More than 43 million minutes of video is uploaded on YouTube every day. So, within just a couple of weeks of you uploading your five-minute music video, it’s competing to stand out amongst over a billion minutes of newly-uploaded video, not to mention all the preexisting videos on the platform.
Our previous post on promoting music videos on YouTube showcased the best methods to gain visibility without spending any money. But if you’re really committed to getting some serious view counts and having your music videos takeoff in weeks rather than months, it’s time for you to explore YouTube ads.
Every week, we get some variant of the question, “How do I get my music video on YouTube ads?”, and “Can you promote a music video on YouTube?”
One of the fastest and most cost-effective methods of gaining views for music videos on YouTube is to promote them with skippable in-stream ads and in-feed video ads on YouTube. These types of ads and campaigns can be configured and activated with a Google Ads account.
We’ve helped over 300 artists find success on YouTube, and in this post, we’re packing in all of that data and insight to show you exactly how to promote your music videos using YouTube ads — without breaking the bank.
How to get views on music videos with YouTube ads
The first thing you probably want to know is:
How much does it cost to promote a music video on YouTube?
On average, the cost-per-view (CPV) to promote a music video on YouTube to a US audience, can range between $0.01 to $0.05 per view. The optimal daily budget may range between $1 and $10 per day, depending on the target views and competition for a given video.
This means, for $100 or less, most music videos can get about 5,000 views from a relevant, targeted audience that’s highly likely to be interested in that type of music.
Sound good? Let’s dive in.
How to promote music videos using YouTube ads
- To promote a music video with YouTube ads, the first thing you’ll need is a Google Ads account. Set this up on a computer (much easier than on a mobile device). Once you complete the sign up and link a payment method, you’ll probably see a screen like the one below. Click “New campaign” to configure a new ad campaign.
- Under the “Choose your objective” screen, click “Product and brand consideration”.
- Select “Video” as the campaign type, and “Influence consideration” as the subtype.
- Leave the bid strategy on default (maximum CPV). Specify the budget and dates. We recommend specifying a daily rather than total budget, so that you’re more in control of how your money is being spent. If you decide that something needs improving after a couple of days, having specified a daily spend limit beforehand will ensure you don’t spend too much money on a sub-optimised campaign.It’s also important to specify an end date.
Never leave a campaign without an end date specified — if you forget about it, you can end up with a very unpleasant surprise on your credit card statement.
- Keep an eye on the estimated statistics that Google Ads displays on the right. This shows Google’s best guess of how many impressions your ad might get with the settings you’re choosing. You want to narrow this down to a range of about a few hundred thousand to a few million.Too narrow an estimate (less than, say, 100K, if you’re targeting the entire United States) means that your reach might be very limited and expensive.
Too broad (say, more than 20 million), means that your ad spend might be getting wasted on showing your ad to people who aren’t really interested. (Don’t worry, you’ll learn more about this as we go along.)
- “Inventory type” refers to the sort of videos on (or next to) which your ad will be displayed. If your video contains a lot of profanity and you believe your audience is most likely watching other such videos, you might want to choose “Expanded”. On the other hand, if you believe your audience is unlikely to be watching videos with any profanity, you should choose “Limited”. Most people should just leave this setting on “Standard.”
Important: Note that YouTube ads policies do not allow ads that contain profanity or adult content. If you’re trying to promote a video that contains such content, you’ll need to make a separate, “clean” video to use as the ad (which you can upload as an unlisted video to keep it hidden from you channel), and link that ad to your main video.
- Under “Excluded types and labels”, be sure to check the “Embedded” and “Live streaming videos”. You don’t want your ad to be shown on videos embedded on some other site, because you have no idea what that site may be about or the user experience there. (Would you want someone associating your video with a super-spammy, annoying website that they happen to find themselves on?)
You also don’t want to interrupt live streams and annoy potential fans.As in the earlier case, if you want to exclude videos with mature ratings, check those labels to exclude them.
- Choose your demographics settings based on your best guess on how old your audience might be, and what their gender might be. If you already have music on Spotify, our step-by-step guide to Spotify analytics will help you figure out more about your audience demographics and tons more invaluable insights about your audience.
- The “Audience segments” section also helps define audience interests. The “Affinity” option is particularly useful for promoting music videos.
- For the video in our example, we’ve chosen “Jazz Enthusiasts”. Explore other genres on the list to find the ones most closely related to your audience’s interests.
- The “custom segment” option is a great way to uncover insights about your potential target audience if you aren’t sure where to start. When you provide Google a few keywords and related websites, it displays segment insights for those interests. In our example, we found that people interested in Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, Sarah Vaughan, and Nina Simone, are 60% male, 24% above the age of 65, and 78% non-parents.
- “Topics” allows you to define what sorts of content topics your ad will be displayed on. This is different from audience interests. For example, if you specify audience interest as “jazz”, your ad might be shown to people interested in jazz, regardless of what they’re watching. If you specify a topic, say, “piano”, your ad is shown to people watching videos related to pianos, regardless of whether they’re interested in jazz.
When both, interests and topics specified, your ad is shown to people with that interest, when they’re watching videos related to the specified topic: in our example, people interested in jazz, when they’re watching videos related to pianos.
- “Placements” allows you to limit your ad to specific YouTube videos and channels. Unless you’re an advanced user, we generally don’t recommend this because this may dramatically limit reach and increase your cost. YouTube is a huge place and no matter how much content you’ve seen, there’s always more to discover — so it’s better not to limit your ad to a specific set of videos, unless you have very specific and clear reasons to do so.
- Set your bid per view. We recommend starting at around $0.01 or $0.02 and slowly working your way up with incremental increases to determine which bid delivers the best performance.
- In this example, we’re using skippable in-stream ads, but in-feed ads are also a viable option. The final URL is the URL of the music video you’re promoting.
Keep in mind that people who see your music video in a skippable ad and then click through to the full video, are doing so only because they liked what they heard. Those who click on a thumbnail ad will only judge whether they like the video after they’ve clicked the ad. So, the watch rates on the music video you’re promoting often tend to be better with in-stream ads than with video feed ads.
The actual performance will depend on your specific music video and audience. It’s always a good idea to try both ad types out and see which one works best.
- After you set this all up, you’ll see this screen. But wait! You’re not done yet. There are two more important settings to make sure you change.
- Go over to the Campaigns parent page, and click on the three dots next to the campaign you just created, then click “Edit campaign” in the context menu.
- On the Edit campaign screen, expand the “Networks” tab and ensure that “Video partners on the Display Network” is unchecked in case it isn’t already. Then click “Save”.
- Scroll down to “Additional settings”, expand the tab, and check the “Frequency capping” box. This ensures that your ad isn’t shown over and over again to the same person within a very short window of time — because that’s only going to annoy people who might eventually have become fans.
We typically cap impressions to one per day, but you could experiment with even lower frequencies, like one per week, if you wish.We also recommend leaving “view frequency” disabled. This controls whether your ad is shown again to someone who’s already clicked through and watched the video. If they’ve shown enough interest that they watched your video, it’s possible that they may feel like checking it out again.
And that’s it! Your very own ad campaign to promote a music video is now fully configured. Note that the ad still needs to get approved by YouTube before it will be displayed. Make sure that your ad complies with all of the YouTube ads guidelines and policies to avoid having it disapproved.
Next steps
Setting up a YouTube ad campaign to promote your music video is a great start. There’s also a lot more you can do to boost your odds of success, such as organic video promotion, campaign optimization and data analytics.
Managing hundreds of marketing tasks on every single music video can be intimidating and overwhelming, besides taking away time from your core focus of making great music. Our music video promotion services have helped hundreds of independent artists get the breakthrough results they’ve always dreamed of. Take a look at what artists are saying about us.