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Has anyone on HN had Adwords convert for their business yet (in real measurable ROI)? The best I've seen so far was like a 2 year payback period. Not very goo
by barmstrong 16y ago
Has anyone on HN had Adwords convert for their business yet (in real measurable ROI)?
The best I've seen so far was like a 2 year payback period. Not very good. It's gotten competitive enough that I'm rarely seeing Adwords be useful anymore to a startup.
- mkramlich 16y agoA personal experience of mine: game A: spent $100's on Google ads ... made $0 revenue game B: spent $0 on Google ads ... made $100's revenue (disclaimer about other variables, YMMV, take with grain of salt, etc.)
- MicahWedemeyer 16y agoWe've had a little success. It's fairly easy to track the conversion rate from AdWords campaigns if you're also using Google Analytics. Our ads convert to signups at about a 10% rate. At $0.16 CPC, that means we pay $1.60 for each signup via Adwords. That's still too low for us to get a reasonable return. I've tried various things in order to bring up the conversion rate, since I think 10% is low, but this is an area where I'm lost. I've tried making a landing page, A/B testing the landing page, and some other tricks, but I'm out of my area of expertise here. That's what I meant when I said that doing ads is pretty damn hard. But if I could just hit 20% conversion and stay there...then we'd be golden!
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoDude, a 10% conversion rate is pretty damn good. What startup are you talking about? I'm guessing that a signup != paying customer, correct? I think ads for free users is a very tough model. Now ads for software you're selling? That's definitely not impossible (ask patio11).
- MicahWedemeyer 16y agoWe have a freemium model, and yes I'm saying 10% conversion to the free plan. From there we try and convert them to premium.