YouTube Ad Creative
(34:52) Targeting The Right Audience
(42:06) Outro
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Show Notes:
- AppFind
- Ad Outreach
- Ad Outreach - 8 Figure YouTube Ads & Funnel System
- KeywordSearch.com
- Aleric Heck - LinkedIn
- Click Funnels
- Hubspot Inbound
- Russell Brunson - LinkedIn
- Google Marketing Live
- Tested Advertising Methods
- Ryan Mckenzie - LinkedIn
- Tru Earth
- William Painter
- Raindrop
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Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.
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Other episodes you might enjoy:
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Transcript:
Aleric:
The goal is if you can give people this aha moment in the ad and actually provide them genuine value, they are far more likely to take action.
Brett:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today have I got a treat for you. We're talking about YouTube, what's working now, and I have an absolute expert in the space, someone that I've known about for years and then known for quite some time as well. We were in the same mastermind together. Shout out to War Room, made that mastermind group rest in peace. And so we've seen each other's work and it's been super fun. We have different areas of focus where e-commerce is kind of e-commerce focused. My guest today, Aleric, is focused on larger ticket items, lead gen coaches and consultants. But I think the synergies of what we do, bringing those together, going to create some powerful insights and results for you. And so my guest today is the founder and CEO of Ad outreach and keyword search.com. None other than Aleric Heck. Aleric, welcome to the show man. And how's it going?
Aleric:
Awesome. It's going great. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited. This is going to be great,
Brett:
Dude. It's going to be a lot of fun. When you reached out recently, we were talking about leads and stuff, and I was like, oh, why have I never had Arik on the podcast? And so then we made it happen, and here we are. And so thanks for taking the time. I know you've got some really great insights. We're going to have fun kind of riffing on some YouTube thoughts, and so super excited to dive in. I want to know though, this is part of the story that I do not know, how did you become a YouTube expert? Why did you choose YouTube and how did you end up here?
Aleric:
Yeah, yeah, and that's a great question. It actually is a really natural evolution. It's probably different than a lot of other people that get into different ads and that side of things. I actually started organically on YouTube 15 years ago with the YouTube
Brett:
Channel. Interesting. Yeah.
Aleric:
Back in 2009, I created a channel called App Find and I was reviewing mobile apps, tech tutorials, and what really helped the channel take off was I was teaching people how to use their iPhone for the first time. So I've got some of those basically for every iPhone iteration. I think after the iPhone four, I was doing a complete beginner's guide to the iPhone and those videos.
Brett:
Wow, super interesting.
Aleric:
Yeah, got millions of views. So millions of people watched them. One of the videos, I think the most popular one was the iPhone seven complete beginner's guy. That's when a lot of people were getting an iPhone for the first time. It has over 8.6 million views. It's crazy. So
Brett:
No way is it still getting views to this day? Did you pay attention? So are people still watching an iPhone seven video for whatever reason
Aleric:
They are, believe it or not. And actually it's a lot of other countries outside of the United States, so it's actually really interesting to see.
Brett:
I got this used iPhone seven and now how do I use it, type of thing.
Aleric:
Exactly, exactly. And so it is really interesting because the back catalog of all those, the videos that I made years and years ago on YouTube, still get those views. And I saw recently the term iPhone tutorial, we rank for several of the placements on the first page including, and it also kind of depends on where you search and stuff, but generally it usually pops up first, second result, which is pretty interesting. So some of the videos that I'd created a long time ago are still doing well. And actually today I have hired somebody out of this guy in San Francisco who I've known for a while in the tech kind of space, just to take over the channel, keep it going, and still putting out content every week. It's just not me anymore, but amazing man. Yeah. So keeping that alive, which is
Brett:
Great. It's so cool. It's one of the things that really differentiates YouTube from any other social platform is that content, good content, organic content gets better over time and sometimes it can get more traffic over time, and it can last for years. It can last way. Beyond the point that you think this could ever be relevant, your content may still live on even an iPhone seven video in 2024, still getting some views because a pocket of the world that wants to learn that and wants to see that, of course, we're focusing on ads. I know you pivoted to ads as well, but understanding the way people work within YouTube is super important. So how did you make that leap? So you saw the power of YouTube organic, how'd you make the leap to ads?
Aleric:
So I had all of these different people that were wanting to sponsor the channel, these mobile app developers. This was also the heyday of mobile apps. So think like 20 13, 20 14, 20 15, 20 16, around that timeframe. And I was actually was in college at the time and I had all these different apps that were reaching out and I was doing YouTube videos to promote some of these different apps. I would either put it into the existing videos or do dedicated videos and I was turning it into more of a business and then I got a video editor, script writer, all that stuff. So I was turning the YouTube channel more of a business, and I remember one day, and normally I would just do these app videos. So let's say it's a dedicated video, people would watch it on the channel, it'd be great. And maybe they'd come back later and they'd do another promotion or they'd work with other influencers.
Well, at one point I had one social media networking app that had hired me to do a video or pay me to do a video. I post a video, they get a bunch of downloads that this is great, can you post that same video again tomorrow? We want to double the results. Then I said, well, hey, it doesn't really work like that. You can't just post the same video to the same channel the next week and double the results. That's not how organic works. And they said, well, how can we get more people to see this video? And I said, well, what about YouTube ads? And I was aware of YouTube ads, but I hadn't really done it at that point. And this was kind like 2014 going into 2015, I think that was in the beginning of 2015. And basically like, well, what did we take this mobile app or the video that I made, just the standard video on the channel and just run that as an ad to get more people to see it.
So I set it up just from scratch. I just went in, set it up the first campaign, and then we ran that as an ad. They ended up getting thousands of downloads from that and they loved it. They're like, this is great. So then they go and tell somebody else that it was kind of a performance marketing company that hired me. So there was another developer that was working with them, which is a bigger company, which ended up becoming later on becoming a unicorn company, which was pretty cool. But there was another app that they're like, all right, we're doing a big promotion now. We've got a bigger budget. The second YouTube ad campaign I ever ran was a thousand dollars a day budget for this mobile app that ended up totally blitzing, but that's again, now today we look at that, we're like, all right, there's obviously bigger clients we have than that, but that was the second one.
They're like, you did so well with this here, we trust you to do that. And then I just learned just from doing it what worked, what didn't work. And I think I realized I had a natural affinity towards media buying. I understood how it worked. I was going in reading Google documentation, so it wasn't like I was doing completely blind, but I was just kind of diving in and it was in the earlier days of all this. So I ran that promotion and then that company and I ran that for a while, and a company calls me up, and again, like I said, I was in college at the time. They were like, they want me to drop out of college, fly out to Silicon Valley, join their team. They're like, you can run our ads, YouTube ads and all this stuff. And it was tempting, but I decided to turn it down.
I'm like, I want to build this myself. I see the opportunity here. And so then I tapped my network. So by that time I had worked with hundreds of app developers, had sponsored the channel because at one point it was the top app review channel on YouTube with half a million subscribers, all that stuff. So essentially I had all these apps, and so I just reached out to 'em and said, Hey, here's what I did with this company. I would love to do that with you as well. And I've, since you mentioned, gone away from apps and into which actually I'll get to into more of the coaching, consulting and high ticket space. That's how I got my start, was doing those YouTube ads for apps. Then I discovered ClickFunnels in 2016. I was at HubSpot inbound. Shout out to Russell Brunson exactly. Shout out to Russell Brunson. I was there. ClickFunnels had a booth. They were still early on. And I remember signing up for that. I'm like, this is awesome. Then I said, wait a second. I can go and promote things that are more than just a free app with in-app purchases.
And so that brought me into a whole nother world. I joined my first mastermind also in 2016, and the natural evolution was this mastermind was really designed for consultants, agencies and coaches. And originally I created a webinar for how mobile app developers could promote their app with YouTube ads, and it was designed to get potential clients for me. But what did I run to the webinar? Well, obviously I knew YouTube ads, they were talking about Facebook ads and this mastermind, but I was like, yeah, I'm just going to do YouTube ads. I did YouTube ads to the webinar and it worked really well. And what started happening is everybody else in the mastermind was like, wait a second. How are you getting these results? I quickly became one of the, I got some pretty good results and I said, oh, it's using YouTube ads instead of Facebook ads. And that's when they all started asking, okay, what are you doing?
Brett:
Show me the way. Help me do this for my coaching and consulting business.
Aleric:
Exactly. That led me to really pivoting over to helping coaching and consulting businesses with YouTube ads. And actually for a long time, we have clients that we run ads for as well, but one of the big areas is we also train a lot of coaching and consulting businesses in how to run YouTube ads, helping, that's like a hybrid process, so helping them set it up, but then kind of handing over the keys. And then of course we've got clients that we'll run ads for as well. And we've also got some training programs and things, but really focused in that coaching consulting area. And it's something I love just because a lot of people that are going out and they're creating some kind of impact on people's lives or businesses and it's really rewarding to support those, support
Brett:
Them. Super cool, man. I love that background story. And so we're going to dive into content in just a minute. And the creative that works on YouTube, because the creative that works on YouTube is different than the creative that works on Meta or on TikTok or on other channels. And so what I love about your background though is that you really got to know the platform. Your goal wasn't to become an ads expert. That just kind of happened, but you created great content and people were consuming that. And it was one of the top tech review sites and app or channels and you were talking about apps and stuff, and it just took off for me. My background is from a different perspective, but still kind of the background just led perfectly to YouTube. I did TV back in the day, so I did TV ads kind of pre OMG, and so I really learned what makes for a great TV spot and how to target and things like that.
And what's interesting is that there are some similarities between TV ads and YouTube. I think YouTube is more TV than certainly Meta or TikTok or other platforms are. And then I really knew SEO, I really knew search, I knew query based traffic. And so you kind of bring those two together and that is YouTube or that certainly was YouTube back in the day. And so we were all e-commerce, and I remember, I still remember where I was, I was at a Google Marketing live, I believe it was in New York City. So I guess I mostly remember where I was when they talked about video action campaigns where you can run YouTube but bid to hit a CPA target customer, a cost pro acquisition target. And I was like, this is it, man. This is where this is a new opportunity for us. We can crush this. It's like all my world's colliding. And so then it just worked. And so super cool to hear that. Let's talk creative though a little bit. I think this is where most people go wrong. I've heard Google say that 50 to 70% of your success on YouTube is driven by creative. I think that's true. I think that's true across all platforms, but how do you guys approach creative and what's your framework for creative that works on YouTube?
Aleric:
So we really take kind of a three part framework of hook, educate, then call to action with the ads, especially since we're working with a lot of experts that have some type of value and expertise to share the educate portion we found is really important and it's essentially the key. So you talked about the similarities with television ads. I think that also there's kind of a similarity here too with the expert based ads to maybe those more infomercials or a short form one, not like a super long, but I remember watching some of those types of things growing up and obviously seeing the evolution to ads and essentially really hooking people and capturing their attention. And there's different ways to hook them. It could be identifying a problem that they have showing that you're going to have a solution. It could be more of a pattern interrupt, something to capture their kind of attention.
It could be the answer to a query that they're looking at. So it's like you kind of jump right in and it's almost like that's the video that they were meant to find, which works really well. But basically there's ways to hook people at the beginning to capture their attention, get them to decide, okay, I want to watch this ad. And then from there the educate section is really providing that value. I say I call 'em golden nuggets because we do want to keep them relatively short but worth their weight in gold. So they're small but really valuable. And so you might give a few golden nuggets, a few key points that's going to help somebody. So again, we work with a lot of coaches and consultants, so they might share a couple of keys to losing weight or to selling on Amazon or things like that, or a few keys to going and changing their life or personal development, whatever happens to be.
So share a little bit of that. And the goal is if you can give people this aha moment in the ad and actually provide them genuine value, they are far more likely to take action, the end, which is the call to action because we are sending people to a different kind of place. So whereas you're on the eCommerce side, usually going to be sending more to, and there's obviously different ways to do it, but more to have people purchase a product, what we're going to be doing is usually sending to some kind of training or lead magnet. And we found with YouTube it's the best to actually send it to a video based training because they're watching video on YouTube. They'll go from video to another video and they can go and opt in for that training and then kind of continue. And usually it would be going to book a call and then become a client, or the video might, or webinar might lead to a course or some kind of thing along those lines.
But essentially the hook, educate, call to action providing real value inside of the ad. And I think that's really, really key. And I'll give kind of an example of one of these aha moments, which I think is really, I don't always do this, but I think you'll appreciate this as somebody who I know you've created some been behind the creation of some pretty remarkable ads. One ad that worked really well for kind of a nutrition coach and fitness based person is he had a kind of cup measure you can see through, so you can see filled with oil. So just imagine this kind of measuring cup with oil in it. And he starts off the ad by saying, if a calorie's a calorie, why can't I just drink 2000 calories of oil every day and stay fit? And then he said, okay, now that we've established a calories and a calorie, why do you think that you could just eat 2000 calories of pizza and be healthier than 2000 calories of salad, right?
Because everything that you know about calories is wrong. There's actually more, let's talk a little bit about macros and then diving into that. And so basically then there's education. So it gives this aha moment. It's a visual representation. It's saying, okay, this now makes sense. And if you watch that, and I know that was a big moment for me, I had my own weight loss journey when I kind of realized that there was more to it than I had thought. And it's like how can you distill that into an ad then teach a little bit, provide value? So you've changed their worldview, now you provide value, now you have a call to action at the end to get them to go and sign up for the training where they're going to actually learn. So now you have the what and the why, but what's, how do I actually do this? So it's like, okay, calorie's not a calorie. I need to figure out macros. I've learned something, but I don't know what to do, what actually how to do it. And so that's what is behind the training that people opt into. So that's just an example.
Brett:
Yeah, it's so good. And I want to talk about the middle piece. I want to really dive into the hook because I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. So we'll spend some time there in a minute. But the educate piece, this is where you want someone to feel like my life is better just from watching your at. How weird is that? I feel like I got some value from this ad. In fact, I could probably take what you just said, A calorie is not a calorie. I can go quote that to my friends. I can use that at the next dinner party that I'm at and I'll sound super smart. So there's a little bit of value there. I believe it was John Caps in the book tested advertising methods, although I may have this wrong, where he talks about creating fascinations, these little elements of an ad where it's like, oh, I didn't know that.
That's super cool, right? Super cool related to your product or your service or your offering. And it just gets me intrigued and it also delivers some value. So that's really cool. And we've got a couple other layers that we add there for e-comm. But yeah, it's a similar approach where it's like, I want to teach you something you did not know about this because it's going to change your world and then you'll want to buy my product. And so I do want to talk about hook though for a minute because I think this is where a lot of people go wrong. I think this is where we want to contrast a little bit to our TV brethren and our TV friends and compadres tv. Historically, Madison Avenue type TV ads are great at hooking and getting people's attention, but often getting attention in the wrong way, getting attention in no way that relates to the product itself.
We've all seen TV ads we're like, man, that was funny. Monkey jumped out of a trunk and this thing happened and that thing happened. And you're like, I don't have a clue who that ad was for. And so I think you've got to hook someone in a way that's totally relevant to your product. And so you can do things like pattern interrupt, you talked about that. My buddy Ryan McKenzie from True Earth Laundry detergent strips, they've got this ad that was wildly successful that started with, hey, what should you never mix with water? And then it's witches and electronics and super silly stuff. And then it was also laundry detergent. You're like, what shouldn't mix laundry detergent with water goes on to explain it. So pattern interrupt can be really valuable. Sometimes it's just like a thought provoking question. My buddies at William Painter sunglasses, I kind of help them with media planning and stuff.
There was this great ad created by Raindrop where the spokesperson came out and he is like, your face is your moneymaker, so why would you cheapen it with cheap sunglasses or whatever? Why would you put cheap sunglasses on your moneymaker? And so coming up though with a hook that fits your product so that when someone is leaning in and paying attention, it's related to your product or related to your service or related to the webinar you're about to send them to. And so any other insights you would have on hook? When is that done Well, when is that done? Poorly? Curious how you guys test hooks, just any insights there. Yeah,
Aleric:
And we'll usually on the hook side test several different hooks. I think that's really important. You got to see what is going to work, what's not going to work, and I think having some type of curiosity is really valuable. Also, a great hook pushes away people that aren't a good ideal client and pulls in ideal clients. Now in the past, that was even more important. Back when, and we were talking about all the changes that we've both seen in the YouTube ad platform, but back when it used to be more of the paying per the CPV and it was more based around the 32nd view is what you paid for, then it was like really like, okay, let's get you off this ad if you're not relevant. Now it's more of an algorithm as we both know in terms of bidding based on the CPA.
And so it's a little less on that side. However, it still is important to train the algorithm. So you want the wrong people to skip and the right people to watch the ad. And so one of the things that is also valuable is calling out who that ideal potential person is or using language that they're going to resonate with. So for instance, one of our top hooks is actually around YouTube ads versus Facebook ads. Like YouTube ads beat Facebook ads every time. Let's face it, Facebook ad costs growing through the roof and even when you have great ads, they're almost impossible to scale. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can use YouTube ads just like the one you're watching right now to scale your coaching consulting business to seven or even eight figures.
Brett:
You've done that a few times. You said that
Aleric:
A few times.
Brett:
I have done that, a few. You have seen that ad so many times, but it's so good. And what's crazy is the way you structured that that was fitting several years ago, it's just as appropriate today. And I'm assuming that video is still crushing for you. Oh
Aleric:
Yeah, it's still crushing the original. And so we've done new, we filmed the video a few other times the educate section has changed, but before some of the changes to the platform, we had that one video. That one video was an eight figure ad. We did over 10 million revenue track from that one specific ad that we ran millions of views to. And since then, and
Brett:
That is one interesting thing too, and just as a side note here, Arik with Facebook, I do know some people that they have outliers with their Facebook ads as well and one ad that will vastly outperform the rest, but it still seems like on meta or other platforms, there is ad fatigue and that ad fatigue can sit in kind of quickly. Well, we continue to see with YouTube is if you find one or two or three ads that really hit, you may be able to run those for a year, sometimes for two years, right? Because the audiences on YouTube kind of turn over quickly, and so sometimes you get that winning horse and you can ride that thing for a long, long time.
Aleric:
Exactly, and even when we decided to phase that ad out, it was still working. It's just the content in the middle of the ad was not relevant anymore. We were talking about the old way of doing YouTube ads, which is more keyword and placement targeting, and it's shifted over into audience targeting, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit shortly. But basically that ad just continued to perform really well and then it's okay, well this is a good hook. Let's pair that with other new educate section, but with clients that maybe are going into YouTube for the first time, they don't know what hook's going to work or not. What we like to do is create four or five, six different hooks and actually just put those together. It doesn't mean you're filming that many videos. You want to film the videos, segment them out. I'm sure you probably do something similar.
Brett:
More modular type content. Exactly. Mod we can mix and match.
Aleric:
Yeah, so let's film half a dozen hooks. Let's film a couple educate sections, maybe a couple call to actions, maybe one goes to a training, one goes to a webinar or a PDF or whatever, and then put those all together. Now we have 24 different videos in the time it takes to film just two or three videos.
Brett:
I love that so much and awesome. So we got the hook and we found that that is the biggest lever to pull, the most important lever to pull. If you nail the hook, the rest becomes much easier if you do not land the hook than really none of the rest matters either. But let's talk about the educate piece. Some of the ways we look at this slightly differently, although I bet these components are also in your formula as well. We look at things like product demonstration for e-comm, I got to see the product in action. I want to see the sunglasses, I want to see the yard tool that I'm using. I want to see the automotive accessory. I want to see it. So that's important. I also want some social proof. I want to see, hey, are other people like me using this, enjoying it? Maybe there's some UGC or maybe it's just reviews on Amazon or on the.com or whatever that really bring to life this product works. And then I want to overcome objections because all skeptical, we've all been burned by ads in the past, so what am I doing to overcome objections? And so we kind of blend that into the middle part that we call kind of the product demo, but what are a few of the pieces there and the educate portion of the video that really makes that effective?
Aleric:
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question and there's similarities there. It's a little bit different in this side of things. One is you actually want to start the educate section by providing a little bit of credibility, but you don't want to go too over the top in that, and this is especially with expert based businesses because you want to demonstrate before you teach people that you are somebody to pay attention to,
Brett:
Why should I listen to this
Aleric:
Person? Exactly, why should I listen to you? Now, the mistake people make though is they say it right at the beginning and that's not a good hook unless it's something completely ridiculous where the coach behind this famous athlete, and that's going to be a hook in of itself. In general, what you want to do is you want to have a hook. Then you go into, we call it the why you, okay, so why should they listen to you? And that's really going to kind tout the expertise or credibility that you have. Sometimes that's more positioned around yourself and what you've done, or it could also be positioned around results that you've gotten, clients track, record, whatever it happens to be. So you do that relatively quickly. Once you do that, then we like to do either one kind of bigger teaching or three golden nuggets.
So it depends on, and actually we'll usually recommend split testing this. So like I said, there's two educate sections. So one is to teach on one particular topic, maybe to pull back that example, it could be on macros or it could be on our alpha AI targeting strategy and how that's different. It could be basically just one kind of general topic or it could be three tips or recommendations. One of the biggest is myths. So busting myths. So if people had a preconceived notion about something, how can you actually tear that down, tear that apart, and potentially addressing problems or mistakes other people have made in the past. So maybe they've tried something similar before, like you said, and here's why they shouldn't do this, shouldn't do that, shouldn't do this instead, here's what they should do. So I think that when you're looking at the educate section, there's a few different ways to do it, but you want to provide credibility, then you want to provide value, and what we talk about with our clients is to focus on the what and the why, not how is way too long. It's also what's gate kept behind.
Brett:
That's what they're buying, right?
Aleric:
Exactly. And ultimately it's not even behind the opt-in, it's really that's what they're buying at the end of the day, but we want to give them, it's like what and why should they care? What is it? And then they're going to go and get more information, more holistic picture by opting in than they go to training, which we've found. What works really well, this is actually interesting, is so what we do is call it a video conversion funnel, and it's like a cross between a VSL funnel and a YouTube video that people might watch instead of the classic VSLs that I'm sure both of us have seen, many people who are listening or watching have seen the ones with the text on the screen. It's like white background, black text on the screen, maybe a couple images pop up more slideshow. What we've found is going from YouTube to a training, it actually is good if it feels like a YouTube video, so a 15 to 20 minute long YouTube feeling video.
So where you're talking to the camera, if there's slides, you're in the bottom corner, maybe it's a demo, maybe it's even just you kind of talking to the camera and things pop up on the screen as you're talking right alongside, you have these little callouts or things, and so it feels like a YouTube video, but you follow the framework of A VSL to take people again and rehook them. You're demonstrating credibility, you're taking them through, you're teaching them something. You're then stacking what they're going to get from either an offer that you might be selling or in a lot of cases more booking a call, like a strategy call. Here's what you're going to get. And then tying back to that, so kind of following that strategy, but doing it in a way that feels like a YouTube video, so it's produced a YouTube video. That's what we found. I
Brett:
Like that because one of the things we look at a lot, and again, it's a little bit different with e-comm, but you want someone to feel like they just clicked and they ended up in the right place. I just saw this product demonstration. I saw some kind offer. I saw some person demonstrating the product. Now when I click and land on the lander, it feels like what I just saw in the video. So you don't want someone to click and then they're like, wait a minute, that right place that I clicked that I clicked the wrong thing, I got to get out of here. And I think it's a similar thing what you're talking about. I just consumed a YouTube video. I've already shown that I like YouTube. So now when I land on this page with some education or a deep dive into something that feels like YouTube as well.
So that landing page, that landing page experience is super, super important. I want to talk briefly because I want to get into some audience targeting in just a minute, and I'm trying to be mindful of time here. I want to talk about the call to action just really quickly because I think this is a place where people fall short. If you don't ask someone to take a specific action, guess what? They will not take it right? I think we assume too much. We think, well, I just showed this awesome product, or I showed this awesome training, and so they'll just click and they'll go consume it, but really we need to spell it out, click here, get the free trial, order the sample pack, watch this video so you can see this product in action. Sign up for a free whatever. And so anything you teach or help people, one thing we actually just did recently, we do quite a bit of YouTube for retail support. So hey, this product available in Walmart near you, it'll be the best price you can find. So what do you specifically want them to do? Do you want them to click and buy? You want 'em to go to Walmart, you want 'em to target? What do you want them to do? So anything you teach on call to action.
Aleric:
So what we teach on that side, and that's a really good point. You need to tell people to be able to take action, and that is what's going cause those conversions. And so we like to recommend saying the call to action three times at the end of the ad. Now, sometimes it is time sensitive, so it depends on where people are at the length of the ad, but in general, three times is really valuable because it's the repetition. And so I'll give you an example in a second. I don't have it as quite as rehearsed as my hook, but I'll give you an example in a second. But what we say is we want to restack the value that they just received. So now that you've seen just how powerful YouTube ads can be, now that you've seen why it's more than just counting calories, I want to invite you two, click the link right here on the screen or below to go and register for our training.
We're going to walk you through exactly how you can X, Y, and Z. So what are they going to get? So remind them, we just gave them value. Attention spans are short. It's like, all right, we just gave you this value. We want to give you more value, and then you tell them exactly what to do. It's not just like, oh, sign up for my training. It's click the link right here on the screen or below the video, and that's going to get you access to our full training where you're going to learn how you can X, Y, and Z so you can achieve the result that they want. And when you go and sign up by using the link right here on the screen below the video, you're going to be able to get instant access. All you got to do is put in your name, email, phone number, and you're going to be able to get full access to our training where we're going to show you how this works and there's only so much we can cover in a quick video like this. That's why we have this training available. And that way you can bookmark, you're going to be able to have that as your resource. So something like that, again, it's going to be different depending on the person, but basically it's another reason that they want to do it. They want to take action reminding them that if they already got value here, they're going to get so much more and then add a little bit of urgency.
It's going to depend. If it's a webinar, that's an easier one, right? It's like we're watching this, there's a webinar coming soon, et cetera. And then at the end, once we say click the link again, we'll actually go into a screen. I'm actually very curious if you do something like this because, and I will say it's been a little bit since we really more in depth tested this, so now we just kind of do it. We just kind of rolled it out. But basically at one point we tested putting a picture on the screen of the opt-in page that we're sending people to and not doing it, and it actually increased the conversions by small, but one 2% on the overall, not necessarily on the, but basically it actually increases the conversions by just showing, okay, here's where you're going to go. You're going to get to a page looks just like this, just putting your name, email, phone number, you can get instant access to the full training, and at the end we actually just show the page. And it's also part of a squeeze too because yes, YouTube will give you a little bit of a countdown, but it's not always the exact same. You don't want your ad to abruptly end people are entranced and then the ad ends
Brett:
Give them time to go and click. Yeah, it's interesting. We've seen a couple of different things work for e-com. Sometimes you'll do outtakes like this, William Painter do this and a number of others at the end, they're like, it'll do outtakes. And they'll be like, why don't you just click the link? Why don't you just go check it out? I think what's valuable about what you're saying where you show the actual page or you show the actual product is again, it creates that consistency of what I saw in the ad is exactly what I see on the landing page. And so now I know I'm in the right place. It's also kind of priming me to take that action. We don't generally do that where you show the actual page that may change over time, but I like that approach and it totally makes sense that that would work well.
Cool. So let's talk audience targeting. This is one of those areas where pretty unique to YouTube the way you can target audiences here. I know on meta most the advertisers I know in the agencies, I know they're doing more broad open targeting, letting the algorithm do all the work. The YouTube algorithm is powerful, but we're still finding, for the most part, we want to give the algorithm a little bit of help and we want to lead the algorithm into the right path to eliminate waste and to get us rolling into results faster. I love the connection that Google own YouTube and Google's got tons of search behavioral data, and so why not tap into that? What are people searching for? And so building custom segments or custom audiences around that, but would love to understand how do you guys generally think about audience targeting?
Aleric:
And that's a really great question there, and that's what I love too about Google and YouTube and Google owning YouTube is just, there's so much data and I think that's what people don't really think about as much when they think about running ads on YouTube is like, wait a second, Google has all the search data. They also have Google Chrome, so they know basically the websites people are going to Google Analytics install more than half of every website. They're tracking all that details. There's a reason Gmail is free. There's a lot of data they're getting. So there's so much data that Google is utilizing and pulling into the overall platform. And so essentially what we found is the best way to target is what we call alpha AI targeting. And so a lot of people when we look at what they're setting up is they're building using prebuilt Google audiences, and those could be good.
I'm sure both of us have examples of campaigns that do really, really well with prebuilt in market audiences, especially things like that. Google also has started pre-populating certain audiences too to make it a little bit easier for people that aren't building their own. However, what I've found is getting more granular and building your own audiences is going to produce the best results. And so what we do is we recommend our clients really do some research, and I'll talk about my software. Keyword search actually does a little bit of that for us for our clients in just a second, but basically doing the research to figure out, okay, what are people interested? And there's a few different types. So there's custom affinity, it's what are people interested in, what's their general interest? And this is different than Facebook and other platforms where you have to go through the pre-populated list.
Like I said, yes, Google has that, but this is where you can put in interests that people already that people have, and it could be a more granular interest. And Google's AI is going to find who those people are. Now, I know you of course know this, Brett, on your side, but just in terms of the listener, the person watching, just so you know, you can actually build your own audience. This is what they're interested, but then we can go deeper because we talked about how Google has all of the search data, both on Google and on YouTube. What you can do is target people with that custom intent based on what they're actually searching for on YouTube or Google. So people are looking up how to lose weight or how to run, how to use YouTube ads or best ad platform or whatever for these different examples. And there's so many examples here. You can target people that are actually searching for that exact thing and then get in front of them with those ads. And we found that that's really powerful, especially people have Google search campaigns, they can kind of carry over some of their best keywords into these custom intent audiences. People running the old type of YouTube ads, which is more targeting direct keywords or maybe placements. They can turn those into custom intent targeting.
Brett:
And it's just so valuable to capture that search data because yeah, you know what non-brand search terms are converting Google Shopping or Performance Max or search. And so build an audience of those people. So those people searching for those keywords on Google or on YouTube now you can kind of bundle them into a segment, target them with YouTube ads. A couple little variations we like to use there. Well, and one other quick call out, so we got that custom intent audience. I believe that the amount of time is, those are refreshed about every 14 days or thereabouts. I think that's another reason A where sometimes you can find a winning ad and it just keeps working, right? Because that audience is always being refreshed and renewed there. On the e-comm side, we like to use keywords, especially if it's a larger ticket item where someone's maybe buying an expensive pillow or mattress or something, automotive or whatever, where it's like competitor X versus competitor Y as the keyword or competitor X reviews, competitor X demonstration where you can tell if someone's typing in these keywords, they're in research mode, they're trying to decide which product to buy.
And so now we build an audience, and that usually works on the affinity side where you're, and this is totally unique, and I 100% agree with you, we rarely use the the shelf audiences from Google. They can work, but I would rather give Google like, Hey, here's my top five competitor URLs. So Google build an audience and affinity audience based on those signals, and those often work very well and can scale at least to a certain degree. So really good stuff.
Aleric:
Exactly. The URLs is another area that we found on the affinity side that works really well. The intent based is still our top performer there because it's what People're searching for. But the URL audience is performing better than the standard affinity or like you said, prebuilt or even just typing in just individual keywords. Going in and doing those URLs is really powerful because Google has a lot of this knowledge. I've had people ask me, how can that even work? How do they know? Well, they know because people go to Google search and they click on a link and they go to the website. People don't just always type it in or they're using Google Chrome, most popular, one of the most popular browsers, and then they're also Google Analytics isn't on half of the website, so they have all this data. It's just waiting for you to tap into it. And it's interesting, I was talking with somebody else in the space as well, another person at War Room Coum as well, and one thing that he was telling, love
Brett:
Kum, shout out to Kum. Oh
Aleric:
Yeah, exactly. Shout out to kasum. Yeah, Kasum ISS awesome, but they're again rhymes then too. So look at that. Anyways, I was talking with him and he thought, and I would agree that I'm curious your take. I think that he was saying that he believes that Google just has so much more targeting capability. They're holding back because they realize if they gave access to the full thing, it would just be almost ludicrous, your ability to leverage and
Brett:
Open up privacy issues, and they're really concerned about mitigating lawsuits and stuff like that. So yeah, I would 100% agree. Google knows everything about everyone essentially. And so I do think they're holding back on targeting probably somewhat to protect the user more so to protect themselves probably. Yeah,
Aleric:
Exactly.
Brett:
Yeah, super interesting. Cool. Let's talk about your research tool then and keyword search.com. Correct? And how does that work?
Aleric:
Yeah, so one of the things that I found is one of the biggest things that we were doing consistently, either for the clients we were running ads for or the clients we were training to run ads, we were teaching them how to do this, where we were just constantly doing this research, figuring out, okay, what are the different keywords to either put in affinity audience or especially for custom intent, what are all the things people are searching for on YouTube and Google? What are all the different keywords and especially long tail keywords, what people are looking up? Also, what URLs could people be going to UR L audiences? Maybe they're typing in specific channel-based keywords. So we were doing a lot of this manual research, and even when we were leveraging other tools, it was still a manual process. We had spreadsheets, we had templates, all this stuff.
We were going and putting them in the spreadsheets. So we were doing research, we were using a combination of YouTube's auto complete for the YouTube side because that's a little less out there. And then we were using some of these other, there's obviously a lot of the big tools out there that get Google and some YouTube keywords and things like that. But again, it was still a process where we were having to take it from that, put it into a spreadsheet, then go and add it in and create custom audiences. This is a lot of time, why not go and just build our own software? So I set out to do this three years ago, even before the AI side of things, it was earlier iteration, which I won't get into as much, was kind of finding these keywords on YouTube. What we did is we wanted to actually set it up to get more YouTube data, so it's a little more complicated, but basically we're going in and there's certain data that we're actually scraping based on search results and what people are potentially searching in addition to leveraging the existing data based on Google based keywords, which is more available through APIs that Google has.
And we're combining that by looking at what are people searching for, what are they searching for on YouTube? What are they searching for on Google? What potential interests do they have and what websites might they be going to? And what we have done is actually built an AI wrapper around it. So essentially what keyword search does is it allows you to go in and just type in your business some details about it, put in the URL of your landing page, and it'll go and scan that and it will go and give you all of the different affinity audiences to potentially target. So it'll give you like, all right, here's all the different things to set up. It'll give you all the different search terms and keywords for Google and YouTube, categorize by topic with the ability to go and expand each topic. So if I was to put my business ad outreach in, it could go and grab a topic, YouTube ads, and it'll have some keywords like how to use YouTube ads, YouTube ads tutorial, and if I wanted more, I would just click expand and it go and find another dozen keywords.
You just keep clicking that as much as you want, and then it'll go and have other areas, lead generation, I have lead, how to get more leads for my coaching business or et cetera, et cetera, want more. Go and expand that. And it'll actually have a bunch of these different categories. These categories could potentially become a custom intent audience, or you can just choose which keywords you want, you select which ones you want, it'll get all of the different affinities, and you can just choose, okay, which affinities, which keywords do you want? And in one click sync it to Google Ads and it'll actually build the audience for you inside of Google ads through the connection with Google ads that we have in the software. And so it's an ability to go and instead of take all this research, which could take hours, especially if you're doing more robust research, we found the average time it takes to go from performing the search and the AI to actually syncing an audience is 2.6 minutes, which is pretty exciting. So essentially we put it all into the software keyword search, AI ad targeting for YouTube and Google Ads, and now it's starting to do more features as well. We're adding some more features around different targeting and also agency features as well.
Brett:
Super cool, man. Excited to check it out. Sounds really smart, sounds efficient. And also probably going to guide someone through the process, especially if you've never built these types of audiences before. It's different than what you do on Meta or on TikTok or anything else. And so this tool is going to guide you through that. So Alrick, love what you do, buddy. Keep up the good work as people are listening and thinking, okay, I need some Alex's training, or I need to check out this tool. How can people connect with you and your team?
Aleric:
Absolutely. Thank you so much. So yeah, the tool is keyword search.com. There's also a free trial to go and check that out over there. And then I also have a GIF for anybody who's listening. I've got our 19 page YouTube ads strategy, PDF. This is more focused on coaching consulting businesses, but you can go to add outreach.com/gift, that's A DO UTR EAC h.com/gift, and you can go and get that free gift. And then if you are interested in talking with us about whether it be YouTube ads or something like that, you can just go to add outreach.com and there's some details on the page and links to all the social, you can look me up everywhere, of course on YouTube as well. It's Eck.
Brett:
Love it, man. And so we've, so listeners kind of get the inside scoop. We've kind of created this little arrangement where his legion or coaches and consultants come to OMG or come to me. I'm like, you need to talk to Al Rick, right? Go talk to him. His team knows what to do. Same on your side as e-commerce companies come to you. You're like, Hey, go talk to Brad in omg. And so it's a really good relationship that way. I love what you guys are doing because every time someone sees that ad with Arick on there in his Austin office talking about YouTube beating Facebook every time, it may nudges someone a little bit closer to saying, I should test YouTube. I should test YouTube ads. So keep up with the good work, always fun to riff with another YouTube expert. So ton of fun, man. Really appreciate it.
Aleric:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Brett. Really appreciate it as well.
Brett:
Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think of the show. If you know someone who would benefit from this show, please share it. Please review it. Please rate it helps other people find podcasts. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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