Youtube Ad Tracking – How To Properly Set Things Up

Hello, all you Hyrosians and ad goblins. I’m Alex Becker, CEO of Hyros, here today to discuss with you YouTube ad tracking and how to set it up properly. 

If you’re running ads, you’re not going to get them to perform the way you want without getting the right kind of data. 

And how you get the correct type of data by tracking correctly. 

I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I see it time and time again. People set up their ad campaigns and track them the wrong way, leading them down a dark path that never gives them the returns they were hoping for. 

But I’m like the light in a dark forest to show you the way. And there is a better way to track your ads so that you get better returns and make more money. 

The first thing you need to understand is to track your ads correctly. Next, you should focus your tracking on your sales. This is the game right here, people. 

Too often, people focus their tracking on views, impressions, likes, and shares, depending on the platform, and the thing is, you’ll get some reports from those items, but they’ll be wrong. 

So what happens is that if you’re tracking your ads incorrectly, you’ll make wrong decisions on your campaigns and ads, which will waste a bunch of your time and probably cost you more money while not getting more sales. 

It’s downright foolish, ok? So don’t do that, and don’t be a fool. 

Instead, focus on your sales and work backward from there to determine which ads are performing and which ones you need to kill off. 

First, let’s discuss why tracking is important and how most people wrongly track their ads. 

Why Is It Important For Ad Tracking My YouTube Campaigns?

First, understand that proper ad tracking is the single most important thing in making your ads profitable. 

Ad design and the content matter, but more than you think. See, funny ads convert. Ugly ads convert. Boring ads convert. And your ads could convert with proper targeting. 

And to get your targeting to perform better means that you need the data on who wants to watch your ads, where is the best place to put them, and what your target audience likes to do before they decide to convert to your ad. 

The reason to track sales for your YouTube ads is that from there, you can reverse engineer what your target audience does before they decide they want to schedule the sales call or opt-in or whatever it is that you want them to do. 

So tracking your sales is the most crucial step here. By learning to track your ads based on sales, you will get insights into everything your audience has done, making your other ads on different platforms more optimized and giving you better details on how to focus your targeting even more. 

To set up your tracking effectively, you need to understand that most tracking software gives one of three methods of credit. The most common tracking methods are first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch attributions, and while those are all fine, they are all limited in some ways. 

First-Touch Attribution

First-touch attribution is a method of giving credit to ads that focuses on the first time a person interacted with your content. This method lets you see what ad helped them into your funnel but ignores all the things they’ve done since then. 

The first touch is an excellent way to see the entry point for your target audience, but it lacks details that will help you shape and refocus all your other content and ads, perhaps accelerating the buyer’s decision.

Last-Touch Attribution

With last-touch attribution, the most recent ad to the desired action is the one that gets the credit. That’s a great way to see if your call-to-action or sales page is optimized, but it doesn’t help you figure out what got your target there in the first place. 

It’s like shooting an arrow at a target blindfolded while riding a horse on a Ferris Wheel. Ok, that’s outlandish, but the point is, it’s hard to see what got you to the bullseye, and you have to decide whether the ad was performing well, whether it was luck or something else. 

Most platforms like Facebook and YouTube really like last-touch attribution because those platforms really like to promote themselves. 

For example, you may run many ads on every platform possible. 

With last-touch, YouTube will show you the attribution to the ad that your target most recently interacted with before converting from YouTube. It gives a lot of weight to the most recent ad and ignores all the other things your target did before they decided to act. 

Multi-Touch Attribution

Multi-touch attribution is a method that says, “Hey, we know that the first time or the last time weren’t the only times your target chose to interact with your ads. We know there were others along the way, so we’ll give them credit, but not too much.” 

Multi-touch allows you to give credit to multiple ads, but much of the priority is given to the first and last ads. 

How to Properly Set Up Your YouTube Ad Tracking

The point of tracking is to be able to sharpen your message and refocus your ad targeting to create better returns. The key to that is by getting better data to inform your choices. 

Unfortunately, if you rely on other tracking software, you’re like most advertisers. You’re stuck in the mud, your tires are spinning, and you can’t figure out why you’re not getting to where you want to go. 

There are two ways to properly set up your YouTube ad tracking, the typical way, and the better way. 

Let’s talk about how most of the common people set up their tracking. The way most people do it is silly, but it’s just what most people know. 

To get started, set up your Google ads on your YouTube channel. 

This will track your views and impressions of the ads you’re running on YouTube and give you analytics about behaviors and interests, but not too detailed. 

You’ll also get insights into how long people viewed your video, how many people engaged with the ad through clicks and likes, and the percentage of viewers on each ad versus the total number of ads you’re running. 

What most people do at this point is refocus their ads and create similar types of content if they see a video performing well. 

But by tracking an ad based on watch times and total views, you may need to figure out why a person came to watch the ad, what they liked about your ad, and why it didn’t convert better. So what people do is spend a ton of time making more of the same, and what happens? They get more of the same. 

It’s like the riddle about the chicken or the egg; what came first? The video or the sales? 

Instead, if you track your ads based on the sales the videos produce, you’re better able to create more compelling content that drives even more sales. 

Next up, you want to set up your Google Ads Brand Lift. Google Ads Brand Lift is a unique tool for analytics that allows some advertisers the option of creating a short survey about the ad that can give you insights directly from your target. 

It’s not a tool available for all ad types, so you’d need to be in touch with Google directly to see if you can take advantage. 

Skippable Ads

Once your analytics is set up, you can opt for skippable YouTube ads, which are ads that play before a video, and viewers can skip after 5 seconds. 

Why are skippable ad analytics important? 

The benefit of skippable ads is that you don’t pay for the ad unless viewed for 30 seconds. Knowing how long viewers are captured by your video lets you know how attention-grabbing your first 5 seconds are and whether your ads can hold them for more extended time periods. 

If you have a quick bounce rate and people skip your ads after 5 seconds, it doesn’t matter how great the rest of the ad is. 

You just won’t get any traction, so throwing more money into similar videos is like throwing money into the garbage disposal. You’re not going to see any returns on that ad or video. 

First Things First

Ok, before we jump too far into different ways to scale your ads, let’s talk about how Google tells you to set up your YouTube ad tracking. 

If you want to do the typical way to track your YouTube ads, you should expect typical results. Of course, you can set them up quickly, but I think you’ll be disappointed in your results. 

Or maybe not, because if you’re getting the wrong data, you won’t have a clue how bad your ads are performing. 

You’ll think everything is great until you look at your returns, then you’ll realize something is wrong, but you won’t have any idea how to make them perform better. 

Video Content: So, if you want typical results, you first must upload your video on YouTube. Without content, you shouldn’t be advertising. 

Campaign Selection: The next step is to create a campaign, goal, and type of campaign you’re running from your Google Ads account. 

Campaign Strategy: Choose the strategy and subtype, and give it a name. 

Budget: Setting your budget is important but should be something you can scale. 

Don’t go the whole hog right away. As you track your ad performance, you want to be able to kill it or scale it based on how it performs, so save a little of your budget for the ad after you get the data. 

Similar Video Types: Select the types of similar videos and their content that are acceptable for your target. For example, you don’t want to run ads for kids on a graphic first-person shooter review.

Audience Targeting: Now, you can set up your targeting and audience selection before choosing keywords, topics, or placements. 

Views and Bidding: Once you’ve completed all those steps, start bidding on the maximum price you’ll pay for views. Again, don’t spend your entire budget just yet. Make sure your ads and videos are being watched, and you can target them for better performance before you scale.  

Conversion Tracking: Your ads aim to create conversions and returns. The typical reports focus on views, likes, and shares. So if you’re tracking anything else, what’s the point? 

I think it’s more important to focus on sales than any other type of conversion, which is the strategy I’ve used over the years, with some of my side businesses making 7-8 figures. But it starts with tracking and focusing on sales more than any other data point. 

The Easier Way To Track Your YouTube Ads

I don’t know about you, but all those steps seem like a lot of work, especially if I’m going to get reports that focus on last-touch attribution models that don’t help me understand what my target is doing before they convert. 

With the way YouTube and Google track ads, I don’t get much information from these reports, and it is a lot of work setting them up, which is why I prefer Hyros to handle these tasks. 

Hyros is a software that helps me set up my ads and provides much deeper, customizable reports that help me scale my ads to 20-30% ROI. 

Ok, that’s it, people. 

Check out our Facebook mastermind for more content like this; it’s incredible. There are some serious heavies in that group with over $50 million in ad spend. And I don’t offer courses, but you can basically get one for free if you subscribe to my YouTube channel, where I provide content like this every day.

If you want to set up your YouTube ad tracking, you can do what most people do and get the results most people are getting, which aren’t great. 

Or you can get better ROI on your ads by using Hyros. The best part is that if you don’t get 20-30% ROI on your ads with Hyros, you don’t pay anything more. 
It’s simple math. Get results, or don’t pay. So check out Hyros now.