Here I’ll be sharing the experience we had running Google ads & YouTube promotions for an educational academy mentoring about NISM (a financial exam in India made mandatory by SEBI for most finance professions & students)
YouTube sponsored video is the most recent feature launched in late 2023.
We’ll break down how each objective worked for us at a very affordable price with a suitable bidding strategy.
Google Ads Breakdown (app promo – search, discovery, display, Google Play)
In the overview tab of the campaign: In 7-9 days we got 42K impressions and 3.2K clicks.
The graph showed some inconsistency due to pausing the campaign for 2 days. As it was the first time running Google ads for this academy so, Google is still collecting the historical data from the website and app inaction by placing the tags from GA4.
This was the exact ad preview and different versions of it.
Though it showed so many clicks, the average downloads were 6-8 each day. It would have increased if we continued for a week.
As this app promo was running all over India especially the Uttar Pradesh region had the most downloads & impressions. So the quality of downloads needs to improve, the longer the app promo runs the more we can filter out the nontarget group
Even though we added all types of assets (image, video & cover photos), display networks on mobile phones gained maximum share.
We purposely inserted a long YouTube video to gain a high viewing duration for the most demandable course.
Here are some screenshots of other metrics.
Coming To YouTube Promotions (currently in Beta Stage):
If you see on YouTube Studio, it is still in the beta stage. However, if you advertise from GooglemyBusiness your YouTube video can be promoted and will be reflected on Google ads dashboard.
YouTube promotions was also the first time we tried it. You get to see more specific metrics on YouTube Studio analytics than ads dashboard.
Motive behind running YT video promo was to gain more reach and let our audience know about our YouTube channel (which has just crossed 1000 subscribers)
We were getting good views on each video with high viewing duration but the downloads weren’t so effective compared to the budget.
I think, we still need to understand YouTube promotion little in depth. It is a good tool for increasing the reach of already trending videos on your channel.
So, trying a combination of both app promo and YT video promo is a good move.
Updated Views On 21st Jan 2024:
After a gap of 7-8 days, we observed our campaign and got below-average results (as seen in the below graph).
Conversions refers to app downloads and compared to the budget and frequent changes we were making, the conversions are quite low. We tested a lot of things in less time:
a) Stopped YT video promotions (as they were just getting us views but didn’t get much conversions)
b) Focussed on promoting only our signature course and removed the other course creatives that were performing less
c) Started search ad campaign with the promotion of our best-selling course with site links to detailed financial articles.
So the overall budget is increased to ₹480/day
So the overall budget is increased to ₹480/day
We also tried uploading a student database from an external site but that didn’t work for us. As Google targets the desired audience very well with the given interest areas.
The main problem we were facing in the app promotions campaign was many irrelevant audiences was downloading our application and few of them have downloaded by mistake. So the sales team needs to do a lot of filtration and segmentation of prospects .
As I get more insights from the website search campaign and the other app promotion campaign, I’ll update the same in this blog.
(this article will get updated regularly as I get more insights, I’ll be sharing with you all)