Our Paid Bible Video Outreach
I’m a Christian who’s long thought that there must be a better use of money to fulfill the Great Commission than for example, paying thousands to upgrade the church’s landscaping. In early 2022 I created a Youtube channel with a handful of short videos explaining how to become a Christian, along with some other Bible basics (@biblehowtos on Youtube).
It didn’t take long to learn that I needed to pay to promote the videos. I have a background there, so I set up a simple Google Ads “pay per click” video ad campaign using my own money. Now this is the important part of my story: My videos are in English, so I naturally targeted two countries where I thought they’d fit best: The United States and Canada. I also chose a few other parameters, trying to steer the ads to the most promising crowd. I set up the ad campaign to play for a month, and I committed ten dollars per day: five dollars each for what I considered to be my two best videos.
I thought that first month went pretty well. Frankly it was fun to watch the numbers of people who clicked to see the videos. I tried a different combination of inputs in month two and was shocked to see that when I dropped the USA/Canada requirement and let Google promote them anywhere in the world, the numbers skyrocketed, so I left that parameter alone from then on. I’ve learned that Google doesn’t like it when I quote exact numbers or paste screenshots here, so I’ll leave it at that. It’s definitely a powerful tool though, especially I think, when we NOT try to make money on it as most do.
A footnote though: The three countries that consistently show the most views are India, the Phillipines and Indonesia (each past British colonies that speak English). The average run-time stays remarkably close to two minutes. When I knew that, I kept my video length at about three minutes, and was careful to keep key information in that first two minutes. You can budget less than I did. It seems to me that this is perfect for smaller churches, or individuals who are “between churches” jiust now.