An old friend once said to me (quoting – or so he said – Henry Ford) that, if you’re doing well, you can afford to advertise, if you’re not doing well, you can’t afford not to.
I’ve searched for this quotation and from what I can see it doesn’t actually exist – however, it’s not quite an urban myth. What Henry Ford actually said was:
A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.
Why am I thinking about this? Well, I have researched long and hard about how to grow a YouTube channel and, packaged in various different styles, it basically comes down to:
- Be consistent (post regularly)
- Create Quality Content
- Get involved in communities (connect with your audience outside your channel)
- Hustle (whatever that means in reality)
Rarely, does anybody actually discuss whether or not you should advertise. In fact, in honesty, most ‘gurus’ who do say you should advertise say you should only do it once you are doing well. Others say that most people prefer to learn methods for growth that don’t cost money (although of course they do need big investments of time).
This opens up three basic questions:
- Does Henry’s advice apply to the modern world?
- Should I use advertising to promote my YouTube channel?
- If I do use advertising, then where and how should I advertise?
The three main things I think I need to drive are:
- YouTube: Watch Time – how long have people spent watching your video – YouTube insists on 40,000 hours of Watch Time before you can monetise your channel
- Facebook: Page Likes – the more people who like your page, the more people the content you publish will reach organically
- YouTube: Subscribers – subscribers are your ‘active’ audience, and also YouTube insists on a minimum of 1000 for you to be able to monetise your channel
Starting from 27th August 2018. I have just uploaded my 7th YouTube video. With each previous upload I ‘advertised’ it myself (so without paying) by posting on Facebook (by posting directly on my Page and then sharing this post to my personal timeline). I also sent a set of WhatsApp messages to a group of friends with whom I have a more current personal connection. On the Friday evening, I post a Facebook message of ‘In case you missed it’ re-linking the video. The results in terms of Watch Time are here:
On the 27th, I decided to follow this up by boosting the Facebook post. Would paying Facebook to push my link help reach more people? Rather stupidly, I also at the same time sent a general invite to my friends to ‘like’ my Facebook Page … I should have known better, if you want to see the effect of something then change only one thing at a time!!
Anyway, aside that schoolboy error, here are the same numbers plus those generated during the ad:
There is, as you can see, a sizeable jump in Watch Time at the right hand side which co-incides with then the advert was running.
In terms of Facebook Page Likes, it is harder to work out. I pretty much doubled the number of people who ‘liked’ my page whilst this ad was running, but in reality it’s likely that these ‘likes’ came from my actual ‘Facebook friends’ that I had invited rather than those newly introduced by the Facebook ad. Again, schoolboy error or doing two things at once.
In terms of YouTube subscribers, this ‘advertising’ didn’t appear to have much of an impact. At best, I got one extra subscriber (although this one could easily have come from inviting my Friends to like my Page and one of them having clicked through and subscribed to my Channel).
I think I have followed most ‘good practices’ in terms of both asking people to subscribe and including the appropriate links in the videos themselves. So, on that basis, I think we can safely conclude that these views did not drive subscribers.
One unquantifiable result, however, that came during the running of this ad was that YouTube suggested one of my own videos to me on my mobile Home Screen. I can’t be sure, but I took this as a major breakthrough in that it was the first time this had happened even though I had been posting for 7 weeks. Are there occasions when the famous YouTube algorithm doesn’t exclude your own content? … I suspect so.
So, on balance, was this a success? On the face of it not really. Overall the ad generated 50 clicks so it looks like I paid £0.15 (USD 0.20) for each click on the link to my YouTube video. These clicks in themselves didn’t earn me a penny (cent), so on that basis a waste of money. However in terms of the longer game, perhaps this was a good investment if only because of the ‘suggested video’ effect I mentioned above.
Next test, is it worth trying to drive ‘Page Likes’ without pushing them to YouTube in the first instance? Perhaps having people attached to your Page so that they become a more ‘captive audience’ is a better approach than immediately driving them onto another platform? I’ll prepare a post along these lines and try it out. Stay tuned.
