Last updated on May 21st, 2025
So here’s the big question for today. Should you run your YouTube ads on a separate channel? Again, I want to repeat that because I want you to think about that for a second. Should you run your YouTube ads on a separate channel? Now, why am I asking that?
1. How many ads are you running?
Believe it or not, some advertisers run their YouTube ads on a separate channel from their regular YouTube channel, their regular organic videos, meaning they’re not paid ads. Well, why do they do that? Well, the reason is, is because when you run a lot of YouTube ads, it can really mess with your analytics. You have a lot of people working in the same area. That can get confusing. Sometimes you run a lot of versions of YouTube ads, and that can get confusing too.
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The Short Answer
So the short answer is maybe it depends sort of depends on how many ads you’re running and how many people are in the mix. Because here’s the problem. When you run a ton of YouTube ads next to a lot of different organic content, it can get confused, not just which video is next and how many versions of video X, Y, Z were running as ads. But also you can get confused as to the value of a YouTube view, and you can say, Hey, our views went up by 10,000 this month, but you’re not really making a distinction between YouTube ads and regular videos or shorts or live streams, and that can get confusing.
So I’m going to give you the key factors so you know what to do.
Why YouTube Ads at all?
And real quick, YouTube ads are so powerful because it’s the only platform where you can use information where people are searching for on Google and use that in a video ad and think of how powerful that is. No other platform can do this, accept YouTube ads. So here on VidAction, I teach you how to grow your revenue using YouTube ads from scratch.
More than one YouTube channel, really?
So again, the question, should you use a separate YouTube channel to run your YouTube ads? And by the way, you don’t actually need to have a YouTube channel today to run YouTube ads. You can start one today, and that’s all you need. You don’t have to have any regular videos, you don’t have to have any videos that are, that are not paid ads. You can start a channel just for ads. Or if you expect to do just regular videos later, you can start a channel for your ads and add regular videos later. Again, it depends how you evolve as you start to let people know what service you provide.
An “Invisible” YouTube channel?
So the question is, do you want a public channel or do you want an invisible YouTube channel? Now a public channel, that’s a regular channel. That’s where people come to watch, subscribe to videos. They see it in search. But what I call an invisible channel, that has only unlisted videos, meaning no one will see them unless they run as ads.
These videos have no public view count, they don’t have any branding that’s needed, and you don’t have to worry about any comments. They’re just ads, and to me, ads are usually unlisted. They’re not searchable.
So here’s the factors on how to decide whether to add a new ads-only YouTube channel.
2. Are you doing “regular” YouTube videos now?
First, are you currently doing organic videos? Do you have a channel at all? Next, how many organic videos are you doing? Because if you’re just doing a few, then you can run YouTube ads on that same channel.
Manager Permissions and Access
Then, how much do you worry about giving manager permissions to your ad specialist? If you’ve got a ton of AdSense revenue and you’ve got a ton of people putting their fingers in your YouTube channel behind the scenes, you may not want an ad manager to dive into that. It may be better to go with another channel.
3. How big is your team?
Also, how many ads or versions of the same ads are you running? So if you have the same ad, but it has 10 different intros or hooks, that may get cluttered for your regular YouTube channel manager because you have this big list of ads that show up before the regular videos and you get lost videos and so on.
Ad Format Considerations
What kinds of ads are you running? Are you running the kinds that come up in search or the ones that come up before videos? They call them in-stream or pre-roll videos.
Managing Internally vs. Externally
If you’re not running in-stream, then you might be able to have everything on the regular channel. Do you manage the ads internally or externally? So is your in-house team managing the ads or is it by another service? If it’s your in-house team, you’re more likely to use just one channel.
4. YouTube Ads can skew your data.
Are you worried about skewing your analytics? So sometimes we get confused between what’s a paid view and what’s an organic view, something that’s not part of an ad. And we can also get confused between how many views are coming from shorts or regular videos or lives, etc. If you don’t understand how to separate those in YouTube analytics or spit out a report, you may start to value views as the same thing. One view equals one view equals one view. When in actuality you need to consider the value of views differently from ad to not ad, and from long to short.
The three kinds of YouTube Ads.
I want to remind you, there’s really two or now three main kinds of YouTube ads. You have the in-stream ads, and those are designed really to get people over to the website or just build awareness. We focus on getting people over to the website. That’s what we do with direct response, but you may just want people to know about you or it’s part of an overall campaign where this is just one part of it.
In-Stream Ads (Pre-Roll)
The in-streams, are what we call skippable pre-rolls, and those come right before the other videos. You’ve all seen them. You hit the skip button if you don’t want it or if it’s interesting to you and you’ve done good targeting like we try to do, then you try to get people to watch and then click on the call to action to go to your website. And in a general campaign, these are going to be 90% of your ad spend. 90% of your budget is going to be spent on these pre-roll in-stream video ads.
In-Feed Ads
Then you have in-feed ads, and these are designed to get people to watch your YouTube videos. So it actually promotes the video, not a click to another location. So these appear generally in search. And these tend to be around 10% of an overall budget that includes both in-feed and in-stream. There just isn’t as much inventory of this type of ad, so it tends to be a smaller portion of your overall budget.
Shorts Ads
Now there’s a new ad called the shorts ad, and these are the vertical ads that essentially look like YouTube shorts. You upload a short to your channel, either as unlisted or public, and then you can run it as usually an in-stream ad, meaning it’s just like the other in-stream ads, except it’s vertical. Now, don’t be confused, but you can run this as a video in front of other shorts. Or on mobile, or even on desktop or television or whatever. Just because it’s vertical. It can be on any device.
5. Are your YouTube Ads Public or Unlisted?
And remember, there’s essentially two settings for ads. There’s the public ads, mainly for organic videos. And this can be used in-feed, those search-based or clickable ads. And sometimes for shorts ads, if you’re just doing a couple of versions. It’s okay actually for an ad that’s a short to be just sitting out there. That’s fine. But if you had 10 versions of it, I wouldn’t leave it in your shorts feed. But shorts generally don’t hurt your regular videos. So if you want to do extra shorts, it’s not a big deal.
Unlisted YouTube Ads – Advantages
Now there’s the unlisted form of ads, and this is usually the main type of ads. And these are good for in-stream, those pre-roll skippable ads. These videos won’t get seen if they’re unlisted except in the pre-roll ad, and you can test multiple intros or hooks, and it won’t clutter up the subscriber feeds of your viewers so that they won’t unsubscribe because they’re getting 10 versions of the same ad, for instance. Do you get views? Yeah, you get a lot of views, but they’re not visible view count, right? You don’t have to worry about moderating comments. And also unlisted is great if you’re just uploading videos and they’re not quite ready to go public, and you need other team members to optimize or check off on them. Unlisted is a good state for it to be ready to go.
Who am I?
Oh, and if we haven’t met, my name is Dane Golden from VidAction. This is for beginners because I believe you can learn to use YouTube ads profitably to grow your revenue. Check out my newsletter in the link below and I’ll see you in the next video.