$11.7 million spent on youtube ads for a single ecom brand in the last 12 months.
projecting $25 million this year
$0.99 average CPC
2.6 billion impressions
11.8 million clicks
all through Demand Gen (Youtube) campaigns
look at that spend curve
we started under $5K/day and scaled to over $150K/day in spend
here's why most brands will never do this:
they tested youtube once, ran some skippable in-stream ads with a repurposed meta creative, saw a bad CPA in their google ads dashboard after 2 weeks, and decided "youtube doesn't work for us"
that's like test driving a car in first gear and deciding the engine is broken
what actually makes youtube work at this scale:
the creative can be very different from meta. cold audience creative needs to be 45-90 seconds, tell a story, and hook in the first 5 seconds. you can't just resize a meta UGC clip and expect results
measurement has to change. if you're judging youtube on last-click ROAS in google ads you'll lose every time.
youtube drives new customers that convert later through branded search, direct, and organic. we use blended MER, Google only LPs, Incrementality tools like WorkMagic and Northbeam, and geo holdout tests to measure true incrementality
the new visitor percentage is the number nobody talks about. across our entire book of business, youtube drives 75% new visitors vs meta at 55% - at scale, on average. that means youtube is finding people who have never heard of your brand at a better iROAS than meta
Demand Gen is the campaign type. not skippable in-stream. not video action campaigns. Demand Gen with the right targeting.
most brands put too much on retargeting and wonder why they can't scale... we're averaging around 70% of an account's budget on Youtube Ads at scale and 30% on Search, Shopping, P MAX
we manage $200M /year in google and youtube ad spend
the brands doing $100K /day almost always have youtube as their biggest growth lever. their competitors aren't running it, or they tested it once and gave up
this is the most underleveraged channel in ecommerce in 2026
the data is sitting right here