How to Turn Your YouTube Shorts Into High-Performing Instream Ads

YouTube Shorts placements are getting saturated and CPMs have doubled in a year, but your Shorts creative is also your untapped instream inventory. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy shares a simple but overlooked demand gen trick - duplicating your 9:16 Shorts content into a separate instream campaign targeting mobile only. 

Learn Jeremy's full demand gen campaign structure, from one campaign per placement and lookalike audience setup, to how to triangulate on-platform data, third-party attribution, and post-purchase survey results to actually measure whether your demand gen is working.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

As digital and performance marketers, we're always looking for that another edge in whatever we do. And I think I recently discovered something really simple and just as allergent, which I want to share with you today. Welcome back Google Ads Unleashed, guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. I said Google very weirdly there, but hopefully this won't be the only weird thing about this episode. Um, today I want to share something uh simple with you because I think um demand genen is still completely underutilized in so many accounts, right? I see so many ad accounts which I've been auditing recently where there is absolutely not even a mention of demand genen as a uh as a campaign. Nothing's been running or when it's been running people don't don't actually understand how to run it and how to maximize its performance. performance. So today I wanted to share a couple of tips how you can get the most out of your demand gen campaigns yet again with one special tip which I've not even mentioned in previous episodes. So let's dive right into the basics first. The c the core issue with demand genin is that it is incredibly difficult to ascertain its performance and the reason for that is pretty simple right because um of the sort of how should I say the tension between its attribution functionalities and the actual incrementality it brings to a business. Done plenty of episodes about incrementality, about attribution, but essentially what I'm talking about here is you've noticed probably your brand search campaigns have a huge rowass uh and great CPAs and all that sort of stuff. Their attribution is great. Um they capture a lot of traffic that is effectively converted on the site. However, it's not very incremental. It doesn't really add anything to your bottom line, okay, as much. you could turn them off and nothing happens to your revenue. Whereas with demand genen, YouTube ads and like meta is the same, Tik Tok etc. or radio ads whatever. It's attribution it direct impact like as in what it contributes to the overall marketing mix is extremely difficult to measure um and usually extremely poor on site but it has really high incrementality right someone sees a YouTube ad learns about your brand may search for it further down the line and effectively convert this person um on a different way, right? And it adds more to the bottom line of your business because you're getting more new customers. So the core thing that needs to be solved is how do we measure its performance? And I've said always you need to triangulate three things on platform data. Um you need to triangulate um of course some sort of third party attribution tool such as triple whale and number three is post-purchase survey data. Your post-purchase survey is the biggest biggest weapon you have to understand how well Google um how well YouTube ads perform for you essentially demand gen ads I've done an episode about that so you can go and and listen back to that how to actually ascertain the performance of demanding campaigns so those basics have to sit first then of course you need good creative right there's uh nothing about this uh creative is king you can always start by just repurposing the statics and shorts um from your meta ads if you have an account or if you have a media uh who does it for you. They should be able to put together even the winners of the past and you can set up your campaigns. My recommendation in terms of setup, I've done an episode about this as well, but I'm just going to go through it again, is pretty much you want to have one prospecting campaign per placement because instream versus infeed versus shorts versus some of the image placements such as infeed and discovery perform wildly different. And if you leave everything in one campaign, Google will allocate ate the budget however it sees fit and they just perform crazily different. So I typically like to have one campaign per placement, one for shorts, one for instream, one for um um sometimes in feed. It depends but uh not very often I run this in itself. Um I only do this for lead genen clients realistically um when I have the right content but I use it for image placements and for uh discovery as well. Okay, so typically have three campaigns there and then usually one retargeting that comprises all the placements as separate uh ad groups. Okay, the reason I do that is just to consolidate. I don't want to really have too many um sort of uh different uh campaigns and retargeting with such little budget. Okay. Um and the reason is like I said, Google's not very great at distributing the budget. It's also not very good at be sort of um trying to have all the various ad formats tailored to the placements that it serves. Okay, so what I mean by that is if you launch an image ad and um you actually launch it um on let's say in stream, it just looks s***, right? So you don't really want that to happen because it will cause poor performance. Now once you got tho