The most effective and profitable YouTube ad targeting method is retargeting your own viewers and subscribers. This strategy allows you to reach the audience already engaging with your organic content and follow them with ads across the entire platform.

Who can use this strategy?

To use this approach, you or your client must meet these conditions:

1. An active organic YouTube channel
   
   

2. Sufficient data volume
   You need at least 1,000 data points. So if you want to target your viewers, you need at least 1,000 viewers on your channel, and if you want to target your subscribers, you need at least 1,000 subscribers.
   
   

3. Channel–offer alignment
   Your channel must focus on the same topic as your paid offer. For example, if you’re advertising a real estate product, your organic channel should also revolve around real estate.

Why this targeting works so well

This method consistently outperforms other targeting options in terms of cost per conversion because it reaches the most qualified audience at the lowest possible cost.

1. Hyper-targeted, high-intent audience

Let’s say you have an offer teaching people “how to become a commercial real estate investor in America”. That’s a very niche topic that only a small group of people is interested in. 

But with your organic YouTube channel, you’ve already curated the perfect list of people to advertise to. Because when you post organic content about how to become a commercial real estate investor in America, guess who’s clicking on your videos and subscribing to your channel? Only people who are interested in trying to become commercial real estate investors in America. 

This means those people are the most targeted audience you can possibly get.

2. They already know, like, and trust you

With traditional targeting methods, you’re reaching a cold audience that has never heard of you before and doesn’t know anything about you. In this case your ad has to be exceptionally great, and they’ll most likely have to see it a couple of times or even multiple of your ads until they finally trust you enough to click the link and enter your funnel/sales process. 

But if you’re retargeting the viewers and subscribers of your organic channel, your own viewers and subscribers already recognize your brand and trust your content. Your ads face less resistance and convert at a higher rate because your organic videos have already established credibility and rapport.

3. You can follow them across the platform

Now you might ask, if they are already watching your YouTube videos and are already subscribed to your channel, why would you even need to run YouTube ads to that audience? Isn’t that unnecessary? 

Let’s look at it this way. If you’re posting one organic video a week, you have exactly one chance per week to get the audience to convert. Maybe they’ll watch that video, but maybe they won’t. Maybe they will even watch a video of your competitor. You don’t have any control over it. 

But if you’re retargeting your viewers and subscribers with YouTube ads, you can follow them across the whole platform. No matter what video they watch, even if they watch a video of your competitor, they’ll see your offer. Instead of a single exposure per week, you gain dozens or hundreds of touchpoints, increasing the odds of catching them at the right place at the right time.

4. Big results with small budgets

Because this audience is highly specific and pre-qualified, conversion rates are dramatically higher. Even small ad budgets can produce big results.

The only limitation

This strategy can’t scale indefinitely. Your targeting pool is limited to your own viewers and subscribers, so once that audience is saturated, you’ll reach a ceiling. If you want to scale this audience, you’ll need a steady flow of new viewers and subscribers to increase the ceiling.

However, within that limit, this method delivers the fastest, easiest, and most cost-efficient conversions possible by targeting the lowest-hanging fruits.

Here’s how it’s done

• Open your Google ad account

• Click on "Tools" in the sidebar

• Click on "Data manager"

• Click on "Connect Product"

• Link your organic YouTube channel to your Google ad account

• Click on "Tools" in the sidebar

• Open the "Shared library" subfolder

• Click on "Audience manager"

• Make sure you're in the "Your data segments" tab

• Then click the blue plus icon

• Click on "YouTube users"

• Now we can create our data segment

• You can also create multiple data segments (one for viewers, one for subscribers, …)

• Give the segment a name

• Select your organic YouTube channel

• Select the action that you want to use for the data segment

• Select the timeframe of the action

• Decide whether you want to pre-fill the segment with the data of the past 30 days or if you want to start fresh and only add the data starting from now

• Then click "Continue" and save the data segment

• Now the data segment will be populated

• This can take up to 72 hours

• Here's how to use the data segment we've just set up as targeting for your YouTube ads

• Set up your ad campaign as you normally do

• Go to the "Ad group" level

• Scroll to the "Audience" box

• Click on "Add an audience"

• Click on "New Audience"

• Now we can create the audience using the new data segment

• Give the audience a name

• Select the data segment in the "Your data" box

• Click "Save"

• Then use this audience you've just created as targeting for your campaign

• Make sure that in the "Ad group" level the "Optimized targeting" is turned off

• Because we only want to target people who have actually watched or subscribed to our channel

• This setting would allow Google to also expand the targeting to people who look similar to your viewers and subscribers

• But since this isn't really accurate, it would just water down your audience

• Then publish your campaign as usual and you're ready to go