Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 140 - Small Budget YouTube

Due to the length of this pre-recorded podcast and the presence of two speakers, this transcript may contain errors.

Can you run YouTube campaigns on a shoestring budget for a small local business and still see results? 

Yeah, you absolutely can. And today I'm giving you the blueprint. 

In this special episode, I'm going to be interviewing one of my longtime Google Ads coaching clients so he can tell you firsthand the results he's seen for his clients with small budget YouTube campaigns. Seriously, one of them only spends $10 a day. 

We're sharing real numbers and metrics, targeting, creative tips, and more. This is your small budget YouTube playbook. 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 140: Small Budget YouTube.

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Jyll: Thank you to Austin Lindquist who is the director of SEM at Ring Ring Marketing for joining me today in this episode. 

I’ve been working with Austin and his team for about two years now on Google Ads coaching, really helping the agency he works for who already was getting such great results for their clients go even better even to the next step pushing forward with the latest Google Ads strategies. 

And so on that note, I wanted to invite Austin here today to speak with you because he has seen some really great results with his small business, local clients with YouTube ads. And that's something that, as a smaller business who's maybe spending $20 a day, $50 a day on Google Ads, YouTube may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But Austin and his team have seen great success with this across a lot of his portfolio, and he graciously agreed to share some of those tips with you today. 

So welcome, Austin. Thank you for joining me.

Austin: Yeah Jyll, thanks for having me.

Jyll: I want to start by talking about one of your funeral home clients. I know death care is a big vertical for your agency. So I'm going to share some of the topline of what happened with this campaign and then would love to hear some specifics from you to help folks who might want to try something similar. 

So, this is a funeral home in a very small area running Search campaigns on a modest budget, and they agreed to spend just $10 a day on YouTube. And even more narrowly, this was just vertical content. Okay, so giving results here for a 30-day period: total spend $294. And with that, they got 30,000 impressions, 18,000 views, and reached nearly 10,000 people. 

So for those who are not a fan of mental math, that's a cost per view of $0.02 and a cost per unique reach of $0.03. 

What really struck me about the strategy here that Austin and his team executed is that they kept the targeting pretty open. You know, as advertisers, we think, "Oh, it's a really small business. It's really niche. We have a tiny budget. We have to go super specific." But because they were already targeting such a small geographic area, they used some demographic targeting around age, but otherwise kept it open. 

And then the other thing was focusing on Shorts first, vertical content, one thing they knew they could do really well. 

So my first question to you about this campaign, Austin, is why did you decide to do a video views campaign with this $10 a day and not something more click- or conversion-driven like Demand Gen?

Austin: Something that we've talked about for a while is getting video content out there. Like, he had this big library of videos, just videos everywhere. And so I just happened to look and I was like, "Okay, like, we probably want to focus on buying that user attention versus what you were just mentioning, buying the user action, kind of that mid-to-lower funnel." So brand awareness was a huge thing that we talked about and video views. And I wanted the placement to exclusively be on YouTube—what we mentioned with that vertical style, cause he was the guy that was like, "Okay, I'm going to put it up on my phone." And I was like, "Okay, that's perfect, let me view it." 

The content was fantastic. Content is like the number one thing for this to actually work really well. So, as we started going, month after month, he started noticeably saying, "Hey, people are coming in and they're talking about my creative. This is actually really exciting." And so, we were very excited. And yeah, it's been about month number five, because he was like, "I'll quit after month number two if I'm not seeing anything." And so, five months later, here we are. And yeah, just chugging along. So, it's cool.

Jyll: That's awesome to hear because I know you say "brand awareness" to a small local business owner and they're like, "Ah, I don't need brand awareness." And so it's great to hear that he was able to see the results, and months later, this is now an always-on campaign alongside Search. 

And so you mentioned that your client is happy with the results even though the only metrics we can give are not things that PPC practitioners usually talk about, which is reach and impressions. So, can you tell us a little more specifically, you know, without giving away specifics of your client, what are the kinds of things your client was hearing from leads and customers that let him know these videos were working?

Austin: Yeah. A lot of them, which was funny, were just like, "Hey, he was on YouTube," and they're like, "Hey, I know that guy." Like, that's the guy who served them. So, this is the very unique thing about death care: you're serving that family, right? 

So people would come up to the front desk and ask for him by name. And that's a super powerful statement right off the bat, if you can have that ability and talk about it on, you know, our strategy calls where we meet monthly. It was something that just really drove home that video content is still king. It's such a good thing to have, and he talks about it, you know, to some of his other funeral homes that also work with us so we can help influence them to also get on YouTube. So it's been a good, positive experience so far.

Jyll: Definitely. And you bring up a good point. We're saying "death care" as a euphemism. Like, when someone needs a funeral home, it's not like they've been dreaming their whole life about paying for a funeral. It's a very sensitive time, a very emotional time. And so the fact that there are people who are either anticipating a need or are going through this acute need right now—potentially one of the worst times in their lives, or one of the worst things they ever have to buy—and there's this person who they trust and ask for by name, and want to see because they've seen him in content. That's the kind of thing that we can't measure, but especially in a small town or a small community, I'd imagine is so powerful.

Austin: Yeah, 100%. It's the most powerful. And I think that's why it is such a huge thing that we wanted to push, because I told the client, "I want you to be everywhere. You are small. You know, there's only two other funeral homes in your space. Let's just blast you out as much as possible." And he bought into it. And for, like you said, $300, you can't really get that much with other video platforms. So, it's cool.

Jyll: That's great to hear. And so, this is a great story for a funeral home, but I know you've been employing this across a lot of your client portfolio. 

So, one of the other verticals that Ring Ring Marketing works a lot with is home services: windows and doors and flooring and carpets and things like that. Once again, this is a totally separate campaign, different industry, different city. I'm going to share a bit of the top-line results and then we'll hear from Austin again on some of the specifics there. 

So, this is a window and door installation client. And this one's a little interesting because they ran a YouTube campaign and then they also ran a Paramount Plus ad campaign, which I'll admit, I didn't even know that was a thing before I was on a call with Austin and his team talking about it. And so, when Austin shared the Paramount Plus plan, I was like, "You know what? Let's mirror this with a YouTube plan and see what we can learn." And so again, during this 30-day time period, on Paramount Plus, they invested $500, got 46,000 impressions and 11,000 unique reach. So for those keeping track, this was a $0.05 cost per reach on Paramount Plus. 

And then during the same time period, investing on YouTube about three times what they were investing on Paramount Plus, it was a total spend of $1,677 that got 234,000 impressions, 150,000 views, and 139,000 unique reach. So, again, for those who do not like the mental math, on YouTube, we got a $0.01 cost per view and a $0.01 cost per reach, compared to the $0.05 cost per reach on Paramount Plus. 

Now, an interesting nuance here: with the funeral home example, Austin's team decided to just do vertical videos because that was the kind of content that business owner had. For this business, they did something totally different. This business owner was really interested in that kind of TV experience, which was why Paramount Plus was on the table. And so for YouTube, they decided to place these ads on TV screens only, creating that premium living room experience, but buying it through Google Ads in Video campaigns. 

So let me ask you this first, Austin. Which did you prefer running as the person managing all of this, the YouTube campaigns or the Paramount Plus campaigns?

Austin: I mean, I'd definitely say YouTube. And the reason being, it's not that I have anything vendetta-like against Paramount Plus. I think that it was an efficient machine, but to all the PPC directors out there or anyone else—even a PPC ad specialist—when you're trying to set things up and they effectively have the same capacity and capability in some regard, I want something that's under one roof. 

We wanted to test this because we were just like, "Let's see what else is out there." Obviously, it's a different placement, right? But YouTube, being the second largest search engine, we wanted to utilize that traffic. And obviously, it pairs very well if you have a Search campaign, so we were just like, "Okay, let's keep everything under YouTube, under one house." In my opinion, it was much easier to set up. I think that there were some things on the dashboard that were a little wonky that we experienced some difficulties with, but...I don’t have anything vendetta-like against Paramount Plus. I think those were minor things, but I definitely would say that anyone who's first starting out should definitely stick within YouTube because it is a very easy and efficient tool to use.

Jyll: And so with this YouTube campaign, again, this is a window and door installer in a given city. You decided to target homeowners, and then to target people in-market for home improvement. Now, there are in-market audiences for things like window installation, door installation. So why did you choose to go broader here with homeowners and home improvement, rather than just targeting people who are looking for windows and doors?

Austin: Yeah, so a lot of the directive here was a lot of brand awareness. This company has been in business for 60-plus years. And so you're like, "Oh wow, you've been in business for 60-plus years, everyone must know you." And he’s like, “Austin, nobody knows!” And so we were just like, "Okay, it's just a glaring thing that we need to be focusing on: getting your name out there as much as possible." 

So that's what we focused on in the creative. So that was super powerful. And yeah, we've been going with this client, I think, for eight months now. They were very wary at first, too. So it's been, overall, an overwhelmingly positive experience with them as well.

Jyll: That's great. And to clarify, YouTube has been going for eight months that you've been working with that. 

Austin: Yeah. Absolutely. 

Jyll: And so you're reaching homeowners. You mentioned AI creative to me when we were speaking earlier, and I know we hear "AI creative" and it's popular, so can you tell us a little bit—because with the funeral home director, you mentioned he was creating a lot of content you could use. This client did not have any video content for you. So can you share a little bit about the process of how you used AI to create the videos that have worked so effectively in this YouTube campaign?

Austin: Yeah, so this is pretty simple. I mean, any AI tool really is out there for all of us to use. So what I did is I started with the 30-second ad and I just grabbed a lot of their really good static images. We focused on their 60-plus years in business, and I actually used—you know, you can use ChatGPT or Gemini—just to help with a script. Threw it in there, it matched everything, and then I just placed all the photos. It was that simple; it took me probably like 20 minutes to do so.

Jyll: And you did this personally. Someone for whom creative is not usually your job?

Austin: Yeah, yeah. I just did it myself because I was like, "Okay." And I've gotten very efficient at it to where I can get someone in that seat where they're doing it full-time. But yeah, just starting out, it doesn't take very long. 

Jyll: And how does your client feel about these results? Like, I know as media buyers, we get excited about things like a $0.01 cost per reach, but what are the results your client has been noticing in their business?

Austin: The first creative we started with was brand awareness and highlighting their 60-plus years in business. We've later transitioned to a window-specific campaign, a door-specific campaign, and showers. And each time we ran that specific creative, it was really crazy to have them talk about—literally within the next couple of weeks—I'd get a call from the client saying, "Hey, they're talking about our windows." This is really great because as we're diving into this world of offline conversion tracking, right, we have so many things that we want to track. You get afraid, even as a PPC director or a client, like, "Am I going to get these results?" So I think that video is still a powerful element for us to use, and it's just proof when people start talking about it. 

Jyll: And you say people are starting to talk about it. Do you mean their current customers or leads, or what's sort of the buzz that they hear when they get one of those creatives in-market via YouTube?

Austin: Oh yeah, I'd say both for sure. Like, they are coming up to the front desk saying that they asked about it, because we run a lot of deals. That's what I love doing in trades—you get to run these particular specials. So if they're talking about the specials, one, I absolutely know that we are hitting the mark. And then two, sometimes she has told me that when they're on the actual job site themselves, people will come up and just be like, "Hey, I actually chose you guys because I searched for you, saw an ad or something like that." And then they're like, "It reconfirmed my convictions that I picked the right company because I saw you guys everywhere on video." And I think that was, "Wow, this is a really good sales pitch for me." I was like, I can just use exactly what you said. It's just bringing me back to my old TV days.

Jyll: That's awesome. Well, Austin, thank you so much for being willing to openly share the tactics that are working for your clients at Ring Ring Marketing. I really appreciate you taking the time to record on the podcast with me today, and I'll see you soon at our next meeting.

Austin: Perfect. Awesome. Thank you, Jyll. I appreciate it.

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Thank you again so much to Austin Lindquist, Paid Search Director, for taking the time to share what's working for his clients with me and with you.

To recap, what can you do with your clients or your business if you want to get started with a small budget YouTube campaign? 

1. First is creative. 

You need some actual video to show people if you're going to run a Video campaign. And if that's something tricky to you, you can take a page from Austin's playbook and use AI to help you. That doesn't mean AI-generated people and AI-generated results. It can be as simple as taking images you already have and using freely available AI tools to maybe add a voiceover, put some music in, and clip it all together. In-person, real video is best, but you can absolutely get started with something else if you need that in order to convince your client or yourself that it makes sense to invest in actually recording video. 

2. Next, refreshing creative. 

If you're used to just running Search campaigns or Shopping campaigns, then we don't really need creative refreshes that much because ad fatigue is not really a thing. But ad fatigue is absolutely a thing when you're running video creative, especially if it's in a small city or small town. So Austin's tip is to think about refreshing your creative every 3 months or so, and I agree with that. 

3. And last but not least, this is not meant to replace your Search campaign, okay? If you only have $20 a day to spend on Google Ads, you are probably going to want to spend it in Search first. Think about YouTube as something great to pair with Search when you have maxed out your Search opportunity, or you're trying to stand out against competitors, or you really just need to build some of that brand awareness to help the sales process go smoother with your leads. 

If you'd like some help developing your own small-budget YouTube strategy, you can book a call with me at jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time inside Google Ads.