Google ad sense questions

[alexhedleymusic]

Hi,
Iv'e been using google ads to promote my latest single and just first of all to explain numbers wise... I had it released on my own for 5 days and it got 700 plays and about 45 likes. then I ran ad sense for 5 days and I was shocked on the first day to wake up the next morning with and extra 1000 views overnight... anyway it continued like this but a bit slower and by the end of the 5 days I ended up with 3.5k views on the video but only about 5 or 6 extra likes and I also made about 5 subscribers. the thing that has confused me a bit is the massive 'views to likes ratio' that this has shown. I know people will just say people watched the video but weren't interested and if that's true then that's good but I just got this kind of gut feeling that it didn't seem right. does anyone out there question the legitimacy of google ads for YouTube Music promotion as I thought something just didn't quite sit right with the numbers and stuff. another thing which confused me most was that I had gained 4 or 5 subscribers through the Adsense campaign but they didn't appear as notifications like it would usually. so if I look at my subscriber notifications it will say 'so and so subscribed' but with these new subscribers the numbers were going up but there was no notification of any of these new subscribers and you couldn't view there profiles. I also had one positive comment and two negative comments saying something like 'stupid advert' anyway that's the lowdown on my google ads first experience and Im just sort of trying to clarify wether or not these new subscribers and all the views are real because it seems a Bit odd to me to have 1000 views in like 10 hours and get 5 likes on the video and 0 dislikes. dunno maybe im looking into it to much but just seems odd. let me know what you think

[OneWorld]

I am no use to you at all, I know nothing about these things but after listening to some of your stuff I hope you get the issue resolved and more importantly get more recognition, I think you do some great stuff - best of luck

[rockydennis]

Try looking at the audience retention numbers in Youtube Analytics for your videos. For each video, you can see the average amount of time viewers are spending watching your videos, and you can see a plot of what percentage of viewers are still watching plotted against time.

[RichardT]

It sounds completely reasonable to me - getting likes and follows is much, much harder than getting plays. A lot of people (including me) never like or follow anyone.

You get a much higher like ratio from people who already know you - that sounds reasonable too.

[Drew Stephenson]

it's worth remembering exactly what we're talking about here as well. It's not people going to your site and clicking play necessarily:
- it's your video appearing on an embed in a page where someone's looking for something completely different. It might be auto-playing whilst they have the sound off and they may not even be aware of it.
- it's your video appearing in a 'next up' list that's playing in the background (or sometimes skipped over straightaway as they search for their next target.
So a lot of those listens won't be 'active' listens, and sadly some of them won't even have the sound on.

It's definitely worth looking at your retention numbers, that's as important a metric as the number of plays.

Obviously there could also be bots at play, but they don't tend to target music videos in general as they're not very click-baity.

[alexhedleymusic]

It sounds completely reasonable to me - getting likes and follows is much, much harder than getting plays. A lot of people (including me) never like or follow anyone.

You get a much higher like ratio from people who already know you - that sounds reasonable too.

hey Richard, yeah I did think that too about getting a higher ratio from your normal followers. still confused about the subscriber thing though. don't know why those 5 or so extra subscribers aren't showing up as notifications. thanks for your feedback anyway