YouTube is the easiest channel to spend a lot on and the easiest to fool yourself about. View-through conversions make almost any campaign look profitable if you let them. Run properly, with honest measurement, it is one of the few places left to reach people before they start searching.
Usually through generous measurement rather than bad targeting.
Counting someone who watched a few seconds and converted days later as a YouTube conversion will make any campaign look successful. Some of that is real influence, much of it is not.
A 90 second brand video cut down does not work in a skippable format where the first five seconds decide everything. Assets built for YouTube perform very differently from assets adapted for it.
Without exclusions, budget flows into content that is technically on-target and practically worthless, including a lot of made-for-advertising channels and children's content.
Video creates interest that has nowhere to go if there is no retargeting or search coverage waiting for the demand it generated.
Measurement discipline first, because this channel punishes credulity.
Before anything gets scaled, the data has to be right. GA4 and Google Tag Manager audited and rebuilt where needed, conversion actions deduplicated, Meta CAPI or server-side tagging where it applies, and offline conversion import so the platform optimises toward revenue instead of form fills.
View-through windows tightened and reported separately from click-through, so you can see what YouTube contributed without it quietly absorbing credit from everything else.
Concepts written for skippable placements, with the first five seconds doing real work, and enough variants to learn from.
Ongoing exclusion of low-quality placements and content types, which is unglamorous and one of the highest-return activities in this channel.
A Looker Studio dashboard tied to your real conversion data, plus a written read on what changed and why. No 40-tab spreadsheet, no vanity metrics, no 'impressions are up' as a headline.
If your search and retargeting are not yet capturing the demand you already have, YouTube is usually the wrong next investment. I will say so rather than take the budget.
Some engagements have verified public numbers. Others are longer-running or confidential roles where I can speak to scope and approach but not exact percentages. I would rather show you the real mix than invent a case study.
Roughly $20K per month in Google Ads spend, in a market with $45 to $80 CPCs.
Ongoing role as Senior Paid Media Manager, leading strategy and a growing paid media team in a heavily regulated industry.
I go through the account, the tracking and the conversion path and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how your buyers actually search.
Weekly optimisation against the metric that matters to your business, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
I can produce and iterate performance-oriented variants. For high-production brand films you want a production company, and I will work with whatever they deliver.
By reporting view-through separately, tightening the window, and where volume allows, testing against geographies with the channel switched off. Incrementality testing is the only honest answer, and it needs enough scale to be possible.
More than search to learn anything reliable, because the feedback loop is slower and noisier. If budget is tight, search and retargeting almost always return more per pound.
Both are possible, but they need different campaign types, creative and expectations. Trying to get both from one campaign is how most YouTube budgets get wasted.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
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