Hello! From a brief google search i did I didn't find much about what happens when you promote a YouTube video so i wanted to share my experience

Lets be real, everyone just starting out has, at the very least, THOUGHT about paying for a few thousand views in order to give their video/channel a head start but do any brief research and you'll realize those sites offering 5k views for $3 are..well...bs Not only are they fake views, but they can potentially ban your channel.

Then there's the YouTube "promote" feature
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Theoretically it should work nicely right? Just pay google to show your video to people, and as an added bonus you only pay for the people who actually watch it.

YouTube these days is so saturated with content, especially the gaming market, it seems almost impossible to get your video in front of anyone. I decided it was worth a shot to let Google do the work for me.

So what happened?

FIRST
I want to just explain what happens when you "promote" a video.
The promotion is basically just a Google Adwords campaign, it will create an in-stream ad which is an ad plays before another video, and a in-display ad which puts your video to the right near similar videos.

You pick your budget, target audience and then set it up through adwords.

MY CAMPAIGN
I decided to test it out with 2 videos

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I set a budget of $25 for each video ($50 total) and made my target audience gaming. By default its targeted to everyone, and this is what google recommends, however i personally feel that targeting a gaming video to someone who clicked on a beauty video is a waste of effort. Sure, there is potential to attract someone who would otherwise never have considered your niche. but to me it just didn't seem likely.

SO WHAT HAPPENED?
Did I get more views?
Yes! In-fact within the first hour I got around 50 views, from real people as well. Not only that, but checking my analytics they were mostly "high quality" views as well. What i mean by high quality is they stayed and watched my video for a good amount of time. I may be wrong, but YouTube considers a view anyone who watches your video for more than 30 seconds. You can have 300 people watch your video for 60 seconds, but if your video is 10 minutes long, i would consider all of those views low quality....why? RETENTION
Getting people to your video is one thing, but getting them to stay is what really counts. A high retention rate sends the message that your video is worth watching, and thus it will rank better in search results.
That being said, according to analytics my average view time was 12 minutes!
Thats something to celebrate right? Adwords must really work huh?


EH
How many likes did I get? 0
How many new subscribers did I gain? 0
How many people commented on those videos? 0

Sure, i got my videos in-front of people, and some of them watched, but it did not turn those views into engaged subscribers.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I realize that the promote feature is probably better for running an actual ad (channel trailer) and i hope to test that out sometime in the future as well.

I am semi-pleased that I was able to get my video in front of people and get a decent number of views where as i probably would have gotten none or very little, but as i mentioned above without turning those views into engaged subs, is it really worth it?

Thank you to whoever takes the time to read this, i hope someone gets some value out of this, Like i said, I didn't find much about what happens when you promote a YouTube video anywhere so i wanted to share my experience.