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Would love to know more about why you think AdWords and FB is a waste of time and money. Please don't take this the wrong way, but as someone who has managed m

Would love to know more about why you think AdWords and FB is a waste of time and money. Please don't take this the wrong way, but as someone who has managed many accounts of all sizes (up to the multi-million dollar/year range), often times most accounts just aren't setup very well. Not that I can always blame people as there's always work to do, and things constantly change, but the point stands that you may not be able to dial-in a profitable campaign even after spending $5k depending on what your conversion rates are like. Just as often, the problem is on the website and not the ads as well. For example--and not meaning to knock you here, but perhaps the cartoony graphics are a turnoff to prospects. I don't know, but testing would find that out (which you may have done). All of that said, sometimes it does not make sense to focus marketing efforts on paid advertising channels like paid search/social, but you can usually do things profitably at a small scale, even if you're just focusing on smart use of retargeting with RLSA or something like that.

simonswords82 10y ago
Good points well made and no offence taken at all. In our particular industry there are some large (wealthy) incumbents who bid silly prices for the keywords that convert. It's a race to the bottom, with Google the ultimate winner. Our CAC was infinitely higher than the LTV of paying customers permitted on Adwords as a channel, so we had to ditch it. We did try the usual things, landing pages with unique copy, split testing ads, split testing landing page copy, negative keywords, retargeting and so on but as the OP discovered just didn't convert. I should add that when I say it didn't convert - what I mean is that we have other channels that convert at a much lower CAC, and so we have doubled down our efforts on those instead :) Google doesn't need any more of my money! Facebook - We probably could have spent more time and money on before writing it off but again, we have other channels that are working and so didn't feel the need to push on with Facebook. In your experience does Facebook do well for B2B products like ours?
- shostack 10y ago
  Can you give a sense of what size budget you tested with and how much data you collected? Tests that are too small to deliver statistically significant results are something I see quite often. For FB, think of it as a place to connect with your audience. You probably aren't going to see a lot of click-based performance, but there might be a strong view-through correlation since it is very similar to display in that regard. So if you are trying to raise awareness of HR people for example, you can probably target them pretty easily on FB, and if you give them shareable content, that can help be a force multiplier since you won't pay for the shares. You just have to be clever about your targeting, and even more clever about how you are measuring things from an attribution standpoint. If you are expecting it to perform well on a last-click basis, you'll likely be disappointed.
cyberferret 10y ago
Just to add my two cents worth. The main reason I went with AdWords myself was because I set up a paid Google Apps account to handle the emails etc. for hrpartner.io. As part of that, they sent me an offer for a few hundred bucks off my first campaign as well as a dedicated AdWords account manager for a month. So I decided to try it out. My account manager was good, but she didn't really understand my business. I learned a lot of cool AdWords tricks, but at the end of the day, the campaign(s) she set up for me were really too generic, and I was getting all the wrong sorts of customers calling/emailing. Things like people were Googling "McDonalds HR Department" and seeing our ad coming up and calling us to complain about their shift! It made me realise that in order to make Adwords work, I really needed someone who was intimately familiar with the platform AND my business, and who had the time to monitor things closely and make tweaks on almost a daily basis. I'll hold off for now and spend the money elsewhere (possibly Bing as Simon suggested) and other B2B app and review sites and see how that goes.

simonswords82 10y ago

Good points well made and no offence taken at all. In our particular industry there are some large (wealthy) incumbents who bid silly prices for the keywords that convert. It's a race to the bottom, with Google the ultimate winner. Our CAC was infinitely higher than the LTV of paying customers permitted on Adwords as a channel, so we had to ditch it. We did try the usual things, landing pages with unique copy, split testing ads, split testing landing page copy, negative keywords, retargeting and so on but as the OP discovered just didn't convert. I should add that when I say it didn't convert - what I mean is that we have other channels that convert at a much lower CAC, and so we have doubled down our efforts on those instead :) Google doesn't need any more of my money! Facebook - We probably could have spent more time and money on before writing it off but again, we have other channels that are working and so didn't feel the need to push on with Facebook. In your experience does Facebook do well for B2B products like ours?

shostack 10y ago
Can you give a sense of what size budget you tested with and how much data you collected? Tests that are too small to deliver statistically significant results are something I see quite often. For FB, think of it as a place to connect with your audience. You probably aren't going to see a lot of click-based performance, but there might be a strong view-through correlation since it is very similar to display in that regard. So if you are trying to raise awareness of HR people for example, you can probably target them pretty easily on FB, and if you give them shareable content, that can help be a force multiplier since you won't pay for the shares. You just have to be clever about your targeting, and even more clever about how you are measuring things from an attribution standpoint. If you are expecting it to perform well on a last-click basis, you'll likely be disappointed.

cyberferret 10y ago

Just to add my two cents worth. The main reason I went with AdWords myself was because I set up a paid Google Apps account to handle the emails etc. for hrpartner.io. As part of that, they sent me an offer for a few hundred bucks off my first campaign as well as a dedicated AdWords account manager for a month. So I decided to try it out. My account manager was good, but she didn't really understand my business. I learned a lot of cool AdWords tricks, but at the end of the day, the campaign(s) she set up for me were really too generic, and I was getting all the wrong sorts of customers calling/emailing. Things like people were Googling "McDonalds HR Department" and seeing our ad coming up and calling us to complain about their shift! It made me realise that in order to make Adwords work, I really needed someone who was intimately familiar with the platform AND my business, and who had the time to monitor things closely and make tweaks on almost a daily basis. I'll hold off for now and spend the money elsewhere (possibly Bing as Simon suggested) and other B2B app and review sites and see how that goes.