Drooble YouTube Promotion: Does It Work?

In this piece, Brian Hazard of Color Theory breaks down his recent experience using Drooble YouTube Promotion, a safe and effective third party service which will promote your latest video using Google Ads.

Guest post by Brian Hazard of Passive Promotion

Your new music video cost $2000 to make. One week after its YouTube premiere, it has 134 views.

What to do?

You could share the link on your socials for the seventh time, at the risk of annoying your friends and family. But even if they click through, the lack of social proof is unconvincing. Why should they bother watching when no one else will?

You could Google “YouTube promotion” and wade through the morass of bot-powered scams that promise traffic from real people (who coincidentally all happen to be located in India and Colombia).

No, you want to promote your video the *right* way, the way the major labels do it: Google Ads.

There’s only one problem. You thought Facebook Ads Manager was complicated? Wait until you try Google Ads!

I’ve been messing with it for years now, and have made some costly mistakes. I’ve spent hours on the phone with support agents who couldn’t explain how targeting works, or why my ads weren’t showing because my targeting selections were cancelling each other out. I’ve watched more than my fair share of 45-minute tutorial videos on YouTube that don’t quite apply to what I’m trying to accomplish as a musician.

Fortunately there’s a shortcut: Drooble YouTube Promotion. They’ll promote your video safely and effectively using Google Ads, and email you a no-nonsense summary of the results you care about.

You may be wondering, do I need to give them my Google login details? Nope!

For better or worse, you can promote any video you want from any Google Ads account. I just created an ad for a friend’s video to test it out.

So theoretically, one could throw money at their preferred presidential candidate’s videos! What could go wrong?

YouTube Promotion Order Process

Setting up your campaign is quick and painless. First, copy/paste the URL of your video:

I chose the catchiest song from my latest release, a synthwave concept album about superstitions, inspired by early Cure records.

It’s got a great thumbnail — thank you Canva (affiliate link) — but beyond that, it isn’t an optimal choice. Here’s why:

Drooble YouTube Promotion uses the skippable in-stream ads format. Ads play before, during, or after other videos. The viewer can skip it after the first 5 seconds, and the advertiser is only charged if they interact with the ad or stick around for more than 30 seconds.

Ideally you want a video that:

1. Starts right away (mine fades in)
2. Does something to catch the viewer’s attention (as opposed to my static cover art)
3. Lets the viewer know who and what they’re watching (they’re expecting an ad, not a song)

But hey, you go with what you got. And so I did.

Next up, you name a few similar artists and choose what locations to target. Simple enough.

Finally, you select a package. Add two zeros to the dollar amount, and that’s about how many views you can expect.

Drooble gave me a promo code to test out the $25 package, and I was off to the races!

My YouTube Promotion Results

A week and a half later, I received an email with my results:

Views Before Campaign: 26,066
Views After Campaign: 29,238
Likes Before Campaign: 274
Likes After Campaign: 285
Subscribers Before Campaign: 10.5K
Subscribers After Campaign: 10.7K

My initial thought was, wait… that’s it? I asked if they had a control panel or something that I could log into, so I could see all the data.

It turns out they don’t, since they’re running the ads manually. Eventually they hope to automate the process, but there’s no telling when that might be. It all depends on what Google does with their API.

According to Drooble, most people are happy with the level of detail they provide. Artists typically use the service to launch a new video, so the results are rather obvious.

At my request, they provided me the start and end dates of my campaign, plus a few key data points:

Impressions: 4,412 / Views: 3,011 / View rate: 68.25%.

Less than a penny per view! Contrast that with my last skippable in-stream ads experiment:

Impressions: 4,474 / Views: 1,533 / View rate: 34.26%

I paid $62 for 1533 views with my own targeting ($0.04 CPV), versus $25 for 3011 views through Drooble ($0.01 CPV).

Of course I can dig deeper into the data, and verify my results, through YouTube Studio:

3157 views, 95.8% of which came from YouTube advertising = 3024 views vs. 3011 reported. Check.

30.9% of ad viewers made it through the entire song and/or were taking a bathroom break.

The views did indeed come from the three countries I selected. I’m guessing the algorithm favored the UK because view duration was slightly higher, or the cost per impression was lower, or both.

The like count checks out, but as you may have noticed in the screenshot above, the campaign only garnered two new subscribers. I’m not convinced that in-stream ads are the best way to grow a channel.

If there’s any other data from YouTube Studio you’d like me to share, let me know in the comments!

My Drooble YouTube Promotion Conclusions

It should come as no surprise that I highly recommend Drooble YouTube Promotion.

If you’d like to give it a shot, you can save 10% and support the site by using discount code COLORTHEORY here.

That said, it’s not the be-all and end-all of YouTube promotion. To maximize your growth on the platform, you’ll need to hunker down and learn the ads interface, and experiment with different ad formats and targeting.

But to jumpstart a video launch, or to give all your videos a sprinkle of social proof, Drooble YouTube Promotion is the most cost-effective option that I know of.

Have you tried Drooble YouTube Promotion, or any other YouTube promotion service? Share your results in the comments!

Brian Hazard is a recording artist with over twenty years of experience promoting eleven Color Theory albums, and head mastering engineer and owner of Resonance Mastering in Huntington Beach, California.

His Passive Promotion blog emphasizes “set it and forget it” methods of music promotion.