Where I'd put your next ad dollar

June 3, 2026·4 min read

Happy Wednesday!

Got asked a few times recently about how to find scale when current channels feel capped out. It was some variation of this: where would you put the next dollar of ad spend?

Each brand asking had Meta, Google Search, Shopping, etc. (all the basics running) and want to find how to grow top of funnel.

The answer I gave is YouTube ads. With caveats about when, how, and what to expect.

This shouldn't be your first growth lever. If you're running a program where YouTube is the main lever on its own, that's probably not going to pan out. You're going to lose money fast without a system to collect mid and bottom of funnel.

If your other channels are dialed, though, YouTube is where I'd put the next dollar.

The format that's actually working right now: Demand Gen.

Within YouTube, the format I'd run is Demand Gen. Demand Gen is the format we're seeing work right now.

We're seeing CPMs that are better than most other platforms. With specific in-market targeting, we're seeing $5 to $8 CPMs, which is 20 to 30 percent better than Meta on a like-for-like basis.

Running shorts in vertical format gets you good cheap traffic on top of the video engagement. You get direct response clicks AND the brand lift from people who watch the full video. It's one of the only formats where you get both at once.

Creative is the whole game.

Andromeda rewards creative volume on Meta. YouTube rewards creative quality.

If the hook is bad, you don't get good view rates. If you don't get good view rates, your CPCs go up and your CPMs go up. The platform is intent-based, and Google rewards better user experience with lower costs. From Google's point of view, if people are engaging with a video and watching it through, that's good for the platform, so they give you better pricing. If it's a bad experience, they charge you more for the same distribution.

If you try to run your current Meta assets on YouTube without rebuilding them for the format, you're probably going to fail. The asset is the secret sauce.

What this looked like at Groove.

We started running YouTube ads years back. The business literally doubled within a year.

That was an older format era. CPV was still the main play and Demand Gen wasn't really a thing yet. The platform has changed since. The underlying truth about YouTube hasn't. It builds long-term consideration in a way that compounds across everything else you're running. We've kept investing in it for that reason.

Your attribution platform is probably unnecessary.

Most teams reach for Triple Whale, Northbeam, or some other attribution platform when they're thinking about adding a new channel. For most brands at this scale, you probably don't need them. Your spend isn't complex enough to justify the cost of the tool or the team's time to actually use it.

What we use to measure effectiveness:

Branded search trend in Google Trends, compared to previous periods
Organic traffic in Google Search Console
Amazon search volume if you sell there
Other platforms' click-reported CPA, which tends to drop as YouTube ramps

That last point is the one most teams miss. Meta has gotten meaningfully worse at finding net-new customers in the last couple of years. When YouTube does its job at the top of the funnel, Meta works better downstream because the audience is already warm. That dynamic shows up as a quietly improving Meta CPA over the same period your YouTube spend is going up.

There's no day-one payback.

Most brands aren't patient enough when they think about testing video.

If you're a bootstrapped brand you're likely maximizing your budget running direct response ads, and you don't have the space to test video without putting real pressure on cash flow.

You have to look at the math in monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual terms. If you know your consideration window for new customers, set that as the evaluation window. Don't make the mistake of judging YouTube on a direct-response timeline. The channel doesn't work that way.

My gut is that your consideration timeline is longer than you think, especially right now. The economy is bifurcated. A lot of people are taking longer on discretionary purchases, prioritizing essentials, holding off. It shows up in the lag between when someone sees your brand for the first time and when they actually buy.

How I'd actually test it.

Hold off on YouTube ads until you're over $10M in revenue. Below that, the volume isn't there to learn from the data and the cash flow squeeze is brutal.

Once you're above $10M, start with 10 percent of total ad budget. It should be enough to learn some things without risking the business as usual stuff.

The biggest predictor of whether this works is creative quality. You can build the assets in-house if you have the right person. If this is your first run at YouTube video, hire someone who's done it before. Good agencies are expensive. Bad creative on YouTube is more expensive, though.

What to do next.

Pull the last 6 months of your branded search trend in Google Trends and plot it against your YouTube spend over the same period (if you've been running any).

If branded search is climbing and your spend is going up, the channel is doing its job at the top of the funnel even if your attribution platform doesn't credit it. If branded search is flat and your spend has been climbing, the creative is the problem. Rebuild before you scale.

If you haven't been running YouTube, look at your competitors to benchmark yourself against their brand search volume. Then, think about what you can do to close that gap.

Kyle

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