Are you looking to scale your business opportunity affiliate offers to the next level? YouTube ads present a massive opportunity to reach highly targeted audiences at scale and generate a steady stream of leads and sales.
In this guide, we'll dive into the framework and strategies used by top performance marketing agency Madgency to scale their clients' YouTube ad campaigns to millions of dollars in spend per month.
Ahmad and Qadeer, the founders of Madsgency, have spent the last several years mastering YouTube ads. Their agency now manages around $3 million per month in ad spend, primarily for info product businesses but also for lead generation in spaces like real estate and insurance. Over this time, they've developed a cold traffic scaling framework that has delivered consistent results across multiple niches.
The key is figuring out two important elements:
- Determining what affinity audiences your high-converting customers belong to
- Creating ad creatives that have mass appeal to a variety of audiences
Get these two things dialed in, and you can unlock rapid, profitable scaling on YouTube. Let's break down the framework step-by-step.
Ahmad and Qadeer, the founders of Madsgency
Why YouTube ads beat other platforms
Before we get into the specifics, it's important to understand why YouTube is such a high-potential platform for paid traffic. A few key reasons:
- YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world with massive reach
- Users spend an average of 19 minutes per visit, indicating high engagement
- Lower bounce rates compared to other websites
- Sales videos and VSLs tend to have the best conversion rates after in-person selling
- People actively search for "how-to" content related to making money, starting a business, etc.
- More lenient policies and less account shutdowns compared to Facebook
- It makes sense to run video ads on a platform where people are already consuming video content.
Additionally, with YouTube being owned by Google, you can tap into search intent by targeting your video ads to people based on what they are actively searching for on Google. And these video ad views are significantly cheaper than the cost per click on search ads.
The 2 keys to YouTube ads success
According to Madgency co-founder Ahmed, there are two critical elements you need to get right to achieve success with YouTube ads:
- Figure out what affinity groups your high-converting audiences belong to
- Develop video creative that has mass appeal across a variety of audiences
- If you can nail those two aspects through research and testing, you'll have a winning formula you can scale to the moon. Let's break down each one.
Identify high-converting affinity groups
The first step is gaining clarity on who your ideal prospects are and what other interests they have. YouTube provides Affinity Audiences that let you target people based on their passions, habits, and long-term interests.
Some examples of affinity groups relevant to the biz opp space could be:
- Aspiring entrepreneurs
- Self-improvement enthusiasts
- Personal finance geeks
- Money making hobbyists
- Tech early adopters
By analyzing your conversion data and doing audience research, you can uncover hidden gems of affinity groups that convert well for your offer. Tools like Google Analytics Interests Reports and Facebook Audience Insights can help with this process.
Creating high-converting video creatives
With your target affinity groups identified, the next key is developing video ads that will captivate their attention and compel them to take action. The ads need to appeal to the masses, quickly communicate the big benefit, and have a clear call-to-action.
Some best practices for biz opp video ads include:
- Grabbing attention in the first 5 seconds
- Calling out pain points and desires
- Showing social proof and results
- Demonstrating the unique mechanism
- Presenting with passion and enthusiasm
- Keeping the video to 60-90 seconds
- Using clear CTAs throughout
The goal is to get viewers thinking "this is exactly what I need" and excited to click through. Creative is the primary difference maker, so it's worth investing time and money into developing ads that hit the mark.
The 3-step scaling framework
With those two core elements dialed in, Madgency uses a simple 3-step framework to progressively scale budgets and reach:
Setting the stage for success
A few important settings to put in place before you start scaling:
- Run YouTube in-stream ads that are skippable. You only pay if someone is interested enough to watch 30 seconds or click through.
- Create ads in a vertical, mobile-friendly (Youtube Shorts) format. This is where the cheapest traffic is.
- Run one demographic per campaign (e.g. Males 35-44) to maintain control.
- Focus spend on mobile placements for prospecting campaigns.
- Keep ad creatives between 60-90 seconds. You need to get your key message across in this window to keep costs low.
With these elements in place, you're ready to start scaling spend using a 3-phase framework - hot, warm, and cold audiences.
Phase 1: "Hot" audiences
The first phase is going after the "low-hanging fruit" of people who are already problem-aware and actively seeking a solution. These could also be people who are already searching on Google for specific keywords.
For example, if you are promoting a course on starting a Shopify store, you would target keywords like:
- How to make money on Shopify
- Shopify dropshipping
- Shopify store examples
- Best products to sell on Shopify
You can use YouTube Ads to target people who made these searches on Google. Yes, YouTube Ads have that option since it's in the same advertising ecosystem as Google search.
These are your "hot" audiences. They already understand the opportunity and are looking for help. Your ad creative should call out their search query and present your offer as the ideal solution.
Using this approach, you can scale a campaign from $100/day up to $1000/day on this first phase alone. The key is connecting the dots between what someone is searching for and how your offer is positioned as the answer.
Phase 2: "Warm" audiences
Once you've maxed out phase 1, the next step is to expand to "warm" audiences. These are people who are problem-aware but may not necessarily be familiar with the specific solution you offer.
An example would be targeting more general "make money online" keywords like:
- How to make money from home
- Best online business ideas
- Legit ways to make money online
- Passive income ideas
At this stage, your ad creative needs to do more education on why your particular solution is the best option vs others they may be considering. Use case studies, demonstrations, and unique positioning to show how you are different and better than the alternatives.
Using this "warm" audience approach, you can scale from $1000/day up to $3000+/day in ad spend. Build custom audiences around highly relevant but broader keywords.
Phase 3: "Cold" Audiences/ Custom affinity & In-Market audiences
This is the phase where the magic happens in terms of truly scaling to the moon on cold traffic. The key here is taking advantage of affinity audience data.
By this point, you should have Google Analytics set up on your site and conversion data flowing into your ad account. Google will then start gathering data on who your buyers are and what their top affinity categories are.
For example, you may find that your best converting audience for an e-commerce course heavily indexes as "Shopify Store Owners" or "Business Opportunity Seekers." Google is telling you these are the broad interest groups to go after.
Armed with this data, you can begin advertising to these larger chilly-but-qualified audiences, and quickly scale to $5k, $10k+ per day in spend. The key is properly allocating budget, with 80% going to the top 3 affinity categories and 20% to the next tier.
Launch new campaigns for each affinity and let the data tell you which audiences can truly scale. Aim your ad creative at these broader interest groups using the same problem-solution hook from earlier phases.
Keys to scaling
Once you're spending significant money on these colder audiences, a few tips to keep in mind:
- Raise budgets slowly for longer sales cycles and high-ticket offers. With a low-priced impulse buy you can be more aggressive.
- Launch new campaigns for different demographics to see which respond best. But treat each as a distinct test.
- Expand winning campaigns to new GEOs, but be sure to put each country in its own separate campaign. Don't assume what works in one place will work in another.
The name of the game is giving yourself enough campaign "breadth" to withstand audience fatigue and identify new pockets of scale.
Real results
Using this phased approach, Ahmad and Qadeer have achieved the following results for clients:
- Took a fresh ad account from zero to $300k/month and then to $1 million in 5 months for a $2000 info product
- Generated a 9X ROAS ($228k in sales on $25k spend) for an Australian client
- Spent $11 million over 7 years for a prominent US business, averaging over 200,000 leads while staying under a $100 CPA target
- Beat Facebook on cost per acquisition ($830 vs $1000+) for an education client despite higher CPCs
The key in all cases was matching the right message to the right audience at the right stage of awareness. When you nail this, YouTube can become an absolute performance machine.
Getting started
To put this framework into action, you'll need a few critical elements in place:
- Install GA4 on your website and set up conversion tracking immediately, even if you only have organic traffic. This data will be crucial for scaling later.
- Develop ad creative that directly addresses what your target audience is searching for. Connect the dots from problem to solution.
- For prospecting campaigns, stick to 60-90 second vertical videos on mobile placements to keep costs down and engagement high.
- Test different audience temperature ranges, but always lead with the end conversion metric in mind. Vanity metrics like CTR and CPC matter much less.
Put this approach into action and watch your scaling potential on YouTube take flight. It won't happen overnight, but with the right structure, ad creatives, and tracking in place, the results will follow.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this guide has shown you the immense potential of YouTube advertising for scaling your affiliate campaigns. By dialing in your audience targeting and developing irresistible video creative, you can build an evergreen source of high-quality leads and customers.
The key is to start small, track your data relentlessly, and scale progressively using the 3-step SOG framework. Focus on creative testing and let the algorithm work its magic to put your ads in front of the right people at the right time.
With some persistence and a willingness to experiment, you may just find YouTube ads to be your secret weapon for taking your biz opp affiliate earnings to the next level. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, marketers who adapt and master new traffic channels will have a major advantage.
