How to Increase YouTube Subscribers with Google Ads

YouTube subscribers are the backbone of a recurring audience that will engage with your future content, such as product releases or holiday-exclusive products or services. A growing subscriber base also fosters a stronger sense of community, helping you better understand how viewers interact with your content.

According to Google, viewers who engage with video ads are 23 times more likely to take follow-up actions like subscribing to a channel or exploring more videos. Therefore, if you’re looking to promote your YouTube channel further, it’s essential to go beyond organic tactics and learn how to optimize for subscriptions using Google Ads. With the right ad strategy, you can increase your YouTube subscriber count and accelerate your channel’s growth in a measurable, scalable way.

Preparing for a Subscriber-Focused Google Ads Campaign

Unlike standard campaigns that focus on driving traffic or action, a subscriber-focused Google Ads strategy is designed to grow your YouTube subscriber count and build long-term audience engagement. To increase YouTube subscribers effectively, you need to fine-tune your campaign setup for conversions that lead to subscriptions.

Define Your Goal

• To get more subscribers on YouTube using Google Ads, set your campaign’s conversion goal to “channel engagement” or “subscriptions.” This tells Google Ads to optimize delivery toward users most likely to click “Subscribe.”

• With Demand Gen, you can now track YouTube subscriptions as a conversion action, giving you more control to measure and optimize campaigns specifically for subscriber growth.

Choose the Right Audience Targeting

• Use in-market and custom intent audiences to target people actively searching for content in your niche. For example, if you want to gain YouTube subscribers interested in personal finance, you can target users looking up “investment apps” or “financial planning tips.”

• Using YouTube retargeting is an effective way to find non-subscribers who have already engaged with or viewed your video but haven’t clicked the subscribe button yet. This audience targeting strategy can increase effectiveness because these people are already familiar with your content and just need a nudge to subscribe.

• Build lookalike audiences using your email list or CRM data. While you can’t pull a direct list of YouTube channel subscribers, if you have at least 100 email subscribers or customers, you can upload that data into Google Ads to find similar people who are likely to become subscribers of your YouTube channel.

Select the Best Video Ad Formats

• Pairing compelling creative with the right audience is key. Skippable in-stream ads and in-feed video ads are especially effective at capturing attention and encouraging subscriptions. These formats allow you to show up in front of users already interested in related content, increasing your chances of attracting YouTube subscribers.

• Demand Gen campaigns support multi-format creative—video, image, and carousels—to keep engagement high and avoid ad fatigue. Since your goal is to get YouTube subscribers, Demand Gen’s focus on conversion actions makes it an ideal format to drive real, measurable growth.

With these preparations in mind, you should be fully equipped to set up and launch your campaign aimed at increasing your YouTube subscribers. Utilizing Google Ads indeed presents you with numerous opportunities and strategies to achieve your advertising goals.

Setting Up Your Campaign to Get YouTube Subscribers

Once your creatives are ready and your campaign strategy is locked in, it’s time to launch. Below is a step-by-step walkthrough on how to set up a campaign specifically designed to increase YouTube subscribers using Google Ads and YouTube Ads.

1. Link Your YouTube Channel to Google Ads

• In your Google Ads dashboard, go to: Tools > Data manager > Connected products.

• Under Featured products, select YouTube and click Link channel*.

* Note: You must have admin-level access on the Google Ads account to link a YouTube channel.

• Paste the URL of the YouTube channel you want to grow. Click Enter, then select the correct channel from the results.

• Enter the email address of the channel owner. They will receive a notification to approve the link.

• Once the owner approves, the YouTube channel will appear under the Connected Products > YouTube section in your Google Ads account.

2. Set Up Your YouTube Subscriber Campaign

• Go to New campaign > Choose Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.

• Select Demand Gen as the campaign type.

• Under Conversion goals, click Add goal, then choose Engagements. Click Continue to proceed.

• Confirm that YouTube engagements have been selected as your campaign’s goal. Then, continue setting your daily budget and bidding strategy.

• At the ad group level:
  • Define your audience targeting (in-market, custom intent, retargeting, or lookalikes).
  • Choose your placements—you can opt to appear across Google channels or select only YouTube placements like in-stream, in-feed, and Shorts.

• At the ad creative level:
  • Set your final URL to your YouTube channel homepage to drive more traffic and get YouTube subscribers directly.
  • When uploading your YouTube video creative, you can manually select placements if you prefer optimizing for specific ad formats (e.g., in-feed vs. in-stream) or let Google serve across all for broader reach.
  • Add strong headlines and descriptions, and set your CTA to “Subscribe.”

3. Confirm the Conversion Action

• To ensure that your campaign will be properly tracking subscriptions, go to Goals > Conversions > Summary.

• You should see the YouTube subscription conversion under Engagement(s).

• Confirm the goal is active and properly configured. Review this with your Google Ads expert or dedicated media buyer.

Once everything is set up correctly, your campaign should be ready to acquire YouTube subscribers with a data-driven approach powered by Google Ads.

Best Practices to Increase YouTube Subscribers Using Google and YouTube Ads

We always say that launching the campaign is just the beginning—real results happen during optimization. This is where close monitoring and agile decision-making are essential. Subscriber-focused campaigns need continuous fine-tuning to ensure they’re not just reaching the right audiences, but also converting viewers into long-term followers.

To help you maximize results throughout the campaign flight, we’ve compiled proven best practices that consistently drive YouTube subscriber growth:

• Retarget non-subscribers who have watched but not subscribed. Once your YouTube channel is linked to Google Ads, you can retarget users who watched your videos but haven’t subscribed.
  
  Create retargeting audiences based on viewer behavior and layer in similar audiences to expand your reach and convert passive viewers into active subscribers.

• Use strong “Subscribe” CTAs in your ad creative. For YouTube in-stream placements, include clear verbal and visual CTAs that encourage subscriptions. Phrases like “Subscribe for more insights!” or on-screen animations pointing to the Subscribe button are especially effective when placed mid- or end-video, where engagement is highest.

• Prioritize high-retention content for mobile and TV. Our benchmark report shows that short-form video drives better retention, particularly on mobile, where YouTube ads capture up to 42% of impressions.
  
  But don’t stop there: TV screens have now overtaken mobile as the top device for YouTube content consumption in the U.S. Longer ads (30 seconds or more) are gaining traction on Connected TV, where messaging can be more immersive and CPVs are 12% lower than average. Use every second to capture attention and nudge viewers toward subscribing.

• Monitor and optimize campaign performance regularly. Schedule Google Ads performance reports to be emailed daily or weekly. Monitor your top-performing campaigns, ad groups, and creatives to find what’s driving subscriptions.
  
  Look for outliers, scale what works, and adjust what doesn’t. These real-time insights are crucial to consistently increasing your YouTube subscribers using Google Ads.

• Work with a performance-focused media partner. We get it—not everyone can monitor their campaigns 24/7. But subscriber-focused campaigns need constant attention to hit your goals.
  
  Strike Social’s ad tech enables round-the-clock optimizations to reduce costs and deliver guaranteed outcomes. Our combination of expert media buyers and AI-driven tools ensures your YouTube subscriber campaign is always improving, even when you’re not looking.

Whether you’re just starting your channel or scaling your audience, we’re here to help you grow your YouTube subscriber base with precision and cost-efficiency.

Let’s talk strategy. Contact us and let our Strike Social experts walk you through our YouTube ad solutions.