How an Ed-tech brand used Youtube-for-Action to crack performance at scale to acquire customers in the USA.

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By Sujith Raju Ambati | Lead, Business Strategy & Analytics

Have you ever heard of the high-intent search inventory delivering poorer than the “Branding first” YouTube inventory? 

Challenge

While scaling the lead campaigns for an “Indian Music Classes” brand in USA targeted towards Indians, we faced the following 2 challenges:

1. Small TG size and limited search volume on high intent keywords from Indian Community (e.g. “Music Classes for Indians”) Approx. 2.7M Indians in USA out of which people searching with high intent keywords were extremely limited
2. While capitalizing on other high intent keywords (e.g. “Music classes online”), though the volume was high, however there was no way to identify if it was coming from Indian Community or not.

Which meant that search was not scalable and whenever scaled, there was a high % of disqualified leads

Campaign type	Month	Cost	CAC*
Search	September 2022	₹13,265	475
Search	October 2022	₹74,816	1338

Solution

1. Indian behavior to be targeted than intent. So, Identify keywords recognising the persona of an Indian to be identified and targeted. Thus, increase the size of the TG.
   Indians living abroad still search for Indian things despite being in the USA: Temples, pickles, food, doctors, bollywood fans, South Indian cuisine, bollywood movie stars etc.
2. Utilize YouTube VAC (Video Action Campaigns) with “Custom Intent” audience built using keywords identifying “Indian Persona”.

Result

Though VAC campaigns took a couple of months’ time to optimise however, once optimsied, they delivered 11x scale of search at less than 1/3rd of Search campaigns CAC.

Campaign type	Month	Cost	CAC*
Search	September 2022	₹13,265	475
Search	October 2022	₹74,816	1338
Search	November 2022	₹13,321	330
Search	December 2022	₹26,980	378
Overall Search		₹128,382	₹656
VAC	September 2022	₹108,938	344
VAC	October 2022	₹93,198	297
VAC	November 2022	₹151,250	100
VAC	December 2022	₹110,016	127
Overall Video		₹463,402	₹154

*Note: CAC data is masked here for taking 100 as the base of VAC campaigns in Nov 2022.