Hi friends!
Today’s thrilling post will be a follow-up piece to a post I wrote some months ago about YouTube Lead Form Ads for PPC. I highly recommend giving that a read if you’re looking to test/expand into YouTube Lead Form Ads, as there are some components, such as the webhook solution, which requires a lot of time and energy to get set-up properly. It would be best to get that ball rolling sooner, rather than later, trust me.
I’ll touch on our early results with the new YouTube ad format as well as how to go about setting them up and what options are available to you, the advertiser.
What Are YouTube For Action Lead Form Ads?
A great question! Thanks for asking, segues are hard enough as it is.
YouTube Lead Form Ads drive leads via in-line form submissions, meaning the user no longer has to navigate off of YouTube in order to complete a form fill. This is a huge step in the right direction for making YouTube a more lead gen friendly platform. That said, users still have the option to navigate to your site after completing a form fill should they be interested in doing so.
This ad format is still in beta, which means you would have to get your account whitelisted in order to use these. That being said, the set up is exactly the same as any other YouTube campaign, however, there is an added option to add and create a lead form during the campaign creation process, should you be whitelisted (or when this is released to everyone).
Worth noting, as of right now, you cannot retroactively edit the lead form ads once you create the campaign, meaning you would have to recreate any and all campaigns that have lead forms you might want to edit. I would make sure you have everything you need (webhook solution, correct URLs, approved ad copy, etc.) before creating your campaigns. Otherwise, you might end up building out all your campaigns on 3 separate occasions as we did!
Below are a few images of what these forms look like and what info we’re able to ask for through these forms. The business, “Bird Patrol”, is fictionary, so far as I know.
Early PPC Results
With this Google product still being in Beta, I would expect some changes to be made moving forward (they’ve already expanded on how much info we can ask for/collect via the forms) for the better. Regardless, allow me to dive into the early results we’ve seen.
For reference, we’ve been testing this with one of our clients in the education industry. We’ve been using the Maximize Conversions bid strategy, although Target CPA is available as well. Additionally, we’re only testing one audience to start and that is the Post-Secondary Education In-Market audience. We have plans to expand to Custom-Intent audiences next and we have high hopes for those!
Looking at our top-level numbers, early on in this test, we’ve spent a bit more than $12K and received 41 leads. That makes our overall CPL ~$290, which for this client is by far the best YouTube-related CPL we’ve ever had. Ideally, as we continue to add and test different audiences, making tweaks as we go (which we’ve not done much of yet), we can get that CPL to the $200-250 level. CPLs at that level, for us, would be a huge success and would mean we found ourselves another viable channel to generate leads from, which have become increasingly harder to find these days.
Taking a more granular look at our campaigns, we have some campaigns which are generating a significant amount of leads at a CPL lower than our search campaigns, which I certainly was not expecting to be the case! As of now, our lowest CPL for campaigns with more than 1 conversion is $64.38. Our account average is a $200 CPL, for reference.
It does, however, appear that you need some fairly significant volume in order to see conversions. Those 41 conversions came from some 526,000 impressions and 148,000 engagements. That’s a conversion rate of .03%. We have some smaller market schools whose campaigns aren’t able to spend, presumably due to the size of the market itself. Several of our campaigns have yet to spend a full dollar and those are the campaigns that have less than 100 impressions. Only 1 of our converting campaigns has less than 6,500 impressions so far.
At this point, it’s tough to say whether the quality of engagements or quantity of engagements is most important…although if you can do both then do that!
Conclusion
I have been more than happy with our early YouTube for Action Lead Form Ads test results, truly! We put a lot of work into this test and for it to generate a significant amount of leads at a reasonable CPL is a huge success, one which we hope to build upon.
In my opinion, these lead form ads would work best for advertisers who aren’t asking for too much info through their lead forms. Not only are we limited in what information we can ask for, but we’re also asking for people to take a break from the content they came to YouTube to enjoy, in order to engage with our brand and provide us their personal info.
I recommend using the lead form ads for more top of funnel lead offers and/or low commitment form fills (like, give us your contact info for more information). That said, these are still in beta and I’ve only seen them tested in this specific vertical, so please, test away to your heart’s content! I genuinely hope you can see some successes from this new Google ad product.
