Ad performance: what's the deal?

On the previous page, I showed some stats from a few of my YouTube videos. The numbers were all over the place, proving that traffic numbers, in and of themselves, are not a good indicator of how much you can expect to earn. In other words, 1,000 visitors don't automatically equate to $1.00 in earnings (or some other figure, for that matter). The reason for that is due to the types of ads that are shown with your videos.

For example, let's assume you posted a video about how to bake cookies. Most likely, the title of your video will be something to the effect of "how to bake cookies." Then, in the description beneath your video, perhaps you list the recipe, including brand names for products you purchased to make the cookies with, etc. Lastly, you add tags to your video that are related to baking, cookies, brands, recipes, appliances, etc.

Now, when someone watches your video, they're most likely going to see ads related to exactly what you've specifed your video is about: cookies, baking, Maytag appliances (if you named that brand), etc. That essentially ensures that someone (hopefully many) will click on one of the ads that's shown to them. Now, I'm going to dive into a bit of my own personal theory here, so take the next paragraph in context.

The factors you can control for letting YouTube know what your video is about are video title, video description, tags, category, and the actual name of the video you upload; however, I think Google takes more factors into consideration with the ads they display in YouTube videos -- namely, voice transcriptions from videos (if a video has such data to extract), the location of the person viewing the video, and the cookies that exist on a viewer's computer. Now, Google may not use any of those, but their goal is to make money. And if they don't run the most relevant ads for every single person that watches a YouTube video, then they lessen their chances (and, thus, your chances) of making money.

So, all that to say that I think Google does more than just the factors under your control to run relevant ads, which ultimately works in your favor. But you should absolutely do your part to accurately explain the contents of your video. And with that, it's time to move on to the next section: keyword research. Though not a necessity, keyword research can greatly increase the odds of your video being discovered via YouTube searches.