How To Make Money Online With Google Adwords

What if you could put your offer in front of someone right as they were already searching for exactly what you sell? Not broad Facebook targeting, not cold Google search clicks, but the exact viewer who just typed in “yoga for beginners” or “how to lose weight fast” and is already watching a video about it. That is what YouTube ad placement targeting does, and it is one of the most underused strategies in affiliate marketing today.

In this video, Alston walks through how to set up a YouTube in-display ad campaign inside Google Ads that targets specific competitor videos by URL, which means your ad shows up before the popular videos people in your niche are already watching. He shows both the manual way and a faster tool-assisted way using a platform called V Roll. Below, you will find the full breakdown, step by step, so you can run your first campaign without wasting a single ad dollar on the wrong audience.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear understanding of how YouTube placement targeting works inside Google Ads
The exact campaign settings Alston uses: objective, budget, language, and geography
The manual URL method for finding competitor video placements
How to use V Roll to find hundreds of targeted video URLs in minutes instead of hours
Why placement ads are more cost-efficient than most people assume
Three things you can send traffic to: affiliate offers, landing pages, and your own YouTube channel
Not sure which online income model fits your situation? Take the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com and find out in two minutes.

Why YouTube Placement Targeting Is Different From Every Other Ad Type

Most beginners run ads with interest or keyword targeting, which means the platform makes a guess about who your audience is based on behavior signals. That guessing introduces a lot of waste. Placement targeting skips the guesswork entirely. You pick the exact YouTube videos where you want your ad to appear, and anyone watching one of those videos will see your ad first.

The logic is simple. If someone is watching a 20-minute yoga tutorial at 7 AM, you already know three things about them: they are interested in yoga, they have time to commit to learning something, and they are not just passively scrolling. That is a warm audience. A yoga gear affiliate offer or a yoga course landing page shown to that viewer will perform far better than the same offer shown to someone who clicked on a wellness article two weeks ago.

YouTube placement targeting is the paid equivalent of showing up in the same room as your buyer. You did not find them randomly. You went where they already were.

Step 1: Create a New Campaign in Google Ads

Log in to your Google Ads account. Click the plus sign to create a new campaign. When asked to select a goal, choose Leads. On the next screen, select Video as the campaign type. This is the format that allows your video to run as a pre-roll ad before someone else’s YouTube video begins.

This is not a deep-dive tutorial on every setting inside Google Ads. Alston moves through the standard fields quickly because the goal of the video is to get to the most important setting: placement. But there are a few campaign-level choices worth noting before you get there.

Daily Budget

Alston sets his daily budget at $10 per day. That is his starting point. Your number depends on how aggressive you want to test and how much you are willing to invest before seeing a return. There is no magic number, but $10 per day gives you enough data to see if a placement set is working without burning through a large budget before you can optimize.

Language and Geography

Set the language to English. For geography, Alston recommends thinking beyond just the United States. The United States converts well, but US traffic is the most expensive because every advertiser is competing for it. Alston’s preferred combination is United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and other first-world English-speaking countries. The reasoning: these audiences speak English, understand the offer, and are willing to spend money to solve a problem. You get better reach for your budget without sacrificing buyer quality.

Everything else on the campaign setup page, networks, inventory type, excluded content, you can leave at the defaults for your first test. Get to the placements section fast.

Step 2: Set Your Placements to Specific YouTube Videos

Inside your ad group settings, scroll down to the audience targeting section and look for Placements. This is where the strategy lives. Click the option to add placements, and then select YouTube Videos as the placement type.

What you are doing here is telling Google: show my ad specifically on these videos, not across the broader YouTube network. This is the opposite of topic or interest targeting. You are not asking Google to find an audience. You are telling Google exactly where the audience already is.

You can add up to 5,000 different YouTube video URLs in this placement field. That is a massive number of touch points. The challenge is finding those URLs without spending your entire day doing manual research.

The Hard Way: Finding Placement URLs Manually

The manual approach works. It is just slow. Here is the process:

Open YouTube in a new tab. Search for a term in your niche. If your affiliate offer is in the fitness space, search “yoga for beginners” or “weight loss workout.” Browse the results and click into a video with strong views, meaning people are already going there in significant numbers. Copy the video URL from your browser’s address bar. Go back to your Google Ads placement field. Paste the URL. Repeat this process until you have a solid list of placements.

Alston uses yoga as an example throughout the video. He searches “yoga” on YouTube, finds a video with 94,000 views, copies its URL, and pastes it into the Google Ads placement box. That one video URL represents a placement where any viewer of that video could see his ad before the video begins.

The problem is scale. To build a placement list with even 50 or 100 videos, you are looking at an hour or more of copy-and-paste work. For 500 videos, you might spend an entire afternoon on it. That is time most beginners do not have, and it is repetitive enough that mistakes happen. Alston describes this as the approach that works but costs you hours of your life.

The Easy Way: Using V Roll to Build Placement Lists in Minutes

The faster approach uses a tool called V Roll. Alston is not a sponsor and does not have an affiliate link for the platform. He found it on his own, thought it was genuinely useful, and included it in the video for that reason alone.

V Roll’s listed price is around $99 per month. Alston found a discount by searching the platform name plus “coupon” or “discount” in Google, which turned up a promotional offer around $49.99 per month with a recurring subscription. That deal may or may not still be available depending on when you read this, but it is worth searching for before you sign up at full price.

The platform also offers a free demo, so you can take a tour of the features before committing to a paid plan. If you are just getting started, that free trial is the right first step.

How V Roll Works for YouTube Placement Research

Inside V Roll, go to the section for YouTube targets and then search for video placements. You type in a keyword related to your niche. Alston uses “yoga” as the example. Click search. V Roll generates a list of YouTube videos matching that keyword, organized in a format that makes bulk selection easy.

Once the list populates, you can either download it as a text file or copy the URLs directly from the interface. You then paste those URLs into your Google Ads placement field. What would take an hour or more of manual YouTube searching takes 20 to 30 seconds inside V Roll. Alston estimates this saves a quarter to a third of the time, if not more.

You can also get more specific with your keyword targeting to match the exact buyer mindset. Instead of “yoga,” you could search “yoga for older adults” or “yoga for beginners over 50” to find videos where the audience is more aligned with a specific product. The more precise your keyword, the more qualified the viewers who will see your ad.

Building Groups of Placement Lists

V Roll also lets you build groups across multiple keyword searches. Alston demonstrates this by running searches for “yoga” and then “weight loss” and combining the results into a single placement group. One search for “weight loss” returned around 240 videos in that category alone. When you multiply that across multiple keyword searches, you can build a placement list of hundreds or even thousands of targeted videos in a single session.

Alston’s suggestion for getting the most out of these lists: look for buyer intent words in your keyword searches. Terms like “fast,” “proven,” “best,” or “how to actually” often attract viewers who are closer to a purchasing decision. A viewer watching “fastest weight loss workout results” is different from someone watching “what is intermittent fasting.” Both are in the fitness niche, but one is far more ready to take action.

Not sure which online income model to use the traffic you’re building?

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How YouTube Placement Ads Are Priced (And Why It’s Better Than You Think)

One of the most common reasons people avoid running YouTube ads is the assumption that every impression costs money. That is not how in-stream ads work, and understanding the pricing model changes your perception of the cost.

YouTube in-stream ads are the ads that play before a video and include a skip button. When a viewer clicks skip in the first few seconds, you are not charged. You only pay when a viewer watches past the skip threshold, which Alston notes is somewhere around 10 to 15 seconds, though he acknowledges he is not 100 percent certain of the exact cutoff at the time of the video.

The practical implication: your $100 ad spend does not produce 100 impressions. It can produce thousands of ad plays because a large percentage of viewers will skip, and you pay nothing for those. The viewers who do watch past the threshold are self-selecting. They found your ad interesting enough to keep watching. That is a better lead signal than a passive impression.

This cost structure makes YouTube placement targeting accessible even on a modest budget. You are not paying for disinterested eyeballs. You are paying for viewers who voluntarily stayed.

Three Ways to Use This Traffic

The placement targeting setup is the same regardless of what you are promoting. What changes is where you send the viewer who clicks your ad. Alston covers three main destinations.

1. Direct Affiliate Offers

Send viewers directly to an affiliate product page. This works best when your ad creates clear context for what they are about to see. If your ad promises a solution to a specific problem, and the affiliate offer is that solution, the transition feels natural rather than jarring. Alston is in the make-money-online and affiliate marketing niche, so his offers are relevant to an audience that was already watching videos about those topics.

2. Landing Pages to Collect Email Addresses

Instead of sending cold traffic directly to an affiliate offer, you can capture the viewer’s email first. A simple landing page with a free guide, checklist, or mini-course giveaway is enough to get the opt-in. From there, your email sequence handles the conversion. This approach costs you the upfront ad spend but builds an asset, your email list, that you can market to repeatedly without paying for ads again.

3. Your Own YouTube Channel for Subscriber Growth

This is the most creative use case Alston covers. If you have a small subscriber count, you can target the most popular videos in your niche with a “subscribe now” style ad. Viewers who are already interested in the topic see your ad before a video they chose to watch, they get curious about who you are, and they click through to your channel. Alston calls this “poaching” competitors’ audiences, and he says the setup takes about 10 minutes of work. You are not buying subscribers through fake engagement. You are showing up in front of people who already care about your topic and letting them decide to follow you.

V Roll’s Bonus Feature: Create the Ad Itself

Beyond finding placement URLs, V Roll also gives you tools to create the video ad itself. The platform lets you produce 30-second and 40-second ad spots directly inside the interface. Once the ad is created, V Roll can export the finished video to your YouTube channel automatically.

This means you could theoretically do the entire campaign setup workflow, finding placements, building your ad creative, and exporting to YouTube, without leaving V Roll. Alston does not go deep into the ad creation side in this video, but notes it as a feature worth exploring if you want a single platform for the whole process.

Step-by-Step: Running Your First YouTube Placement Campaign

Here is the full process condensed into an actionable sequence you can follow today.

Log in to Google Ads. Click the plus sign and create a new campaign. Select Leads as the goal, then Video as the campaign type.
Set your daily budget. Start at $10 per day to gather data before scaling. You can increase this once you confirm the placements are driving clicks or conversions.
Set language to English. Set geography to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and any other first-world English-speaking country where people are willing to spend money to solve their problems.
Leave the standard network and inventory settings at their defaults for your first campaign. Go directly to the Placements section and select YouTube Videos.
Open V Roll (or search YouTube manually if you prefer). Enter your niche keyword. For example: “yoga,” “weight loss,” “make money online,” “personal finance.” Generate or collect a list of relevant YouTube video URLs.
Look for buyer-intent keywords when building your list. Searches like “best yoga for weight loss” or “fastest way to lose 20 pounds” attract viewers who are closer to taking action than someone watching general informational content.
Copy and paste the URLs into the Google Ads placement field. Add as many as you have found, up to the 5,000-video limit. More placements means more potential reach across the audience you care about.
Create your video ad. It can be as short as 30 seconds. The ad needs to hook attention in the first three seconds and give the viewer a specific reason to click before hitting skip. Keep the call to action clear: click here to get X, or visit this page to learn Y.
Upload your video to YouTube if it is not already there. Connect it to your campaign as the ad creative. Set your destination URL to your affiliate offer or landing page.
Launch the campaign. Watch the impressions and click-through rate over the first few days. Remove placements that are generating impressions but no clicks. Double down on placements that are driving qualified traffic.

Honest Drawbacks of This Approach

YouTube placement targeting is powerful, but it has real limitations worth knowing before you spend money on it.

You still need a video ad. This is a barrier for beginners who have never been on camera or produced video content. A talking-head video recorded on your phone works fine, but it does need to exist. V Roll’s ad creation feature helps, but you still need to put something together.

Placement performance varies significantly. A video with 500,000 views might drive very few clicks because the audience is passive. A video with 20,000 views might convert better because the audience is highly specific. You will not know until you test. Budget for a real testing phase before you draw conclusions.

V Roll costs money. At $49.99 to $99 per month, it is not free. If you are just starting out with a $200 total budget, paying for the tool plus ad spend might not make sense. In that case, start with the manual URL approach and graduate to V Roll once ads are generating a return.

Ad policies apply. Certain niches, especially health claims, financial promises, and some supplement categories, face stricter advertising rules on Google’s platforms. Make sure your offer and your ad copy comply with Google Ads policies before launching. A disapproved ad means your placement list is wasted until you fix it.

Results are not instant. Even with perfectly targeted placements, it takes time for the algorithm to optimize delivery and for enough viewers to see and interact with your ad. Do not pull the plug after 48 hours. Give a test at least a week of data before making big changes.

Find Your X

Google Ads placement targeting is one way to get in front of buyers. But it is not the right starting point for everyone. Some people do better with content before ads. Others have a skill set that makes a completely different income model a better fit. If you are not sure where to start, the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com asks eight questions about your situation and gives you a personalized recommendation for the income model most likely to work for you. Takes two minutes and saves you from guessing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a big budget to start with YouTube ads?

No. Alston starts his test campaigns at $10 per day. That is $300 per month, which is enough to gather meaningful data on which placements are working. You do not need to spend thousands before you know if a campaign has potential. Start small, test, and scale what works.

What kind of video do I need for this type of ad?

A short, direct video works best for in-stream placements. Alston mentions 30-second and 40-second formats as effective lengths. The key is the first three seconds, since that is what a viewer sees before they decide to skip. Hook them immediately with a problem they recognize or a result they want. Then deliver your call to action before the skip window closes.

Can I use placement targeting for any niche?

Generally yes, as long as your niche has YouTube content to target. Niches like fitness, finance, relationships, cooking, parenting, and business all have massive libraries of YouTube videos you can place ads on. More obscure niches may have fewer placement options, which limits your reach but also means less competition for those placements.

Is V Roll the only tool for finding placement URLs?

No, it is not. Alston mentions it as the tool he found useful at the time of the video. There are other third-party research tools that pull YouTube video data by keyword, and the manual method on YouTube.com itself always works. V Roll was the specific tool he used to demonstrate the faster approach. Other platforms with similar functionality exist, and prices and features change, so compare your options before subscribing.

What is the difference between placement targeting and interest targeting in YouTube ads?

Interest targeting lets Google’s algorithm decide who sees your ad based on what it knows about a viewer’s behavior and preferences. Placement targeting bypasses that entirely. You specify the exact videos where your ad will appear, so you control the context completely. Interest targeting casts a wider net. Placement targeting is a spear aimed at a specific audience already watching content in your niche.

How many YouTube videos should I add to my placement list to start?

There is no fixed rule. Alston notes you can add up to 5,000 video URLs. Starting with 50 to 200 well-chosen placements gives you enough reach for meaningful data without spreading your budget too thin. Once you identify which placements drive results, you can expand from there. Starting too broad makes it harder to diagnose what is working.

Do I get charged when someone skips my ad?

No. For in-stream ads with a skip button, you are only charged when a viewer watches past the skip threshold, which is approximately 10 to 15 seconds. If a viewer clicks skip in the first few seconds, you pay nothing for that impression. This makes YouTube in-stream ads more cost-efficient than many people assume, because a large percentage of viewers will skip and you absorb no cost for those.

Can I use YouTube placement ads just to grow my subscriber count?

Yes. Alston explicitly covers this use case. If you run a channel with low subscriber numbers, you can target popular videos in your niche with a “subscribe now” style ad. Viewers curious about who you are will click through to your channel. It is a legitimate paid strategy for audience growth, not a substitute for content quality, but a way to accelerate discovery among people already interested in your topic.

Sources

Google Ads Help Center: YouTube in-stream ad formats and bidding
V Roll platform (vroll.com) for YouTube placement research and ad creation
Alston Godbolt’s original YouTube video: How To Make Money Online With Google Adwords