Promotion of a medical YouTube channel: increase organic traffic and monetization

Maintaining Large YouTube Channels

Six months ago, representatives of a rehabilitation medicine center contacted our company. The request was to increase the number of views and subscribers on the Youtube channel dedicated to the topic of health. The client was also interested in increasing monetization from the channel.

$351,70

advertising budget

14.8 million

views

306 300

new subscribers

39 242

ad impressions

3 102

ad subscriber

$0,11

average subscriber price

$11 248,45

channel monetization revenue

Details

GEO

CIS Countries

Target audience

People interested in health and disease prevention, patients in rehabilitation, seniors seeking active longevity

Nisha

Medicine

Before contacting the agency, the center’s channel already had almost 170 thousand subscribers, and the videos brought a good number of views. Therefore, we were tasked not to change the format but to add tools that would increase traffic.

Work progress

Content analysis and optimization

Analyzed existing content, audience and competitors. Based on the analysis, we updated the metadata of all previously published videos: changed titles, descriptions and tags, targeting high-frequency keywords. Created a new design concept for video covers and channel header to increase CTR (Click-Through Rate) and attract viewers' attention.

Working with community and content formats

Started actively maintaining the “Community” tab on the channel, where polls, news and announcements of new videos were published. Introduced the YouTube Shorts format and started regular live broadcasts, which helped increase organic traffic and attracted new audiences. Shorts especially helped increase views in a short period of time due to the popularity of the format.

Launch and optimization of paid advertising

Launched advertising campaigns in the Video Discovery format, promoting the channel's most popular videos. Carefully selected audiences and customized advertising campaigns to attract only interested users. Regularly analyzed the effectiveness of advertising and made adjustments to reduce the cost of attracting subscribers and increase conversions.

Monitoring and improvement of indicators

Throughout the entire period of work, we monitored the channel's key indicators via YouTube Analytics. We regularly tested new audiences and creatives, disabling less effective ones. Special attention was paid to analyzing organic traffic to maximize its share in the total number of views.

Reporting and further recommendations

Prepared a detailed report presenting key performance indicators, including growth in subscribers, increased views and improved monetization. Provided recommendations for further development of the channel, including ideas for content strategy, design improvements and further use of paid advertising.

Paid promotion of a YouTube channel

Since the channel already had good organic traffic results that needed to be increased, we included paid advertising in the strategy. We decided to choose the Video Ads in Feed (Discovery) format and promote the best videos through it with a closed link.

* Many people run ads on individual videos, but when you have good organic traffic, it’s better to refuse this step. Our approach will not reduce the retention on other videos, but will only allow you to get a new audience from advertising videos.

Youtube displays ads of this format in search results, lists of similar videos, and on the main page of the mobile app.

In Video Ads campaigns, either a trailer or several of the most popular videos are used in the feed. We chose the second option because it was important for us to show the usefulness of the content on the channel. We also further studied the audience and added new segments for advertising on Youtube.

Results of promoting a medical YouTube channel

Key results

$351,70

advertising budget

14.8 million

views

306 300

new subscribers

39 242

ad impressions

3 102

ad subscriber

$0,11

average subscriber price

$11 248,45

channel monetization revenue

In six months of work, the number of subscribers grew by 306 thousand, and the total number of views reached over 14 million.

To demonstrate the audience growth more clearly, here is a comparison of performance over two time periods. The purple bars and numbers on the right are the channel’s statistics for the first 6 months before you contacted us. The blue columns and numbers on the left are statistics for the six months that we worked on promoting the channel.

We also provide general statistics of the channel for six months of our work.

And for the 6 months prior to contacting the company.

The following screenshot shows the power and role of organic on the channel. More than 220 million impressions, with 92.3% of them coming from badges in recommended sources.

During the promotion over the past few months, videos in the Shorts format have made a great contribution to the channel’s development. These are small videos up to 1 minute long. They collect views in a separate feed, which is now very popular on YouTube. Now Shorts, like TikTok, gets the most organic traffic using unique algorithms.

Analytics for individual short videos:

The first video brought about 1.8 thousand new subscribers and more than 159 thousand views. At the same time, it has been indexed for more than 50 days and continues to gain views. The percentage of views indicates that some users return to the video more than once.

Below is the data on the views of this video. As you can see, in the early days, it didn’t do very well. But over time, it grew in performance. This is a clear example of how Youtube algorithms work. The period of time during which videos bring new views and subscribers can be very long. But the results don’t come instantly.

And the next video did not immediately start gaining a lot of views (as you can see from the second graph). But it has good indicators of subscriber growth and viewer retention. That’s why it works well in the Shorts feed.

YouTube channel paid promotion results

We will consider the report for the last month of running the channel
In the period from December 1 to December 29, we launched 2 commercials. They brought new subscribers at the optimal price – 3.15 UAH / 0.11$. With their help we managed to attract 3102 subscribers only at the expense of paid advertising.

The main task of the advertising campaigns was to promote the selected “best video”, which was uploaded separately with access by link and intended only for advertising. This is necessary to constantly recruit new users and to minimize the risk of deteriorating analytics performance.

Conclusions

The Shorts format played an important role in organic promotion, as well as properly optimized high-quality content. We would like to emphasize this: even the most useful videos require competent optimization, otherwise they do not bring maximum results.

We received paid traffic thanks to the right strategy. It brought new subscribers without harming the channel. As a result, we managed to fulfill our main goal of increasing the number of subscribers and views.

Interested in promoting your YouTube channel? If you need to promote your YouTube channel, don’t hesitate to contact 4Limes. Leave a request and our specialist will contact you shortly for a consultation.

Do you have any questions?

Our experts are ready to answer them. Leave your contact details. We will be glad to discuss your project!