What’s Working With YouTube Ads for Music

Last April, I detailed three strategies to get YouTube subscribers with ads. Since then I’ve added 11K subscribers, bringing me to 29K.

In the meantime, Google deprecated the campaign type I was using and disabled my retargeting audience.

When I saw John Gold of Hypeddit’s video, How I Got 22,000 YouTube Views for $18 (NEW 2025 Method), I thought to myself, “You know who isn’t getting 22,000 YouTube views for $18?”

So I tried a Hypeddit “Grow my YouTube video” campaign, which couldn’t have been easier to set up.

I created four campaigns at $5 per day: one to all countries, one to tier 1 and 2 countries, and two to tier 2 countries.

The campaign to all countries got similar results to John’s, netting nearly 10K views for $12 before I pulled the plug. You can click to enlarge any of these screenshots:

I also got 29 earned likes and 2829 earned views. So why did I pull the plug?

Here were the top countries:

And here are the top YouTube channels where the ads appeared:

The age of the viewers is a mystery…

… until we click through to the channels my video appeared on. Here’s the top one:

They’re basically all non-English kids channels.

To be fair, one can’t rule out the possibility that Pakistani preschoolers simply adore my music and will grow up to be my biggest fans.

The tier 1 and 2 campaign performed just as well, except now I was reaching kids in Peru and Colombia. My tier 1 campaign went out to children in Portugal, Spain, and Italy for 7-10x the cost.

Whether or not my videos will be recommended to non-English speaking children in the future is an open question. This sort of targeting would be suicide with the Spotify algorithm, but I really don’t know how it works on YouTube.

Here’s what our robot buddy Claude had to say about the 2829 earned views:

Those earned views are almost certainly non-human. They serve the fraudster’s goal of generating ad-revenue and inflating metrics for resale, not reaching real synthpop fans. To avoid this waste, exclude high-fraud regions altogether and focus budget on markets with proven, genuine fanbases.

For contrast, I spent $30 on my tier 1, highly targeted, longstanding subscription conversions campaign and got zero earned views for $30 over the same time period, while also getting 53 new subscribers and 45 earned likes.

I spoke with John about it and he’s since updated the “Grow my YouTube video” campaign. Here’s what he said:

After we chatted about the channel placements I updated the Hypeddit campaign settings. The setting that appeared to best eliminate channels with kids content was under optimized targeting ➤ only show ads to people within age and gender specifications. By default, Google Ads allow targeting outside the age/gender specs so this is now turned off. This update has been live since October 31.

For me there were still three kids channels showing up in “where ads showed”. But only with one to three impression each. And thinking back to the days when my girls were little, I can rationalize a handful of those views. I would watch Little Baby Bum with them every once in a while. It was my Youtube account. It was me selecting the videos. I watched the ads. So from YouTube’s perspective, I would have been the audience to target.

I haven’t tested out the updated campaign myself, but I can 100% confirm that enabling that setting virtually eliminates the kids channels.

My suggestion if you want to launch a Hypeddit campaign is to target no wider than tiers 1 and 2, because the cost per view to Peru and Colombia is about the same as to Pakistan and Iraq.

I spent the next month duplicating and tweaking those campaigns with the help of Google Ads Editor, testing everything I could think to test, spending $1100, and capturing screenshots every step of the way.

Rather than subject you to all that, I’m going to show you where I ended up, and how to get there if you’d like to replicate my campaign structure.

Here are my results in the 8 days since my last tweak (again, click to enlarge):

My tier 1 campaign includes the US, UK, and Canada only. For $33 I got 62 subscribers but only 91 views.

Beyond country targeting, my tier 2 campaign is identical. It’s mainly hitting Brazil and Mexico, and netted 557 subscribers at the same cost, plus 228 earned likes, at 218 views.

Somehow it did all that with only 15% more impressions. Are users in Brazil in Mexico that much more receptive to my music, all else being equal? I’m not sure what to make of it.

My tier 3 campaign is closer to my Hypeddit campaigns and mostly for social proof, netting me 11K views for $16.

It’s optimized for clicks instead of conversions (subscribers) and only runs in-stream. That’s the type of skippable ad that plays automatically when you just want to watch the damn video.

The key difference for all three campaigns is that my ads are only shown to men ages 25-64.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love women as much as the next guy, but most of my fans are men.

The tier 1 and 2 campaigns are pushing five songs, both the video and Shorts, wherever it thinks it can get the most conversions. The tier 3 campaign is just to boost the view count on my latest video.

Alrighty then, let’s see if we can’t recreate my tier 1 campaign from scratch!

YouTube Ads Campaign Creation

There’s a degree of setup required that I won’t be able to help you with, as I did it many years ago. At the very least, you’ll need to connect your Google Ads account to your YouTube channel.

Once you’re logged in to Google Ads, hit the multi-colored plus button in the upper left to create a new Campaign.

Select “Create a campaign without guidance” and then “Demand Gen.” You don’t have to select a conversion goal.

Enter a name for your campaign and select “YouTube engagements” as the campaign goal.

Enter your daily budget and disregard the shameless plea for more money.

Apparently you can do this at the ad set level, but I set location and language here.

I’ve disallowed tablets, TV screens, and Windows users. I’m kidding on that last one.

The defaults should be okay for the rest, so we can move on to the ad group.

Name it whatever you’d like and restrict it to YouTube.

We’re going to have to create a new audience, so select “Add an audience” and “+ New Audience.”

Here’s what I’m doing:

The custom segment is basically people who search terms related to, or visited websites related to, synthpop.

And the Your data section is just people who viewed any of my videos, so straight up retargeting. With any luck, a Video Viewers audience will be available to you in the dropdown menu:

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve restricted the campaign to men ages 25-54.

Last and MOST IMPORTANT: You need to enable “Only show ads to people within my age and gender specifications” or else your video will end up on kids channels.

Or you could disable optimized targeting altogether, but I haven’t tested that yet.

Google also told John about another setting that we both have enabled. It’s under Tools ➤ Content Suitability ➤ Excluded Content Themes ➤ Content suitable for families.

Finally we have the ad (click to enlarge):

The final URL is my raw channel URL with?sub_confirmation=1 tacked on the end, which brings up a “Confirm channel subscription” pop-up when clicked.

You can try it for yourself here:

www.youtube.com/channel/UC6ycjrcIXEbI4jsX9BhZ4_w?sub_confirmation=1

I’ve included three videos: the actual video for the song (which is just cover art), a one-minute clip of the song as a Short, and the winning ad from my Meta campaign as a Short.

I’ve added my logo, enabled resized and shorter videos, included a bunch of headlines and descriptions, and set the call to action to “Subscribe.”

I’ve also got four more ads, which are the same idea but different songs.

The idea is that Google can pick and choose which will best generate engagement, or more specifically conversions. For me that’s a subscription, but it may not be for you until you set it up.

When we selected the YouTube Engagements goal, we were presented with this text:

YouTube engagements optimize for “Engagements” conversion goal and only use video ads on YouTube for optimal performance. You can manage your conversion actions on the Conversions page in your account.

You’ll find the Engagement conversion goal under Goals ➤ Summary ➤ Engagement, then click Settings.

I set it as the account-default goal and my conversion action is channel subscriptions. If you’re not seeing the same thing, I’m guessing you’ll have to set it up on the previous page my selecting “+ Create conversion action.”

And that’s it for the tier 1 campaign!

My tier 2 campaign is identical other than the countries: Brazil, Mexico, Portugal. The latter is barely seeing any action so you might as well cut it.

My tier 3 campaign targets Peru, Argentina, Colombia, and Uruguay. Instead of “YouTube engagements,” the campaign goal is “Clicks.” Under ad set settings, channels is set to “YouTube in-stream” only. The ads themselves are just the main videos, no Shorts.

The tier 3 campaign is primarily for social proof, but it only reaches the demographics I selected, who at least have the potential of becoming genuine fans. You can expect 600-700 views for $1.

Though I’m happy with my campaigns, I’m sure that my settings aren’t 100% optimal. I’m open to suggestions!

Did I miss anything? Do things look different on your end? Please let me know where my guidance could be more clear and helpful!