Case

How to earn $120,000/month online training with YouTube Ads

Situation

We were approached by a client who sells courses on making money on YouTube through a free web marathon

They already had contractors, whom the client constantly weeded out. So all the work was done in a highly competitive environment.

Task

The client came in with requests to give from 200 leads per day to $1. If I used more than $7000 per month and entered into a KPI, I would receive an additional % to the payment, so I was interested in it.

December

In the first month of work, I created accounts, processed creatives, and launched the first campaigns. I intended to test both audience targeting, expanded by optimized targeting, and broad campaigns. As soon as the ads were launched, they began to generate leads with much lower CPCs. Although their quality was not high (many people refused to pay for a paid course even though they watched the entire marathon), we covered this problem with quantity.

I used 12 video ads in which the course speaker talked about the strengths of the product, addressing different target audiences and offering different values

For December 15-31:
Costs = $1,171.63
Leads = 2 028
CPA = 0.57$.

January

In January, the client wanted to switch to a different form of payment for advertising. In order not to waste time, we decided to create a second account, because to change the payment method, we had to stop the old one for a while. In addition, the client complained about the poor payment rate, so we had to change our tactics.

I decided to abandon advanced targeting, which significantly reduced costs and the number of leads per day. However, with the second account, I could test more hypotheses at the same time. I transferred the data from the remarketing audiences to both accounts so that they would teach each other instead of working in parallel. We also launched 10 new video ads. In addition, the new account had to be optimized from 0, which significantly worsened the result for a certain period of time.

Total for January:
Costs = $7,568.16
Leads: 8 987
CPA: 0,84$

February

In February, we agreed with the client to provide me with information on the payback of leads. Thus, ROAS became the main KPI, not CPA. Throughout the month, I tested a new video ad using automatic ad rotation and moderating the display of each creative myself. We also launched 10 more video ads.

For February:
Costs = 7 312,47$
Leads: 8 267
Earned: 121 695,23$

March

On the first of March, two more accounts were transferred to me. One of the client's contractors was fired, and I was given his accounts as the most rented of the employees. With 4 client accounts under my control, I re-established data sharing between all Google Ads accounts via Google Analytics to speed up algorithm training. Now I could use these accounts to run A/B tests, test new hypotheses, and reach the target audience in a seamless way. I analyzed the campaigns left over from my predecessor to use the best practices.

I offered the client to upload customer databases to their Google Ads account. Using these lists, we created Look-a-like audiences, which we immediately launched ads for. The client recorded new video creatives, which we also launched. In addition, we launched separate videos aimed at people who had already visited the site but had not applied for the course.

For March:
Costs = $22 517,74
Leads: 14 496
Earned: 265 085,69$