20 ms·

I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience.

I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it's money down the drain, and I've never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I've spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about which keywords to target, and mimicked the reputedly successful approaches of my competitors. Nada. Would have been better off shoveling cash into an open pit. The only customers I've gained through web marketing have been organic, coming through bona fide referrals on other sites. The "hit rate" on that has been pretty good, suggesting that the blame can't lie entirely with my crappy sites...

dajohnson89 10y ago
We, as users, have been oversaturated and desensitized. There is so much crap shoved in our faces, that we've learned over the years to ignore all ads. Speaking for myself, I have an almost visceral negative reaction with ads. I would (and do) pay dumb amounts of money for a service if that means I'm not served ads.
- Nition 10y ago
  This sounds like a joke but when an obtrusive ad comes up I literally only see Close, X, etc now. Totally tune out the whole thing except the parts that look like they might make it go away.
  - Whitestrake 10y ago
    I'm with you - totally unable to remember the contents of the last lightbox popup I dismissed, and I'd challenge anyone to honestly recall theirs if it wasn't within the last few minutes.
- marze 10y ago
  What does this have to do with the topic at hand? The topic is that the traffic the ads bought were bots or click farms.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    A great deal?
- victorhooi 10y ago
  What exactly is "dumb" amounts of money? If by dumb, you mean enough for authors to get by, then you are probably in the minority. People love talking about how much they hate ads, and how, no, they're not cheap, they would totally pay for content. Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free. And if site A starts charging, they will jump ship to site B, until eventually it's a race to the bottom. Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far). Many attempts have been made to monetise things (a la micropayments). I believe Google did something before, where you paid cents, or fractions of a cent to authors for article views. This was back in 2012: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-20395407 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-20395407 And recently Mozilla's Brendan Eich is doing Brave, with bitcoin micropayments. I'd love to see it gain traction, but I don't see it going mainstream. Look, I know some ad networks go too far - but IMHO, Google/FB ads are hardly that intrusive. (I personally hate pop-up/pop-under ads, and auto-playing videos) (Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in ads - above opinions are purely my own).
  - dajohnson89 10y ago
    Sure -- I agree that content producers need to make money, and ads (invasive/unethical or not) are a time proven way of achieving this end. Let's do a run down of my monthly online spend. Netflix: ~$9.99 Hulu premium: $11.99 HBO now (or is it HBO go?): ~$12.99 Sling TV: ~$50 Google play (includes YouTube red): ~$13 Amazon prime (also used for the Amazon TV shows): ~$9 Spotify: $10 A random Twitch show that I patronize: $6.66 Wikipedia: I donate $10/year, so let's say $1. So, roughly, ~$125/month. I use Tumblr heavily and the ads piss me off, but the moment they offer a premium ad-free option they can shut up and take my money.
    - matwood 10y ago
      Interesting you use Spotify and Play. Spotify really seems redundant in your scenario.
      - dajohnson89 10y ago
        I see why you might think that -- but Spotify's playlists and the discover weekly features overall are much better then Google play. Yet, as a project fi & G apps user, Google play has great download functionality.
- Fiahil 10y ago
  Oversaturated and desensitized, yes, but too few non-technical people are bothered enough to install an ad blocker. This is an issue because the biggest security threats, today, come from ad-network-delivered-junk. It has become so much of an issue that my advice on which antivirus to install has shifted from xxx to uBlock Origin. It's just basic computer hygiene, and I would really like if content creator would move away from ad network based advertising.
  - xg15 10y ago
    I like the irony at that. For a long time you were exactly right and "the consumer wants it this way" was a convenient argument that ad-supported sites could make. Now ad-blocking gets more and more mainstream - and many sites (especially news sites apparently) start to panic, pleading users to disable their ad-blockers or putting up ad-blocker-blockers...
    - ams6110 10y ago
      News sites don't get it. There is no story I'm interested in reading in the WSJ or NYT that I can't find on a dozen other free news sites. Sure they do investigative pieces, but if they are really noteworthy they'll get reported on elsewhere within hours. I would never consider paying for a news site.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        News sites absolutely get that people like you exist and are quite common; you're the reason why free-to-readers, clickbait headlined sites where content is either paid for by heavy advertisement or interested parties sponsoring content are so dominant -- no reader-focussed business model can be built around users with those preferences.
        maksimum 10y ago
        And what would the contrasting preferences be? People who are willing to pay for journalism for news' sake?
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Depends on the audience too. I'm anti consumerist somehow and reject ads mentally (it's as if they didn't exist on TV to my mind). The few times I've clicked on ads were for odd geek products (SBC). A few times I found a website / company that indeed taught me something about a brand / product / idea ... but in retrospect a webpage ad is way too superficial for me to know that in advance, and doesn't trigger curiosity much (offseted by the browsing experience penalties).
  - phamilton 10y ago
    Curious, how does your behavior around perfectly elastic goods play out? Two products, same price, arguably indistinguishable (eg. Coke and Pepsi). I like to think I fall into the same category, where ads don't prompt me to spend money I wasn't going to spend before, but I think all else being equal I stick to brands I've heard of (via ads).
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      Out of my head, these kinds of products appealed to me as a kid, and I sticked to those I liked more. Pepsi lacked something. I can't be sure how psychological this is (branding, logo, color .. amount of marketing in my country versus the US). I still think I could probably distinguish them blind. Early on I was fond of both brands, but later, if you offered pepsi half the price I'd still pick out a can of coke. Now I don't drink anything but water so ..
      - phamilton 10y ago
        Sure, that was just an example though. Where do you buy gas? Which lightbulbs do you buy? Which batteries do you buy? Etc.
        agumonkey 10y ago
        Yeah sorry, I got caught in my own head. I think more than brand, it's shelves that drive the decision for such commodities. Whatever is close and in good supply I'll take without too much attention paid to the brand. Or brand reputation when I'm feel picky. But never advertising itself.
- phicoh 10y ago
  I'm always surprised how bad ads are on some systems. I usually like ads in specialty paper publications. It is nice to know what vendors are around, what new products they have. And you can skip an ad in a fraction of a second. Before I installed Privacy Badger, my experience was usually ads for stuff I really didn't care about, unrelated to the subject of the website. Then I start searching for something, find what I want to buy and buy it. Then for months I get ads everywhere for the product I just bought. Never for example for accessories. Of course, ads have to be as obnoxious as possible. Not just being there if you want to give them some attention, no they have to destroy your reading experience. I once gave a news site a nice donation. By sheer coincidence right after that they changed the layout to the point I stopped visiting. Of course, my donation could easily be seen as a reward for the articles I read there before, but it didn't feel right.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Why not just use adblockers? It's free.
somid3 10y ago
Hallelujah
usaphp 10y ago
Is your product specialized to technical users? I've noticed that businesses with more technical clients have harder time getting customers via ads, because most technical users don't click on ads
- somid3 10y ago
  No. Anyone with a career in a large org.
- abalashov 10y ago
  Indeed; you can see some links in my profile. Our product is unquestionably a big-ticket, slow-moving, long-sales-cycle kind of thing. However, there were plenty of clicks. I've just never had a single sale, and only a very small handful of low-quality enquiries, despite lots of traffic.
  - builtinbuffalo 10y ago
    I know your product and space well - you'd be better off with getting people on an email list via a content giveaway to start your marketing. You need a lot more top of funnel and long term engagement marketing to convince your prospects to buy.
    - abalashov 10y ago
      That is undoubtedly true, though I lack the expertise and time to properly implement and manage that sort of thing. All I can do is to try to be a prominent and useful member of the ecosystem in our corner of the FOSS VoIP world and attract enquiries on that basis. I don't see sales to be my problem, but rather marketing. I'm content with the ease with which prospects are persuaded to buy when they come through the door, but there are just far too few opportunities to have those conversations.
  - soared 10y ago
    Well that's very possibly an attribution issue. Those clicks led to traffic, and if the sales cycle is long those clicks will take months to convert. Unless you are tracking sessions back to their source months after the fact, you can't really know if those ads led to conversions or not.
0898 10y ago
The testimonials you have up from the Google and P&G employees are from stock photo sites. (I didn't reverse image search the others.) I'd consider fixing this.
- somid3 10y ago
  Yes, they all wanted to remain anonymous so we used stock images of people similar to them to prevent identification, either via reverse image search or by colleagues identifying them. We run into issues of people judging others when they feel they receive insights to rise... it sets a weird tone. Though your point is well taken, we need to find a better approach. People are sensitive about the topic.
jondubois 10y ago
I felt the same when I tried LinkedIn ads... It doesn't even compare to a poorly targeted Reddit post. I don't know if big companies get special treatment, but as a small startup, these ad networks just don't seem to work at all. Sometimes I feel that the reason why big companies advertise through Facebook/LinkedIn/Google is not to promote themselves, but rather, to bleed small competitors out of business by inflating the CPC/cost of acquisition for their industry.
- abalashov 10y ago
  That is a cynical, but not wholly implausible view. Big companies' ad campaigns do have their weaknesses. Their keywords can be poached by small competitors. Well-known brands invite comparisons, e.g. "HipUpStart.io is a better $BIG_BOX_BRAND."
- somid3 10y ago
  It could be that the 10% traffic does give them an edge, or you're right about the CPC inflation argument as well. Overall, there is something wrong with the current model since it impedes innovation by allowing smaller players to properly reach the masses. A weird way of defensibility via marketing.
- wheaties 10y ago
  Big companies use more advanced features like adaptive audience segmentation or dynamic creatives to better target viewers. Hence they tend to bid on those who are statistically more relevant to them.
- matt4077 10y ago
  I'm spending ca $150/mo on google and getting a few hundred in revenue from it – not even including repeat purchases from these sales (about 80% y/y retention). It's been like that for 8 years. Facebook on the other hand... Probably spend $2000 trying all sorts of things over the years and I'm not sure if there's a single new customer that can be attributed to it.
  - agopaul 10y ago
davidgerard 10y ago
What proportion of your prospects do you guess are running an adblocker?
- somid3 10y ago
  Thats irrelevant since I'm analyzing clicks from Google and Facebook and then looking at their movements via Fullstory. How does an adblocker alter that process?
  - biesnecker 10y ago
    It segments the audience. The people that are coming to your site aren't running adblocker, and might behave differently than those who do.
  - ChoGGi 10y ago
    ublock origin has anti-tracker lists, and to use fullstory you add fs.js to the <head>. I could see it being blocked (like I just did in my custom list).
DougN7 10y ago
Make sure you control which countries your ads can show in. 90% of my budget for high tech equipment was getting spent in Bangladesh. Pure fraud. Once you start clamping down a LOT, results can get better.
- somid3 10y ago
  For the US market, I'd love to see a breakdown of visitors via Google and Facebook and see what % of them use an IP that is associated with a VPN. If the % is high, then there is a case to be made that most of the clicks are from abroad VPNing into the US.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    How do I find this list of VPN IPS? I know Netflix knows it but not sure they are sharing...
    - somid3 10y ago
      I would start with public proxy lists like HideMyAss. I can't imagine foreign users pay premium for VPN services like IPVanish, etc.
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        What % of VPN users will that get you? 10%? This seems a very hard problem to actually solve...
    - blackice 10y ago
      Try getIPIntel.net
    - mpeg 10y ago
      Every IP address has to be registed to an ISP, VPN servers are pretty trivial to detect as you'll see that the registration info from ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, etc. comes up as "HideMyAss" or "Amazon". There are companies out there that provide paid anonymous, reliable (not hacked) proxy servers that run on consumer internet connections though, and those would be very hard to detect as vpn / proxy connections. Another way is through capabilities where you have a computer that identifies itself as a macOS device but has the TCP/IP stack of a windows device – that's a proxy ! I would recommend the source code of p0f or the book silence on the wire to learn more about the topic.
pryelluw 10y ago
Inbound done well outperforms others. The thing is that it requires a bit more effort. You can really leverage organic and establish low cost funnels. Feel free to ping me if you have questions. No bs or strings.
nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
Sorry to break this to ya but I've never had an issue getting at least some traffic through AdWords. Bounce rates that high mean something is extremely wrong with your site or the keywords you're advertising for. I've purposely setup some bogus ads to use as controls and I still only get around 85% bounce rate. If your site is interesting enough people will sometimes stick around even if they reach you randomly. Niche products tend to do better with advertising, less competition. Basically if it's a complete failure you're doing it wrong. Whether you can get a positive ROI is a different story
nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
Just checked your site. It's well put together but the language is far too technical for AdWords. Engineers don't usually make the kind of business decisions to buy these things at larger companies, it's VP level people. Find your kinds of customers and tailor a landing page with stuff that they want, instead of having the site explain everything like a users manual. Ex: Calls centers do not care at all about the other uses for your product, so for ads for "call center phone systems" don't show them any of that. You can leave the existimg content there, it will help with SEO and people that want to look deeper. Just make sure the first few pages from ads are exactly what they're looking for and nothing else. They will read more into it if they're interested. The big thing you're running into is bounce rates because most visitors spend 30 seconds or less deciding if your product is what they want. If you can't convince them "yes, it's perfect" in three sentences most will leave. The easiest and surprisingly effective way to do this is to make the title of the page huge and make it match their search query exactly. Your sales site should focus on uses, not features. Nobody cares about anything technical so take off the stuff about being built in Node etc... The people looking to buy this don't even know what that is. Too many words they don't know is scary, maybe this isn't what they're looking for. Dumb down everything so that moronic managers will forward a link to your site to the guys that actually know wtf you're talking about :)
- abalashov 10y ago
  Thank you for the suggestions! The intentionally deep technical content of the site may be motivated by reasoning backward to your thought process: Usually it's the technical guys, tasked with researching and finding a product that fits the requirements, who find the site and forward the link to their managers. The managers have no idea what any of it means, but "it looks like good stuff", so "contact them and find out more". This has been my experience. Of course, that may be a reflection of the self-selecting group of prospects that the site does reach, so your observations are entirely valid!
  - sogen 10y ago
    AFAIK Technical information is usually downloaded in PDF white papers.

dajohnson89 10y ago

We, as users, have been oversaturated and desensitized. There is so much crap shoved in our faces, that we've learned over the years to ignore all ads. Speaking for myself, I have an almost visceral negative reaction with ads. I would (and do) pay dumb amounts of money for a service if that means I'm not served ads.

Nition 10y ago
This sounds like a joke but when an obtrusive ad comes up I literally only see Close, X, etc now. Totally tune out the whole thing except the parts that look like they might make it go away.
- Whitestrake 10y ago
  I'm with you - totally unable to remember the contents of the last lightbox popup I dismissed, and I'd challenge anyone to honestly recall theirs if it wasn't within the last few minutes.
marze 10y ago
What does this have to do with the topic at hand? The topic is that the traffic the ads bought were bots or click farms.
- abalashov 10y ago
  A great deal?
victorhooi 10y ago
What exactly is "dumb" amounts of money? If by dumb, you mean enough for authors to get by, then you are probably in the minority. People love talking about how much they hate ads, and how, no, they're not cheap, they would totally pay for content. Let's be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free. And if site A starts charging, they will jump ship to site B, until eventually it's a race to the bottom. Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far). Many attempts have been made to monetise things (a la micropayments). I believe Google did something before, where you paid cents, or fractions of a cent to authors for article views. This was back in 2012: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-20395407 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-20395407 And recently Mozilla's Brendan Eich is doing Brave, with bitcoin micropayments. I'd love to see it gain traction, but I don't see it going mainstream. Look, I know some ad networks go too far - but IMHO, Google/FB ads are hardly that intrusive. (I personally hate pop-up/pop-under ads, and auto-playing videos) (Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in ads - above opinions are purely my own).
- dajohnson89 10y ago
  Sure -- I agree that content producers need to make money, and ads (invasive/unethical or not) are a time proven way of achieving this end. Let's do a run down of my monthly online spend. Netflix: ~$9.99 Hulu premium: $11.99 HBO now (or is it HBO go?): ~$12.99 Sling TV: ~$50 Google play (includes YouTube red): ~$13 Amazon prime (also used for the Amazon TV shows): ~$9 Spotify: $10 A random Twitch show that I patronize: $6.66 Wikipedia: I donate $10/year, so let's say $1. So, roughly, ~$125/month. I use Tumblr heavily and the ads piss me off, but the moment they offer a premium ad-free option they can shut up and take my money.
  - matwood 10y ago
    Interesting you use Spotify and Play. Spotify really seems redundant in your scenario.
    - dajohnson89 10y ago
      I see why you might think that -- but Spotify's playlists and the discover weekly features overall are much better then Google play. Yet, as a project fi & G apps user, Google play has great download functionality.
Fiahil 10y ago
Oversaturated and desensitized, yes, but too few non-technical people are bothered enough to install an ad blocker. This is an issue because the biggest security threats, today, come from ad-network-delivered-junk. It has become so much of an issue that my advice on which antivirus to install has shifted from xxx to uBlock Origin. It's just basic computer hygiene, and I would really like if content creator would move away from ad network based advertising.
- xg15 10y ago
  I like the irony at that. For a long time you were exactly right and "the consumer wants it this way" was a convenient argument that ad-supported sites could make. Now ad-blocking gets more and more mainstream - and many sites (especially news sites apparently) start to panic, pleading users to disable their ad-blockers or putting up ad-blocker-blockers...
  - ams6110 10y ago
    News sites don't get it. There is no story I'm interested in reading in the WSJ or NYT that I can't find on a dozen other free news sites. Sure they do investigative pieces, but if they are really noteworthy they'll get reported on elsewhere within hours. I would never consider paying for a news site.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      News sites absolutely get that people like you exist and are quite common; you're the reason why free-to-readers, clickbait headlined sites where content is either paid for by heavy advertisement or interested parties sponsoring content are so dominant -- no reader-focussed business model can be built around users with those preferences.
      - maksimum 10y ago
        And what would the contrasting preferences be? People who are willing to pay for journalism for news' sake?
agumonkey 10y ago
Depends on the audience too. I'm anti consumerist somehow and reject ads mentally (it's as if they didn't exist on TV to my mind). The few times I've clicked on ads were for odd geek products (SBC). A few times I found a website / company that indeed taught me something about a brand / product / idea ... but in retrospect a webpage ad is way too superficial for me to know that in advance, and doesn't trigger curiosity much (offseted by the browsing experience penalties).
- phamilton 10y ago
  Curious, how does your behavior around perfectly elastic goods play out? Two products, same price, arguably indistinguishable (eg. Coke and Pepsi). I like to think I fall into the same category, where ads don't prompt me to spend money I wasn't going to spend before, but I think all else being equal I stick to brands I've heard of (via ads).
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Out of my head, these kinds of products appealed to me as a kid, and I sticked to those I liked more. Pepsi lacked something. I can't be sure how psychological this is (branding, logo, color .. amount of marketing in my country versus the US). I still think I could probably distinguish them blind. Early on I was fond of both brands, but later, if you offered pepsi half the price I'd still pick out a can of coke. Now I don't drink anything but water so ..
    - phamilton 10y ago
      Sure, that was just an example though. Where do you buy gas? Which lightbulbs do you buy? Which batteries do you buy? Etc.
      - agumonkey 10y ago
        Yeah sorry, I got caught in my own head. I think more than brand, it's shelves that drive the decision for such commodities. Whatever is close and in good supply I'll take without too much attention paid to the brand. Or brand reputation when I'm feel picky. But never advertising itself.
phicoh 10y ago
I'm always surprised how bad ads are on some systems. I usually like ads in specialty paper publications. It is nice to know what vendors are around, what new products they have. And you can skip an ad in a fraction of a second. Before I installed Privacy Badger, my experience was usually ads for stuff I really didn't care about, unrelated to the subject of the website. Then I start searching for something, find what I want to buy and buy it. Then for months I get ads everywhere for the product I just bought. Never for example for accessories. Of course, ads have to be as obnoxious as possible. Not just being there if you want to give them some attention, no they have to destroy your reading experience. I once gave a news site a nice donation. By sheer coincidence right after that they changed the layout to the point I stopped visiting. Of course, my donation could easily be seen as a reward for the articles I read there before, but it didn't feel right.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Why not just use adblockers? It's free.

somid3 10y ago

Hallelujah

usaphp 10y ago

Is your product specialized to technical users? I've noticed that businesses with more technical clients have harder time getting customers via ads, because most technical users don't click on ads

somid3 10y ago
No. Anyone with a career in a large org.
abalashov 10y ago
Indeed; you can see some links in my profile. Our product is unquestionably a big-ticket, slow-moving, long-sales-cycle kind of thing. However, there were plenty of clicks. I've just never had a single sale, and only a very small handful of low-quality enquiries, despite lots of traffic.
- builtinbuffalo 10y ago
  I know your product and space well - you'd be better off with getting people on an email list via a content giveaway to start your marketing. You need a lot more top of funnel and long term engagement marketing to convince your prospects to buy.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    That is undoubtedly true, though I lack the expertise and time to properly implement and manage that sort of thing. All I can do is to try to be a prominent and useful member of the ecosystem in our corner of the FOSS VoIP world and attract enquiries on that basis. I don't see sales to be my problem, but rather marketing. I'm content with the ease with which prospects are persuaded to buy when they come through the door, but there are just far too few opportunities to have those conversations.
- soared 10y ago
  Well that's very possibly an attribution issue. Those clicks led to traffic, and if the sales cycle is long those clicks will take months to convert. Unless you are tracking sessions back to their source months after the fact, you can't really know if those ads led to conversions or not.

0898 10y ago

The testimonials you have up from the Google and P&G employees are from stock photo sites. (I didn't reverse image search the others.) I'd consider fixing this.

somid3 10y ago
Yes, they all wanted to remain anonymous so we used stock images of people similar to them to prevent identification, either via reverse image search or by colleagues identifying them. We run into issues of people judging others when they feel they receive insights to rise... it sets a weird tone. Though your point is well taken, we need to find a better approach. People are sensitive about the topic.

jondubois 10y ago

I felt the same when I tried LinkedIn ads... It doesn't even compare to a poorly targeted Reddit post. I don't know if big companies get special treatment, but as a small startup, these ad networks just don't seem to work at all. Sometimes I feel that the reason why big companies advertise through Facebook/LinkedIn/Google is not to promote themselves, but rather, to bleed small competitors out of business by inflating the CPC/cost of acquisition for their industry.

abalashov 10y ago
That is a cynical, but not wholly implausible view. Big companies' ad campaigns do have their weaknesses. Their keywords can be poached by small competitors. Well-known brands invite comparisons, e.g. "HipUpStart.io is a better $BIG_BOX_BRAND."
somid3 10y ago
It could be that the 10% traffic does give them an edge, or you're right about the CPC inflation argument as well. Overall, there is something wrong with the current model since it impedes innovation by allowing smaller players to properly reach the masses. A weird way of defensibility via marketing.
wheaties 10y ago
Big companies use more advanced features like adaptive audience segmentation or dynamic creatives to better target viewers. Hence they tend to bid on those who are statistically more relevant to them.
matt4077 10y ago
I'm spending ca $150/mo on google and getting a few hundred in revenue from it – not even including repeat purchases from these sales (about 80% y/y retention). It's been like that for 8 years. Facebook on the other hand... Probably spend $2000 trying all sorts of things over the years and I'm not sure if there's a single new customer that can be attributed to it.
- agopaul 10y ago

davidgerard 10y ago

What proportion of your prospects do you guess are running an adblocker?

somid3 10y ago
Thats irrelevant since I'm analyzing clicks from Google and Facebook and then looking at their movements via Fullstory. How does an adblocker alter that process?
- biesnecker 10y ago
  It segments the audience. The people that are coming to your site aren't running adblocker, and might behave differently than those who do.
- ChoGGi 10y ago
  ublock origin has anti-tracker lists, and to use fullstory you add fs.js to the <head>. I could see it being blocked (like I just did in my custom list).

DougN7 10y ago

Make sure you control which countries your ads can show in. 90% of my budget for high tech equipment was getting spent in Bangladesh. Pure fraud. Once you start clamping down a LOT, results can get better.

somid3 10y ago
For the US market, I'd love to see a breakdown of visitors via Google and Facebook and see what % of them use an IP that is associated with a VPN. If the % is high, then there is a case to be made that most of the clicks are from abroad VPNing into the US.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  How do I find this list of VPN IPS? I know Netflix knows it but not sure they are sharing...
  - somid3 10y ago
    I would start with public proxy lists like HideMyAss. I can't imagine foreign users pay premium for VPN services like IPVanish, etc.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      What % of VPN users will that get you? 10%? This seems a very hard problem to actually solve...
  - blackice 10y ago
    Try getIPIntel.net
  - mpeg 10y ago
    Every IP address has to be registed to an ISP, VPN servers are pretty trivial to detect as you'll see that the registration info from ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, etc. comes up as "HideMyAss" or "Amazon". There are companies out there that provide paid anonymous, reliable (not hacked) proxy servers that run on consumer internet connections though, and those would be very hard to detect as vpn / proxy connections. Another way is through capabilities where you have a computer that identifies itself as a macOS device but has the TCP/IP stack of a windows device – that's a proxy ! I would recommend the source code of p0f or the book silence on the wire to learn more about the topic.

pryelluw 10y ago

Inbound done well outperforms others. The thing is that it requires a bit more effort. You can really leverage organic and establish low cost funnels. Feel free to ping me if you have questions. No bs or strings.

nrjdhsbsid 10y ago

Sorry to break this to ya but I've never had an issue getting at least some traffic through AdWords. Bounce rates that high mean something is extremely wrong with your site or the keywords you're advertising for. I've purposely setup some bogus ads to use as controls and I still only get around 85% bounce rate. If your site is interesting enough people will sometimes stick around even if they reach you randomly. Niche products tend to do better with advertising, less competition. Basically if it's a complete failure you're doing it wrong. Whether you can get a positive ROI is a different story

nrjdhsbsid 10y ago

Just checked your site. It's well put together but the language is far too technical for AdWords. Engineers don't usually make the kind of business decisions to buy these things at larger companies, it's VP level people. Find your kinds of customers and tailor a landing page with stuff that they want, instead of having the site explain everything like a users manual. Ex: Calls centers do not care at all about the other uses for your product, so for ads for "call center phone systems" don't show them any of that. You can leave the existimg content there, it will help with SEO and people that want to look deeper. Just make sure the first few pages from ads are exactly what they're looking for and nothing else. They will read more into it if they're interested. The big thing you're running into is bounce rates because most visitors spend 30 seconds or less deciding if your product is what they want. If you can't convince them "yes, it's perfect" in three sentences most will leave. The easiest and surprisingly effective way to do this is to make the title of the page huge and make it match their search query exactly. Your sales site should focus on uses, not features. Nobody cares about anything technical so take off the stuff about being built in Node etc... The people looking to buy this don't even know what that is. Too many words they don't know is scary, maybe this isn't what they're looking for. Dumb down everything so that moronic managers will forward a link to your site to the guys that actually know wtf you're talking about :)

abalashov 10y ago
Thank you for the suggestions! The intentionally deep technical content of the site may be motivated by reasoning backward to your thought process: Usually it's the technical guys, tasked with researching and finding a product that fits the requirements, who find the site and forward the link to their managers. The managers have no idea what any of it means, but "it looks like good stuff", so "contact them and find out more". This has been my experience. Of course, that may be a reflection of the self-selecting group of prospects that the site does reach, so your observations are entirely valid!
- sogen 10y ago
  AFAIK Technical information is usually downloaded in PDF white papers.