Nope. I lost money.
Many viewers did place an order after seeing the ad, but not enough to justify continuing the campaign. This was true even taking into account the full lifetime value of a customer. While I was not able to make the campaign break even, by tweaking the targeting options I was able to get pretty close.
For now I have stopped the campaign and will reflect a bit on what went wrong before possibly trying again.
As advice for someone else who wants to try advertising on YouTube, I’d say your product or service should make at least tens of dollars in profit to at least have a shot at making the numbers work. Advertising an app with a flat cost of only a few dollars would be unlikely to work even at the lowest bid levels.
If you do have a suitable product, be prepared to spend thousands while you tweak your campaign towards profitability.
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
