What I Learned Burning $13,867 on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan. Good advice and overview from a subscription service that sells candy (candyjapan.com – Japanese candy surprises sent to you twice a month).

In conclusion, did you break even?

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.

Read more and check out some of the previous biz related posts on their blog.