Between 2023 and 2024, YouTube has introduced a new paid tool to quickly grow the number of subscribers to your channel and then expand organic audience of uploaded videos, that, as a result, appear most often among those recommended.
This is YouTube Promotion, a feature included in YouTube Studio, which allows you to promote videos in a simple and immediate way, but with fewer formats and segmentations than Google Ads. The video appears alongside others in the YouTube app’s homepage feed, in search results, and in YouTube’s “What to watch next” suggestions.
What are the requirements to use YouTube Promotion
To be able to use the YouTube Promotion feature, there are two necessary conditions: to have more than 1000 subscribers to the channel and to enable advanced features. indeed, the channel must have already been launched and must have a history, considering the date of creation, its activity, the frequency of use and compliance with the policies.
To start the campaign, of course you need to link your YouTube channel to an existing Google Ads account or a new one. The link can be set up from “Settings/Promotions” on the YouTube Studio dashboard menu.
How to Sponsor a Video on YouTube
To create a new ad, go to the “Content” tab in YouTube Studio menu, then “Promotions” tab and click the “+ New Promotion” button.
The first screen asks you to choose your goal:
- Increased engagement with your channel: This can help you get more engagement with your channel, such as increased subscriptions, channel visits, and adds to playlists.
- More views of your video: It can help you get more views of the video you’re promoting.
To grow the channel, I recommend the first campaign goal because this is optimized to increase the number of subscribers.
The second screen asks you to select the video and define the headlines. You can choose one of the videos posted on your channel, that complies with YouTube’s policies. Headlines (optional, otherwise they will be automatically taken from the video’s meta data) must have a maximum of 90 characters for the title and 70 for the description.
The third screen allows you to choose sponsored video targeting. As I wrote above, this is a simplified version, if compared to Google Ads. Indeed, we can only select country and language. If videos contain important written or spoken texts, I recommend to select the same language as the content.
The fourth and final screen allows you to select the total budget and the end date of the campaign. The algorithm will make sure that you have a constant daily expense throughout its duration.
The organic video will continue to be in the main folder, while the new ad will appear in the list under the “Promotions” tab.
How to optimize your video to reach a wider audience
To improve the quality of the ad, you need to work carefully on the texts and meta data of the video. In particular, it is important to choose tags that reach a wide audience, but are also consistent with the promise announced in the title and with the content. The aim is to find a match with audience interests the topics covered by the most viewed videos in our field. These tags will be added in the video settings and will therefore work in organic.
The other optimization element is of course the video itself. Quality content , that meets the user’s expectations and can be considered useful, has more chances to turn a simple view into a channel subscription.
How to measure results of your sponsored campaign
“Promotions” tab, which can be reached from the “Content” item of YouTube Studio menu, contains all the quantitative information related to current and past sponsorships: impressions, views and subscribers. In the campaigns I’ve done, I’ve seen a larger-than-usual growth in new subscribers during campaign periods, net of direct data related to specific sponsorships. These are indirect and unmeasured effects, due to a greater exposure of channel’s videos.
More information can be found in “Analytics” section, that can be enabled from Google Studio menu. At the moment it is not yet possible to know the details, but we can see some interesting aggregated data by filtering “YouTube Advertising” among traffic sources. From audience statistics, we can also see how its composition has changed over the campaign period.
These sponsorships are very simple and quick to set up. The number of subscribers will increase quickly and exponentially. Next step will be to create interesting content for this audience and grow the channel even more.
