Your Best TubeSift Alternatives

TubeSift is a great product for YouTube Advertisers who want to find videos for placement targeting. But some people outgrow it. They want faster results, more video/channel placements and ways to quickly sort and filter those video results.

And, particularly agencies or consultants, want more ways to help their clients grow beyond placement targeting campaigns and uncover ways to reach their target audience using other targeting methods, both for YouTube Ads and Google Ads.

You’re likely looking for an alternative to TubeSift for those reasons, so here you’ll find alternative YouTube placement targeting tools. Starting with my own – Adzoola.

TubeSift Alternatives

1: Adzoola

With Adzoola you can uncover YouTube placements and keywords no one is using, so you can create more profitable campaigns. No more manual research. No more targeting the same audience everyone else is targeting.

Adzoola’s placement targeting tools have been described by members as faster, more robust, shows more data and is more advanced than other tools they have used.

Adzoola does this by giving you many more ways to get placements and keywords (YouTube & Google) along with filters that allow you to ‘go deep’.

Members also say it does so much more than they were expecting. But let’s start with the way we help find ad placements on YouTube

Exploring 4 Ways to Find YouTube Video Placements

Video Search is Adzoola’s main tool to help you find specific, relevant videos and channels for your YouTube ad campaigns.

Video Search is actually 4 tools in one:

1. Search by keyword – like you would if you were searching on YouTube
2. Find related videos by URL: Use YouTube’s suggested videos algorithm to find topically relevant videos. These videos get 70% more watch time than videos in search results.
3. Find related videos by keyword ᴺᴱᵂ : A new and unique feature to Adzoola. Use keywords to find videos that appear in YouTube’s suggested results.
4. Find videos by topics: Get videos based on broad topics and sub-topics like Lifestyle [Topic] > Fashion [Sub-topic].

Let’s dive into each of these below…

Method #1: Search by Keyword

Use Video Search to find the most specific and relevant videos that rank for your keyword in YouTube.

You can choose to prioritize by:
 

• Relevance – as YouTube would return results by default
• Upload date – to prioritise recent videos
• Views – to prioritise the number of video views with less emphasis on relevance.

Set a country and language preference. YouTube’s results are less like Google’s. They are less dependent on location, so the country and language is a preference rather than a hard filter.

If you’re looking for non-English results, search in any language and you’ll get relevant results.

You can get the top 10 ranking videos and all the way up to 1,000 videos for your keywords.

If you’re keen eyed, you’ll have seen I said keywords. So not only can you get up to 1,000 videos for a keyword but you can also use multiple keywords in one search.

Benefits of multi-keyword searches:

• Fewer searches: You don’t need to do multiple single-keyword searches to collate the results. So you save time to work on the many other things you have on your plate.
• Reduces overlap: Videos rank for similar keywords. You’ll find a lot of overlap with multiple keyword searches – especially with tightly themed keywords.
• Find videos that rank and appear in the results multiple times for your keywords – those videos get a lot more exposure.
• Find influential channels in your market – those that keep popping up for your keywords.

Method #2: Find related videos by URL

Using YouTube’s search results to find super-specific videos to target with your YouTube ad campaigns is a great way to test new offers and audiences because you’re reaching such a specific audience.

Once you’re successful with placements from search results (or to reach more people) you’ll want to find videos that get more views.

One way to do this but retain control of where your ad shows, is to use YouTube’s related/suggested video results.

YouTube’s Chief Product Officer said 70% of watch time on YouTube is spent watching videos the algorithm recommends. That means suggested videos can often have between 2x and 10x the views of the videos you’ll get from YouTube’s search results.

Enter a video URL into Adzoola’s ‘Related by video’ to get suggested videos.

You can even enter several video URLs to find commonly suggested videos around the topics of the videos you’ve entered. These are key videos you’ll want to use to reach your audience as they have strong visibility.

Another benefit of using this method is that you’ll find videos you wouldn’t have found in YouTube search results because they don’t always have the keyword you’re searching for in the title. But the audience they reach is often the same.

Method #3: Find related videos by keyword

A new and unique feature to Adzoola:

If you want to find videos that appear in YouTube’s suggested results but don’t have a video URL to start the search, use a keyword (or a few keywords). Adzoola will do the work for you to show you the videos YouTube think your audience watches, based on the keyword.

Method #4: Find videos by topics

You can search for videos by broad categories YouTube have defined and applied to videos:

Now you have the results from your search, you could just copy this list and paste it directly into the placements targeting area in your YouTube ad campaign. But by doing that you could inadvertently target videos that are not a good fit. Or even target one video that ranked low but gets millions of views. That one video could take most of your spend. So you’ll want to check for these kind of scenarios before adding them to your campaign.

Clean up your results to avoid targeting irrelevant videos

1. Glance through the videos. Seeing the thumbnails and titles in the results really help you to do that quickly. You can delete any of the videos from the list, one-by-one or select as you go and delete in one go.

2. Apply your filters. In Adzoola you have 16 dedicated filters to make your list of videos even more targeted and relevant. For example you can include or exclude videos containing certain words or phrases in the title (or even description).

3. Sort by any of the data in the results. One thing I do is to quickly cull any videos that have a lot of views but aren’t a good fit for the target audience I want to reach. So I sort by views to show the videos with the most views at the top of the results. Depending on the number of results and the keyword(s) you used, there can sometimes be less relevant videos that could take all your spend if you don’t remove them at this point.

Now you have your list of highly relevant videos, you can quickly copy them, ready to paste into Google Ads as placements.

Quick note: If you’re not sure what keywords to use to start your search, you can use Adzoola’s Keyword Search tool. It’s actually a full-blown keyword research tool with 7 different ways to get keywords. Each for a different situation. One specifically for YouTube keywords (as shown below). The rest suggest keyword ideas based on Google searches.

Exploring 2 ways to find YouTube channel placements

As part of your YouTube advertising you may want to include targeting viewers of specific channels. In Adzoola you can find relevant channels two main ways:

1 . Use the channels tab in your Video Search results

When you do a Video Search Adzoola shows you results for videos that rank for your keywords but it also shows you which channels posted those videos. You can find this in the dedicated Channels tab in the results. Here you’ll see the channels that have videos ranking for your chosen keyword.

BUT…

Finding channels that have one video ranked for your chosen keyword may not reveal the best channel targeting choices. You want to find channels that focus on your target audience – not ones that post videos on disparate topics, that have no theme you can associate with a target audience.

Here’s where Adzoola can give you real insight into finding channels that consistently reach your target audience: Search for several keywords representing topics your target audience watches.

Adzoola will show you the channels that have the most videos in the results for your chosen keywords.

This way you get a set of channels that have multiple videos ranking for multiple keywords. These are likely to be a much better candidate for YouTube channel targeting because they are reaching your target audience.

You can even analyse the channels further in Adzoola’s Channel Explorer tool. You’ll see overall channel statistics and the most recent videos they’ve posted. All with our famous filtering capabilities!

2 . Search for channels in Channel Explorer

An alternative way to find channels is to use the Search for Channels tool in Channel Explorer. Here you can search for channels by keyword.

It’s different to the method above because it’s searching the channel data rather than individual videos. It’s a broader, more contextual search and so it usually gives you quite different results.

As usual you have filters to focus your search. For example you can filter channels that only include a certain word or phrase in the description.

A few distinctive and unique features

View Channel Statistics and Get Videos from Channels

Find out more about a channel like number of subscribers, total channel views, number of videos posted, likes and more.

See what videos they have recently posted so you can see the types of content they make, how often and the kind of views and engagement they get so you can see if they’re a good fit for channel targeting.

You can also see a list of their videos with stats so you can sort/filter to get specific videos to target for your campaign.

Advanced, dynamic filters

We worked hard on the filtering capabilities in Adzoola.

That’s probably why you don’t see these kind of filters in other tools. They are fast. The range filters, like video views, update dynamically as you adjust them.

You can filter almost anything in the results.

Speedy, fast results

When we were building Adzoola, I wanted it to be faster than anything else I had used or seen to get placements for YouTube. That’s hard when you’re pairing it with potentially thousands of results and instant filters.

We’re still improving but you can currently get a couple of hundred results in the time it takes to sip at your coffee (<10 seconds, if you’re not sure).

That means the time you spend researching placements is only as long as you want it to be – rather than waiting 30 – 60 seconds for the results of just one search for one keyword. That’s painstaking.

More data

During the development of the video tools, I kept asking for more and more data to be added to the results. That has now led to 15 columns of data on which you can sort and filter. And that’s not including the data in the channels tab.

But that wasn’t enough…

You can open up the row to reveal more data about the channel that posted it and the video’s tags.

And, if you’re not content with all that, you can switch to the channels tab to see a list of the channels that are in the results

More results

Unlike other tools, Adzoola gives members up to 1,000 results for a Video Search (as many as YouTube give us for your search).

Not everyone is going to need to go that deep into YouTube’s search results but it’s there for you when you’re working in markets where there is a lot of relevant content.

Find the most influential YouTube videos and channels in your market

Another unique feature to Adzoola is the ability to find videos and channels that pop up again and again in your market.

You define the keywords you want to represent your market (or use our keyword tool) then do a Video Search with them.

Adzoola will show you the videos that rank for the most keywords (using the occurrence column mentioned earlier). These are the highest visibility videos in your keyword-defined market, so they’ll be some of the best candidates for your YouTube placement targeting list.

And, when you switch to the channels tab, you can see the channels that have the most visibility in the results. Like with videos, these could be highly relevant for your YouTube channel targeting list.

Try our free YouTube Placement Targeting Tool (a free alternative to TubeSift).

Go beyond placement targeting: Tools to help you scale

Keyword Search

At some point you’ll want to go beyond targeting just placements.

Keyword targeting is one of the logical next steps.

Adzoola gives you access to a full-blown suite of keyword research tools. 7 of them as I write this. Each built for a different purpose. All integrated into one tool, so you can build a list of keyword with different tools.

If you’ve got your YouTube placement campaigns set up and now you want to set up a keyword targeted campaign, you can start with Adzoola’s Suggested Keywords tool to get YouTube-specific keywords. Those are keywords people are actually searching on YouTube (incidentally Google Keyword Planner doesn’t give you these).

You can use the same tool to get Google suggested keywords (these are the autocomplete suggestions you get when you start to type your search query).

That’s just 1 of the 7 keyword tools in Adzoola. The other 6 help you get keyword ideas based on Google searches: long-tail keywords, related keywords, keywords in a category. Even keywords your competitors rank for (organic and paid).

With all this keyword data, you can not only use it to get YouTube-specific keywords for your campaign but also uncover Google keywords you never knew about.

That’s because Adzoola has keyword research tools that go beyond autocomplete suggestions so you get new keyword ideas.

You can use these keywords across Google ad products. For example, create Custom Audiences with these keywords to use in your YouTube ad campaigns and across Google’s Display & Discovery campaigns.

Find Competing Websites in Your Market

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You just read about using keywords to build Custom Audiences in your Google Ads account and how you can use these across YouTube, Google Display and Discovery campaigns.

Well, as you probably know, you can also build Custom Audiences based on websites too.

Adzoola’s SERP Competitors tool makes it easy for you to find a relevant list of websites to create your own Custom Audiences (or for any other purpose you can think of).

There are two types of search:

1. Keyword Search for Domains

Enter up to 200 keywords (your own or those from our Keyword Search) and Adzoola will give you websites that have the most rankings for those keywords in Google. So you can see the domains that rank for the most keywords out of the ones you entered. From this you get an idea as to the relevance and visibility of the domains.

Here you can see an example with a search using 100 keywords around conversion optimization.

2. Domain search

Enter a domain and Adzoola will find you websites that rank for the same keywords, showing you websites that compete in the Google search results. This is distinct from the keyword-based approach above because you’re looking at it from a domain-wide approach rather than focused on a specific set of up to 200 keywords. That means there’s a lot more data being crunched and you can find related/competing domains easily.

Here I’ve used a ski resort, whistler.com, as starting domain. You can see how relevant and related the results are.

I like to use these searches to find websites I can use to build Custom Audiences in Google Ads (or Custom Segments as they’re now being called).

I also use these searches to find websites competing in the SERP for keywords in my market. Then use Keywords for Domains tool in Keyword Search to find other keywords they rank for. I can then use those keywords in my audiences/segments or to further my research.

There’s so much more to Adzoola than I’ve written about here but I hope you now have enough to decide whether Adzoola is worth a try for you. Why not see for yourself?

5: Biteplay

Biteplay gives you the ability to search for videos with a keyword or related videos using video URL. You can search for channels by keyword and trending videos by category.

In the results you’ll see small thumbnails along with data like views, post date, number of comments and likes.

Depending on your plan you can get between 200 and 300 results per video search.

Biteplay allows you to track videos or channels so you can see their statistics over time.

It also has a video maker delivered by wave.video so you can make videos with text and stock images/video.

Why you might want to use Biteplay

• You want to track videos or channels
• You want to find ‘monetized’ videos
• You need a video maker tool

Why you should consider Adzoola

• You’re an agency or consultant who runs other Google Ads campaigns – not just YouTube ads.
• Number of results is important to you.
• Speed of results is important to you.
• You want to search with more than one keyword at a time.
• You want advanced and instant filtering capabilities for your results.
• You want to use more than just placement campaigns.
• You want a full-blown keyword research tool.

See for yourself – try Adzoola

Adzoola will help you execute YouTube ads placement targeting faster but also help you scale beyond placements:

“Until you have Adzoola you can’t really unlock the power of YouTube Ads”