YouTube advertising masterclass episode 2 – Stuff We Love 005 – Tom Breeze

Quite simply Tom Breeze is the best YouTube advertiser we have ever encountered. Tom is so confident in his ability to deliver value for his customers that he works exclusively on a results basis. If you are looking to run more effective YouTube ads you should get in touch with Tom and see if you can get him to do it for you.

Tom Breeze 0:00
Welcome back to the YouTube ads masterclass, we’re in the third and final section of the training. In the first video, we talked a little bit more about the psychology of your customer and the types of offers and how you position them in the right way for your YouTube ads. Then we talked a lot more about the targeting, and how to get in front of your clients and your customers in the right way. Now we’re gonna start focusing on the creative, what actually makes an ad powerful, how to put it together, and how to have the biggest impact because we know we can get in front of your customers, now, we know what they’re thinking, we have the perfect offer for them. Let’s try and make this work as best as possible with some great creative. Creative really is the thing that separates all the businesses from everybody else. So if you get this bit right, and you know what you’re aiming for, you’re going to get a much better result with your ad campaigns.

What are the main types of YouTube Ads?

Tom Breeze 0:46
Okay, so let’s talk about this because when it comes to YouTube, there are kind of two main types of YouTube ads that you can run on YouTube. Really one main ad that you’re gonna want to pay attention to. There are lots of things like Unskipable ads, and there’s kind of a Google Display Network ads, you can run, I’m going to ignore that for the time being, you can get into that later. First of all, you really want to master what’s called a true view platform ads, okay? The two types are, you get the Instream Ads the videos before the videos you are about to watch. So you press play on a video on YouTube as a user, you just meant to watch, just about to watch the video, sorry, and then an ad pops up in front of you. Okay, you know, when that happens? Yep, the most annoying ads on the internet potentially. That’s what I do all day long. I annoy the world it’s a beautiful thing.

Tom Breeze 1:31
Okay, cool. So to type two main types, that one is called an Instream Ads and you characterise it with the skip button on the bottom right hand corner and in the bottom left hand corner, you have the white section where you can have like, there’s a blue button inside of that white section, bit of text there. You’ll be encouraging people to click the button on the bottom left hand corner, as opposed to the bottom right hand corner where it says skidpad, of course. So those are called Instream, they play in the stream or the video you’re about to watch and they can run in the middle of the video and also the end of the video as well. nstream is probably the most popular ad that’s running on YouTube. I don’t want to ignore the other type of ad, which is a discovery ad, you’ll see on the on the right hand side, it’s almost like the ones that are also suggested those ones, as I said, are called discovery. And the pricing model of these two different ads are different.

Tom Breeze 2:20
You pay per engagement, which is really important, right? Because with Discovery ads, the ones that appear on the right hand side, you pay per click. So as soon as someone decides to click to play your video, you’re going to pay at that point, okay, so as it loads up on YouTube, and they watch it, you’ve already paid, okay, you pay per click of that video, because you’re paying for that engagement, right? They’ve seen your thumbnail, and they’ve chosen to click it, consciously made that decision to watch that video. Whereas with an Instream Ad, you’re just interrupting people, and you’re getting in front of people and they have an option to skip your ad and opt out of that ad should they so wish, but you’re only ever pay if they watch past 30 seconds. Now, there were some changes to the YouTube platform where now a view as an video is after 10 seconds but you still only pay when someone watches past 30 seconds, which means that if someone just 29 seconds of your video, and then press the skip ad button, it won’t cost you a penny. Now you also do pay in two other scenarios. One is when they click to go to your websites. The other is if they actually get to the end of your video, if your video is less than 30 seconds in length, but that’s not quite so common. So you’re really paying when someone watches past 30 seconds or decides to click back to your website. Which means as I said earlier, if someone watches 29 seconds of your video, and skips ad, it doesn’t cost you a penny, but it’s great brand awareness too.

Which are the most effective YouTube Ads?

Tom Breeze 3:40
So these types of ads can perform incredibly well but we’re going to really double down and focus on the Instream Ad format. One thing you want to be aware of when it gets to you your YouTube videos, is you really want people to click at the end of your video, of course, you want people to go to your website, right. The more clicks you get per impression in terms of when your ad actually loads up, the more clicks you get that’s called your click through rate, your CTR. When you’re having more and more people click YouTube watching that and see that okay, lots people engaging with that ad, that must be a good ad, and you get rewarded with slightly lower cost over time but also you get opportunities to scale more as well. So you really want a good click through rates. The aim is anywhere between 1.5% Plus, if you can get to 2% and 2% and above, you’re doing really well as a fantastic ad.

How do you increase the click through rates on YouTube Ads?

Tom Breeze 4:31
Okay, so with these types of ads, what we do is we run them and we do a lot of split testing, and we’ll give you a little hack that I think you’re gonna find very, very powerful indeed. So we ran this ad, and when we did the split test we did is very subtle. On the left hand side one you’ll see that there wasn’t at the end of the video it just like click here to take the quiz. Okay, you’re not gonna watch this video, but you just say click here to take the quiz. There’s a quiz about fitness products by a great company called Vshred.com. On the right hand side we tested with the countdown timer. In the last few seconds of that video, we actually counted people down to add that scarcity but also to let people know that running at a time, you better click otherwise that other video you’re we’re about to watch is going to load up instead. Okay, so what we did is we add this countdown timer at the end of the video, and it bumped up the click through rates by 32%. Just by that one very small edit. Now scarcity, and running out of time or running out of anything, is a really powerful, motivator and very persuasive method and technique to use. This is a really subtle way of using it without being obnoxious, without having to tell any kind of false scarcity stuff, it’s purely about like okay, time’s running out, you’re running out of time to watch this video, click the link if you’re going to click the link or not, and bumped up that click through rate by 32%, which made a massive difference to our performance in the account.

Tom Breeze 5:52
So little things like that. If you add a countdown timer at the end of your video, you can expect to see amazing results as well. Now, if you found that useful, please do make sure you subscribe. I know you watch a lot of videos and people ask you to subscribe, but I really mean it. Okay, please do subscribe to this video. If you look below. If you’re on a mobile, this is a red button, click that and then ring the bell and you’ll get notified for more videos that we release. If you’re a desktop you’ll see in the bottom right hand corner the watermark, hover over that click subscribe. You won’t go anywhere you’ll stay on this video, but it means you’ll get notified when I release new videos.

Tom Breeze 6:22
Okay, cool. So let’s move on. So hopefully you found that technique useful. If you did, by the way, leave a comment below. I always like to hear positive feedback. YouTube’s full of trolls, full of negative comments all the time. So it’s nice to hear something positive from time to time. So please do leave comments below as well. Okay, cool.

Here’s another technique we did. We decided to, before the end of the video, when we’re doing the call to action, and it’s coming to the end of the video, we had also add this little graphic in the top left hand corner, where it says get ready to click. Just the green or the blueish green marker will just rotate round circle, they’re showing you that kind of running out of time. In a second, the button is going to appear to click when the bottom was already there. We’re kind of priming people to say, hey, look, get ready to click because I’m gonna tell you to click in just a second and then as soon as Todd here, Todd brown decides to then say click the button in the video, then a lot more people decided to click because we primed them beforehand, we told them it was coming up. They will kind of look at that and notice that they had to click in a second. By telling them to do that we saw huge increases in click through rates. Now, the first week we did this, we saw dramatic improvements like 45% improvement in the click through rate. I just didn’t believe it. Over time, that did drop down a little bit but we’re roughly around about 28% Click Through Rate improvements as a result of doing this, not just with Todd’s videos, but with loads of other clients that we’re working with as well. So now we test this every single time because it can make a dramatic difference to the performance of that click through rates, because basically you’re just telling people to click. Also we also do the countdown timer at the end there as well with this video, just to add that extra impact for the video itself. So this makes no difference to your scripts, no difference to your presenting ability, no difference to your video content as such. It’s just an edit, tweak and you can really improve your click through rates, which is sometimes the biggest thing you can do with your YouTube ad performance. So hopefully you can use those techniques and hopefully find them very, very useful. If you do please comment, please share, please do whatever you can to promote this video because that’s what I’m looking for. I’m really looking for you to subscribe.

How should you structure your YouTube Ad content?

Tom Breeze 8:26
Having said that already, Okay, so that’s about getting video viewers ready to go.

Now, when it comes to your ads themselves the structure of your ad, I wanted to give you a bit of a timeline to know how to create the best ad, I’m not going to answer all the ins and outs about like how to pull on the pain points and focus on the aims and dreams, your customers and the status, and how to position your offer in the right way, and your credibility, and your action plan, your walkthroughs, or anything like that. I’m much more interested in making sure that you understand what to think about and why YouTube is different. Of course, when it comes to that payment method of paying at 30 seconds or beyond, you want to keep that in mind. Okay?

Tom Breeze 9:03
So you’ve got this thirty second window at the start of the video, you’ve actually got a five second window at the start as well because they might hit the skip ad button. So you really want to grab their attention by being really relevant at the start of the video. And then what I’d recommend you do is actually keep your videos to less than 140 seconds, we’ve done so much testing on those different video lengths. Yes, you can get some videos that are longer than 8 or 10 minutes sometimes that perform incredibly well. Sometimes you’ll see ads that work really well at 30 seconds. On the whole it’s a kind of a bell curve of performance, we tend to find two minutes, two minutes 20 is the perfect time for your video. So keep that in mind. When you look at this timeline of your video, in the first five seconds, you’re going to want to really make sure you call out your audience. Call out your demo in terms of their age group, and who you’re getting in front of now you don’t have to say actually physically say hey, if you’re between 35 and 45 You could say that if you wanted to Like, hey, if you’re a male between the ages of 35 and 45, listen, then you could do it if you want to do it that way. That sounds a bit cheesy, but you get the point. What you might like to do, instead of just do it visually, you might want to use some B roll perhaps and show it a gym member between the ages of 35, who’s a male and 45, who’s a male, for example, just show that like, then someone who’s watching that video is like, oh, that seems like me, that’s like someone like me. So I’m therefore more interested in what this product has to say, especially if we’re talking about fitness stuff, because most people will think that’s for a younger demographic. For example, when you see it’s like for 35 to 45, or even 65 plus for example, then you’re starting to see like, Ah, okay, it’s about gym equipment, and it’s a 65 plus male, maybe this is for me, then I’m much more interested at that point. Okay, not for me personally, but you get the point. So you call it out and start the video. And then before 20 seconds is up, you really want to do a call to action. Now, I like to say, here’s the product, and here’s what I’ve got for you, here’s where you should go and grab this product. Whether it be free or whether we paid, I position the product early in the before 20 seconds is up, because what I want to do is make sure people know this is an ad, people know that I’m promoting something.

How do you move people from curiosity to convince me mode in YouTube ads? 

Tom Breeze 11:11
You do a very clever thing was psychology at this point, because what you end up finding out you do in the video itself, is you’re moving someone from curiosity, which you don’t really want, I’ll explain why in a second, and you’re moving them to, alright, convince me. That’s a great strategy to be in when you’re watching a video Ad. If you’re getting people to watch your video and think, Alright, convince me, why did you go and buy this product or opt in for this webinar, or whatever it is, you’ve got, you’re then justifying their decision making as to say, I’m going to hang on and listen to what you have to say, you’re going to dramatically improve your click through rates by almost pre selling or priming them with the fact that you’ve got that product to promote in the first place. Okay, so you’re moving into convincing mode in their mind. The reason you don’t want curiosity is because you don’t want people to be thinking, Oh, this could be interesting. I’m gonna hang on and listen to what and then later on, like, Ashley, no, it’s not for me, because they’ll go past 30 seconds. Yep, you pay. So you don’t want people watching past 30 seconds out of curiosity. You want them we want them watching based on our it convince me, it’s a big psychological shift in video thinking, because so many people say Oh, start with a story or really grab their attention and use a really big powerful hook. We’ve done a load of that on YouTube and it’s not the best thing. If you’re a creative genius, or a sales genius, and you want to do that, give it a go, by all means, because you can get amazing results. For the vast majority of us who aren’t creative, like absolute geniuses, then you’re better off showcasing your products, or what you want people to do at the end of the video before 20 seconds up. So give it a call to action, give it a soft call to action, just to let people know, if you click that link, it’ll take you through to the webinar but let me tell you exactly what’s covered in this webinar. So you can kind of give them more information there.

Tom Breeze 12:53
Then we want to get into your core content of your video, we talk about your credibility, break down that product, give it a demonstration, perhaps talk about the man on the street and testimonials and that sort of stuff if you wish to as well. Building that core content so it feels like a really, really solid ad. At the end of the video, at that point, you definitely want to put a call to action. The end is a final call to action, make it nice and clear. Make it very obvious what you want people to do and what to expect next. So they’re going to click what’s the next page look like perhaps, and then obviously add their countdown timers, and either get ready to click as well should you wish.

Tom Breeze 13:31
Remember, story and humour can cost you. We’ve created something incredibly funny ads with clients and they’ve worked incredibly well. We’ve tried it and it’s failed as well. Humour is a risky one. Stories are really risky one as well, because you don’t want to have to happen is people get engaged in a story, I think it’s gonna be amazing, the watch past 30 seconds, but actually, they weren’t interested in the product aand so then they skip the ad, it’s gonna cost you a lot of money, because you’re gonna have loads of watching past 30 seconds, and very few people clicking to actually go and buy your product or your service or sign up to it if it’s free.

What should you do if you found this YouTube advertising traing useful?

Tom Breeze 14:01
Cool. So if you found this video useful, and he found his whole series useful, please make sure you subscribe. This is your last chance to subscribe because we’re gonna be releasing much more content around this tools, interviews, we’re going deep into kind of like much more detail about what it takes to make video ads work, what we’ve done with other clients, how the videos work best, why we do certain things, what we don’t do certain things campaign builds. We’re planning on going deep into so much content in our channel. So what I’d love you to do at this point is make sure you just subscribe to this channel. So make sure on the bottom right hand corner of this video, you hover over and click the subscribe button. Or if you’re on a mobile, make sure you look below the red button and subscribe. Hope you found this useful. Please do leave comments. Like it, share it, whatever you think you need to do to make sure you help me out here. I just love to connect with the builders community and I’ll let you know how this channel goes because I tell you what, we’re gonna be building this up and I’ll let you know how powerful this channel becomes vs. eMail marketing as well so make sure you do all those things subscribe and I’ll see you very soon thanks so much.

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