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Home » YouTube Ads: The Black Hole in Your Budget (and How to Close It)

Did you know that most of your Google Ads on YouTube appear on videos that are completely irrelevant to your brand?

Try this: if your account targets a specific market in Europe or North America, open the YouTube placement report and sort the placements in reverse alphabetical order.

What you’ll see will look more like the menu of a Japanese restaurant than a digital marketing strategy.

And as you keep scrolling, you’ll go from Japanese to Thai, Korean, Arabic, Russian, Indonesian… a true world tour of digital spam.

Sure, the world is globalized — but no, this isn’t just a reflection of geographic diversity in your campaigns. In many cases, it’s the result of fraudulent activity draining your budget through channels created with AI, designed to inflate views and generate fake interactions. These malicious bots can click your ads, interact with your landing pages, and send positive signals to Google’s algorithms — which, in turn, reward them by showing your ads even more often.

If your Video, Demand Gen, or PMAX campaigns are generating fake leads from YouTube — call clicks that never happened, contact forms filled with made-up data, etc. — this is likely what’s happening.

Sometimes Google catches them and shuts the channels down. When that happens, you’ll see something like this in your reports:

And if you click the link, you’ll land on a message from YouTube like this one:

But here’s the catch: Google rarely refunds that money, even after removing the fraudulent channels.
By the time they’re taken down, the owners have already cashed in — and for every channel closed, several new ones pop up.

Even when we’re talking about legitimate channels, if your target market is domestic (for example, Spain), it’s hardly relevant — or profitable — to have your ads showing up on Malaysian YouTube channels, right?

The Other Big Problem with YouTube Ads. Go back to your placement report and sort by spend in the last 30 days. Chances are, several of the top entries will be children’s content or similar channels:

Perfectly legitimate content — but if you’re selling solar batteries, you probably don’t want your ad showing to a 5-year-old watching Pocoyo on their parent’s phone.

How Much Budget Is Wasted on Irrelevant Videos?

Based on what we’ve observed in our clients’ accounts, between 50% and 80% of your YouTube Ads budget can go to toxic or irrelevant placements if no systematic filtering or cleaning is applied.

Here’s how the wasted spend typically breaks down, according to our analysis:

(*) Source: Fáktica internal analysis of audited accounts

In Video and Display campaigns, you can use whitelists to prevent ads from showing on irrelevant videos — but they’re self-limiting, hard to scale, and usually increase traffic costs. Neither Demand Gen nor PMAX campaigns allow whitelist targeting. You can exclude placements manually, but if you tried to do that one video at a time, you’d spend your entire day on it — and still fall short.

OUR SOLUTION: YouHelp

To solve this, at Fáktica we’ve developed YouHelp, a module of our Antibot software that automatically cleans your YouTube campaigns by blocking fraudulent or irrelevant videos and channels before they drain your budget.

Powered by deep learning models and neural networks, YouHelp analyzes structural, content-based, and behavioral characteristics of YouTube channels.This enables us to automatically detect and block bot farms and fraudulent AI-generated channels designed solely to generate ad revenue from Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising without delivering any real value.

Detect bots and spam channels with AI

Filter out channels in unprofitable regions or languages

Block content and topics irrelevant to your audience

YouHelp can be applied to any Google Ads campaign serving on YouTube. Its configuration is fully customizable, allowing you to exclude languages, countries of origin, and content types (children’s, gaming, religion, politics, clickbait, etc.) that don’t fit your audience or aren’t profitable for your campaigns.

Proven Results

Within just two weeks, YouHelp typically reduces spend on toxic or irrelevant channels by over 95%.

In the medium term (2–3 months), Smart Bidding algorithms start learning from real signals — genuine clicks, authentic conversions, and cleaner traffic patterns — creating a self-reinforcing optimization cycle.
Each euro you invest works harder where it truly matters.

Automatic placement cleaning must be an ongoing process: tens of thousands of new channels are created every day — many of them fraudulent — and with the rise of generative AI, these numbers are set to explode.

We’re good — but we don’t do magic.

If your product is competitive and your landing page is optimized for conversion, YouHelp will definitely help you improve campaign profitability. But if you were wasting 70% of your budget and the remaining 30% wasn’t converting, tripling your relevant placements won’t fix the underlying issues in your product or website.

Curious to see how much you could improve? Get a free YouHelp demo and learn how to clean up your YouTube campaigns and increase profitability — without sacrificing reach.

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