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We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
- trimboffle 7y agoThis is such impressive blather that I’m now convinced I know nothing at all about modern sales and marketing. It may as well have been written by an ancient alien civilization for all I understood. Probably we’ll hear something very like this when SETI receives a signal from another star system.
- tomrod 7y agoHear here! Now, where are the statistical metrics and causal inference assessments?
- trimboffle 7y ago>>> Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we’re fortunate to have a constant and growing inbound flow of leads and net negative churn, meaning the value of usage-driven upgrades outweighs the loss in revenue from subscription cancellations. I’m glad they clarified what “net negative churn” means, that really cleared things up.
- vimman 7y agoI am laughing harder than I should really
- Waterluvian 7y agoIt reads like a Markov chain autocomplete. Let's see what my phone produces if prompted with the first bit: Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we are looking for ways to improve the quality of our products by providing a service to our clients with the highest level of service for the remainder of the year.
- anonymfus 7y agoHere are some Talk to Transformer outputs: > Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we're able to deliver the highest quality services available. We're focused on delivering your most productive platform, whatever you're doing with it. From your smartphone and tablet to servers in data centers and data centers in offices. Our solutions help you store, process and manage everything from plain text and binary data to HD video and audio files. About Us: Cisco is a leading technology company known for innovation, innovation, innovation. We use technology to create a better world. With global operations in more than 100 countries, Cisco provides the essential technologies that enable companies to compete and win in today's global economy. For more information, visit www.cisco.com. > Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, our deliverables are performing better than ever. We are further expanding our market reach and capabilities, making us more competitive and reducing cost through better processing, architecture, security and data centers. That's the good news. The bad news is, we're reaching our head-end capacity and need more help. The Rails team members that work on applications and features on a daily basis don't want to burden the engineering team with refactoring and maintenance. They know that when the infrastructure is gone, they have a new responsibility to help build applications for new players. And there is a new player, but we are still in its infancy. > Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we have secured the Ecosystem. This Ecosystem is already in the technology and revenue channels process. We have a team working on it, including the core guys and big but skilled giants who have also invested their expertise and assets to become the gateway into our ecosystem. As more people start to use this new feature, they will ask for news. In terms of devs, we already have more than 40 developers on board. We have identified a cluster in Africa which is running our client, and have a major team dedicated to project execution and content creation. As development work is ongoing and we don't have exact numbers, we can't officially announce how many people we have on board, however we are not aware of any
- 83457 7y agoThey are getting more new customers (edit: others have pointed out it also includes increased revenue from existing customers), thanks primarily to personal recommendations (word of mouth), than they are losing customers.
- trimboffle 7y agoYou sir, should have written the article.
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoExcept that this rewritten version is not correct! They aren’t necessarily getting more new customers than old customers cancelling, but the combination of revenue from new customers and added revenue from upgrades from existing customers is more than the revenue lost from customers who cancel. Which, btw, is exactly what they say, using standard industry terms, and it’s not ambiguous. It just wasn’t written for you, that’s all.
- shawabawa3 7y agoThat's not true They are getting more increased revenue from existing customers than they lose from cancelling customers, which is very different
- michaelbuckbee 7y agoInbound -> people coming to the site (instead of salespeople calling them up) Churn -> people canceling their subscriptions. Churn Rate -> rate at which they're canceling (ex: 5% a month) Net Negative Churn Rate -> if the overall dollar amount of people moving from $50/mo plans to $100/mo plans is higher than the dollar amount of people canceling subscriptions. So while the Churn Rate doesn't change (still 5% a month) the overall monthly revenue is still increasing. This is really hard to do and it's a good indicator that they're making something that people really want and are willing to pay to use.
- Dwolb 7y agoEvery business basically has 4 ways revenue increases or decreases month over month. New customers spending new money (net new) Current customers increasing spend (expansion) Current customers decreasing spend (contraction) Current customers leaving (traditional churn) Net negative churn means when you add up the bottom three, revenue has increased. Another way to say it is you don’t have to add new customers to keep growing revenue.
- freeone3000 7y agolet churn = (reduced income from existing customers cancelling the service) let use_increase = (Increased income from existing customers using the service more) assert churn > use_increase; net_churn = churn - use_increase; assert is_negative(net_churn);
- sweeneyrod 7y agoI don't think this is that jargony. Anyone in the target audience for the article should know what "churn" means, and given that knowledge should be able to work out what "net negative churn" means. Probably the clarification would've been better if it had started "meaning the revenue from usage-driven upgrades" (and likewise "usage-driven" and "net" in "net negative" don't add anything) but overall it should still be comprehensible.
- StevenRayOrr 7y agoWhen doing my own writing, I try to remember a quotation from Kenneth Hudson's The Jargon of the Professions: > The best minds in any profession are never guilty of jargon, expect when they are very tired. Pedestrian minds are drawn towards it automatically and to the most frightening extent. Jargon, one could suggest, is the natural weapon of highly paid people with very little of any value to say. It is a sad and ironical comment on our society that many people feel released from the pressure to use jargon only when they have reached the top of their profession, by which time it may be too late to change one's habits. , however one might wish to. Ambitious people, still busy climbing the ladder, may well consider it professional dangerous to use straightforward language. One therefore has the paradox that only the person who has finally arrived, with [their] reputation secure, can afford to be simple and jargon-free. Lesser mortals appear to need their jargon, as a membership-badge of their profession. They do not have the confidence to face the world without it. Do I escape the tendency towards jargon? No, not by a long shot, but pieces like this are a good reminder as to why it is worth the effort to keep trying.
- threeseed 7y agoThe target audience is other founders. And so just like you wouldn't remove the jargon from a medical journal not sure why you would want to in this case.
- mojuba 7y agoFounder is not a profession, and this kind of impenetrable jargon here doesn't add value to the conversation. It's marketing talk where some jargon words make sense while others are more of a "professional fence".
- gdubs 7y agoIn every field there’s usually a few brilliant minds who can boil complex ideas down to simple words. Even if your audience is very technical, they’ll still appreciate when a writer takes the effort to find the clearest way to say things, keeping the “jargon” to the bare minimum. The eraser is the writer’s friend.
- threeseed 7y agoThis is pretty basic stuff for a SaaS company. Might be worth watching some of the YC Startup School videos to get up to speed.
- trimboffle 7y agoAh yes, “YC Startup School“ where dumbos like me may learn the basic things, thanks I’ll seek it out to come up to speed.
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoWow, you are really bitter about your inability to comprehend a pretty basic article that was not written for you. Suggestion: unless you’re already a doctor, don’t crack open a medical journal. Your head might explode.
- alistairSH 7y agoBasic for a consumer-facing SaaS company, perhaps. I work for a SaaS company, but B2B, and I agree with the other comments - it could almost be a satirical take on a founder's pitch.
- michaelbuckbee 7y agoI feel like this a really uncharitable reading of the article. This is a real business that has built itself up from nothing to $100,000 per month in revenue (which is important as it means they aren't just burning VC cash in random acts of marketing) and they're speaking in precise terms about specific actions they've taken and the results they've gotten. I've no doubt that if you're unfamiliar with marketing that these terms are new (in the same way that if you're a marketer and reading about database indexing you're going to have to do a little work to figure out what everything means.) This is important to me not because I've any stake in this (I've no affiliation with Uploadcare) but because I worry that the knee jerk rejection of any kind of marketing by developers really hurts startups and bootstrappers. There is definitely blather in the marketing world [1], I'm just saying this isn't it. 1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign-document-1-million-for-this/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...
- EdwardDiego 7y agoThe fact that they admit to targeting keywords that have no relevance to their product is just... I dunno.
- michaelbuckbee 7y agoSlight clarification: they targeted keywords that they didn't have a specific landing page for, this might be like sending people to a landing page that generically talks about "file uploads" instead of a landing page that hyper-specifically talks about "file uploads for laravel". They were saying they should have held off on targeting those more specific terms until they had those matching and more specific landing pages in place.
- trimboffle 7y agoMichael .... it’s really bad writing. You can’t say “hey ordinary person I’ll save you wasting $50k on AdWords” then instantly drop straight deep into the most arcane of mumbled, cryptic, faded rune digital marketing magic speak. Refer to the comment below from HN user 83457 who explains same but in English.
- spunker540 7y agoI’ve spent the last year in a marketing role and as I read this article I was thinking to myself “would I have understood an HN post like this 1 year ago?” Thanks for confirming that I probably wouldn’t have! It is a lot of jargon.
- simias 7y agoIt kind of reminds me of people discussing stock using what looks to me like numerology. They don't really focus on the underlying company or what it does, they mainly look at the stock graph and use more or less complicated models to try to predict future performance. Sometimes they actually have no idea what the company does. I feel a bit the same way reading this article. There's a lot of talk about conversion rates and funnels and semantic cores and awareness ladders but in the end does do they have a product that people actually want? Having bad SEO and a confusing website is bad because it could make it harder for people to buy your product but it's not going to magically make people buy something they don't want. Also I wonder if focusing entirely on "conversion rate" is fair. There are other benefits to advertisement, such as increasing brand awareness for instance. After all look at the vast majority of real world ads, there's basically a 0% conversion rate. People don't see a Coca Cola ad on TV and immediately go the supermacket to buy a bottle. I don't see a football player wearing Nikes and immediately go online to shop for shoes. Maybe somebody will click on your ad, browse your website for a bit, think it's interesting and months later they'll convince their boss to use it for their next big product.
- kyle-rb 7y agoI think focusing on conversion rate is fair in this case. I would think Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is more for conversions and less for brand awareness. Their example query of "file upload php" is someone who's looking for a solution right this second, so it's not unreasonable that they would sign up and try out the service right this second.
- Rastonbury 7y agoDid you read the article? Your last paragraph refers to a demographic and should be accounted for in a rung in the awareness ladder. The reason people focus on conversion rate is because you can easily calculate spend and predict RoI. Coke can spend on a TV ad because it's a drop in the bucket but every dollar is valuable to a bootstrapped company. Exactly why you want to know what you'll get before one blow 50k on adwords.
- EdwardDiego 7y agoI love how the actual product was one line out of several hundred on that breakdown. Then when I go to the website: "Full stack adaptive delivery" I have no idea why their adverts aren't converting, I mean who isn't into full stack adaptive delivery? So. Damn. Compelling...
- ThePhysicist 7y agoIf you operate an online SaaS business you will know most of these terms (and if you do run such a business and don’t know them it would be highly advisable to learn them). This isn’t an article for the general public but specifically for people that bootstrap (SaaS) businesses, so I think it’s adequate to use the terminology of the field.
- vincentmarle 7y agoI was expecting the worst after reading comments like these but it was actually quite easy to read. If terms like CTR/CPC need to be explained then it would be safe to say you were not the target group for this article.
- njay 7y agoLots of great lessons. For those wanting more, I wrote a blog post a while back about our own lessons learned with Google Ads: https://www.getleadup.com/post/the-startup-founders-guide-to-setting-up-google-ads https://www.getleadup.com/post/the-startup-founders-guide-to...
- davedx 7y agoInteresting... > "...a customer acquisition cost way above one-third of customer lifetime value" Is this really so terrible? As I understand it a lot of mobile games pay more for acquisition than they'll make from the user in e.g. IAP's to scale up their player base and climb the charts. What is a normal CPA vs LTV in the SaaS space? Also, if you pay less to acquire these customers than you will make from them over time, you haven't quite wasted 50k have you?
- ealexhudson 7y agoI guess the issue here is that your current LTV may not match the LTV of this cohort of customers, and the closer the CAC for this cohort gets to your LTV, the more you risk that actually there isn't margin there?
- jpking 7y agoIn addition this is potentially a good sign for optimisation of both CAC (better quality marketing) and LTV (better quality product).
- GarrisonPrime 7y agoIt depends on the industry. In retail, for instance, a customer acquisition cost of more than 10% their expected lifetime value is unsustainably expensive. Is suspect retail having only 5-8% profit margin is part of that though.
- nrjames 7y agoClimbing the charts with a mobile game has the potential for activating a virtuous cycle with eCPMs for advertising as a parallel benefit to player acquisition. The acquisition and eCPMs can feed the cycle and self-sustain for a while. That's how the Voodoo and Ketchapp's of the world create their arbitrage markets that keep their throwaway hyper casual games dominant in the top of the charts. They've effectively gamed and broken the charts that way, reaping enormous benefits.
- smoyer 7y agoI saw that and assumed that the $50k wasn't actually wasted ... they just ended up with a cohort of customers that wasn't as profitable (unless of course the cost of maintaining those customers exceeds the other 2/3rds of their LTV).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mikece 7y ago"Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for" This sounds self-evident but we all know sales people who sell a fiction and then engineering has to scramble to (try to) turn it into reality.
- foxhop 7y agoA product could already have the engineering bits in place but without a landing page calling out that very feature or usecase, sending traffic to a mismatched page is a diservice. People click an ad to learn more, if they are presented with a specific use-case but land on a generic marketing page they will click the back button.
- GarrisonPrime 7y agoAnd yet the company is paying for all those pointless clicks. Hopefully they’ll consider “misleading ads” as a possible reason for a low conversion rate.
- mikece 7y ago"Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time." This sounds very familiar... in fact it sounds a lot like "Respond to change instead of following a rigid plan" from the agile manifesto.
- Stjerrild 7y agoNothing new, for an experienced marketer this is ABC.
- nurettin 7y agopreviously, on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18904625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18904625
- dealpete 7y agoMy content blocker wouldn’t let me see this site... did I miss anything important?
- jeen02 7y agoPeople who didn't know how to do ads spent $50k on them and complain that they lost $50k.
- code4tee 7y agoThere is a winter coming for the online ad model when more people realize, as this author has, that most online ad spend was probably a total waste. That combined with the increasing crackdown by the consumer on blocking data tracking raises serious questions on the long term viability of the business models of some big players in the industry.
- ameister14 7y agoWhat the author realized was that they should have gone about it differently, not that ads are a waste in a general sense. Their post-mortem had real recommendations that would have helped them had they followed them from the start.
- mritchie712 7y agoright, the OP even mentioned: > A clear funnel with established conversion rates, check Is it checked? > 20% of people hitting our landing page block Segment which then blocks a portion of our analytics. It's pretty hard to get the full picture on your users, especially those coming from ads.
- EdwardDiego 7y agoI'm in adtech and godddamn, I can't wait for the industry to wean itself off user tracking, shaking and crying like a heroin addict. For years myself and other engineers have been warning the product owners that third party user tracking's life span is very much finite - Firefox was going to block 3rd party cookies by default several years back, but walked it back because Google weren't ready for that and threatened to withdraw the money Mozilla makes from them, but it was the sign of the end times. Now that Google can identify you with reasonable probability without using cookies, they won't hold Firefox back, they don't need to, and it suits them to roll out the third party blocking in Chromium, alongside browser cache partitioning to avoid the classic circumventions - ETags, steganographed PNGs etc. as first implemented by Safari. UA strings, often used in fingerprinting, are also not long for this world. And of course, now that Google has a solution that doesn't require cookies or fingerprinting, Chrome is all about that privacy lol - the fact that it hurts Google's competitors is merely happy circumstance. The amount of panic in adtech companies now is hilarious because they chose to mimic an ostrich until the browsers left them no choice - but they're still flailing around and demanding devs try to find alternatives to 3rd party cookies. The cookie based user tracking paradigm is dead, but there's a shit ton of people, especially in DSPs and DMPs whose salary relies on them not believing that.
- shripadk 7y agoLeft a comment on the IndieHackers page. Keeping a copy here for those who aren't reading the comments section. I have noticed this a lot in various websites I have helped in ad campaigns. Their biggest problem is their landing page. Just like this article uses lots of jargons to explain simple concepts, their landing page reflects the same. For those of you wanting to know more about landing page optimization just watch Isaac Rudansky's excellent videos on Udemy. One of the most important rules is the 5 second test. Show your landing page to your colleagues/friends/family depending on your target audience. If they can't understand what your business proposition is in 5 seconds you have failed landing page optimization. As simple as that. The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page: ------------------ The landing page is too complex. Like what does "Full stack adaptive delivery" even mean? I am sure 90% of your paid visitors are just bouncing because that landing page tagline is alien to them. Dumb it down. Make it simple. Surprisingly, the description in the Indiehackers page makes so much more sense than the one you put up: "File-system-as-a-service that does uploads, storage, and media processing for Web and mobile apps, so you can ship products faster and scale them painlessly" If you told me that the first time I would have understood your value proposition. Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. There are too many jargons already. Don't complicate it further. Instead of "Full stack adaptive delivery" just try: "File-system-as-service". Instead of "Serve ultimate UX with better images on any website. One script to rule them all." just have: "Ship products faster with better images on any website". That's it. You will get 50+% higher conversion rates with just this one change.
- franciscop 7y agoAs someone who is trying to learn and some day launch something like this, thank you so much for this advice! I've been known to complicate descriptions on my OSS packages but still achieved moderate success, so I'm thinking on how to convert this knowledge into revenue and these comments are super helpful. Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing?
- stef25 7y ago
- flokie 7y ago"Full stack adaptive delivery" - wut ? Wouldn't surprise me if bounce rates are high. Took quite a bit of reading to figure out what industries and use cases are
- leeoniya 7y ago> CTR is the most important component of Quality Score this is because that's how google gets paid. you can create a great ad that's not terribly relevant to a specific audience, get good ctr but poor conversion. some tips: make sure to watch your search query reports and continuously refine your [hopefully shared] carefully-applied negative keywords lists. avoid broad match like the plague. we use mostly phrase and modified broad with good negative phrase lists that have been continously honed over many months. don't hyper-segment keyword or ad variations, it'll become a nightmare to manage with little-to-no benefit. also, whether paid ads are worth it is highly dependent on your market, competitors, and your typical conversion value. because our typical orders exceed $500, we see double-digit factor returns on ad spend even though we're an established, well-known mfg name in our market. and yes, be ready to waste some money when dialing things in - $50k in a month of pure waste is quite a lot but that same amount "wasted" on tweaking over the course of 6mo-1yr is not out of the ballpark, assuming it yields progressively increasing ROI. YMMV
- asperous 7y agoWhile Google may be paid per click, the value of that click (how much companies are willing to pay), is directly dependent on their conversion rates. So Google is incentivized to get you the most converting clicks as possible.
- leeoniya 7y agoi think it's safe to say that the incentives are not exactly aligned. if i was google, i would make sure that the ctr was as high as possible while the conversion rate was just enough to be worth it. there are a lot of fine-grained controls missing from the adwords backend which waste money. for example, you cannot segment iphones from android, or forcibly exclude ie11 because you have chosen not to support it any more and the site falls apart on it. you cannot prevent ads from showing to visitors who've already come and bounced. they keep expanding how much "modified broad" sucks in by making the matching looser - with little notice. and that's just the tip of the iceberg. lots of things that can easily save you money do not exist in their backend. imo these are not oversights but are left out intentionally.
- dangerface 7y agoOp had some good tactics but an ass backwards strategy. Should have let the agency do the thing they where paid to do. > Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale things This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again. I work in an agency, I won't work with you if you do this, because you will get the same results and blame me. > Lesson #2: Focus on page quality and CTR when doing paid tests Nope don't do this. When testing ads you should focus on the ads you are testing. Make as many as you can, test, review and reduce to the winning ads then repeat. When you have found the ads with good CTR it's time to start working on page quality (making your page relevant to the ad). > Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for Again no don't do this, write ads to test your keywords build pages for the ads that work, not the other way around this isn't SEO. > Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid Different ads target customers at different stages of the buying journey, ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic. > Lesson #5: Analytics will save (some of) your bacon > Lesson #6: Revisit your awareness ladder often to validate and update it Winner winner chicken dinner, some good advice.
- davedx 7y agoSome great advice here, thanks for posting it. Regarding this: > ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic. What do you mean exactly? Isn't a landing page the top of the funnel by definition?
- lmkg 7y agoFrom the user's perspective, the funnel can have several stages before they even arrive at your website. E.g. becoming aware they have a problem, researching the problem in general and what approaches have been tried, deciding which type of approach is applicable them, comparing different products. An organic search is likely to be in one of the earlier phases, but a paid search campaign can target keywords indicative of later phases, as well as different value propositions. This user-centric idea of a funnel is different than the website-centric view of the funnel where you start with a landing page and end with a lead form or purchase. The phrase "Customer Journey" usually gets bandied about to refer to the former, although it also often gets bandied about without referring to anything at all.
- wildchild 7y agoYour "product" is bullshit, your "full stack adaptive..." is a bullshit. People are not retarded, they quit tab.
- austincheney 7y ago> Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid Explained in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21469677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21469677 Prepare to be disappointed by paid traffic conversion going in. Paid traffic isn't there to convert, like you hope since it costs you money. It is primarily there for brand awareness which only works if your branding is visible.
- chrshawkes 7y agoWhat more companies should look into is YouTube advertising. You have many youtubers including myself who get paid from multi-billion dollar companies every month to deliver their message to a highly targeted niche market. It's a better alternative to Ad Sense and you'll get quadruple the impressions for a similar price. The landing page is what it is though, if it doesn't capture the customers attention, that's the fault of the company paying to advertise.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y agoIf my making a living depended on doing stuff like this, I'd find another way to make a living.
- jsonne 7y agoI see this sort of complaint kind of a lot unfortunately and mostly from engineers who think marketing should work like engineering. $1 in should equal $X out. Unfortunately it usually isn't that linear and the whole, when everything is working, tends to be more than the sum of the parts. You get the disproportionate outcomes when all the pieces fit together and not in a linear fashion. Marketing, like startup growth in general is on a hockey stick pattern.
- sumoboy 7y agoAnother story blaming Google ads, plenty of methods to measure why people exit a page including 3rd party tools to even survey the user "why you leaving?" to get some feedback.
- ogre_codes 7y agoI know this advertising campaign isn’t perfect, but I have to wonder if Google isn’t digging too deep. They’ve let advertising dominate their search pages so their page becomes less valuable to the user and advertisers get less value per dollar paid. Where the original concept was to put only a few relevant advertisements up which users would actually be interested in, now they pile on advertisements thick and deep and I rarely find them valuable. At some point this has to affect the ROI for advertisers.
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoExcerpt: "o Narrow down your extended keyword set and focus on the keyword groups you have polished content and landing pages for, especially when you have a complex product. o Use an awareness ladder to inform keyword segmentation by purchase stage but revisit it often to validate and adjust. o Do not use the same landing pages for different steps of your awareness ladder. o Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time. o Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates. o Run tests to optimize page content, which will reduce your cost per click. o Once you find your winner, you’re ready to go all-in. Now’s the time to pass it off to an agency to scale things up, if you are contracting out campaign management."
- dpcan 7y agoThis headline is a little sensational. When I ran a brick and mortar business where we took bookings, Google Ads were imperative to us getting new business. So were Facebook Ads. When they weren't running for some reason, or weren't optimized, we could feel it in the pocket book. AND, it wasn't too expensive. I was able to pay around $300 per month and get a lot of business. Anyway, every business is different, and I think local business owners need to consider whether Google Ads are good for them based on their own unique situation.
- lbj 7y agoWith a solid post mortem like that, its not entirely lost. But with Adwords we're doing it to ourselves, drives bids up to a level where profitability becomes very difficult.
- the_cat_kittles 7y agoits just... absolutely insane to me... that anyone would not feel completely useless "trimming keywords" and conducting research to optimize an ad buy. people who do this- have you ever considered what this is doing to your mental state?
- brianna_dickey 7y ago>Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates. A good reminder that you can apply The Lean Startup methodology (Build > Measure > Learn) to projects of all sizes from forming a new company to running an ad campaign. Ship early, test often, rinse and repeat.
- ddri 7y agoJust want to say I'm grateful you took the time to share this lesson - there were some insights there I'll be thinking about ways to action on our side of things. Thanks!
- mikeirvinenews 7y agoXRFiles.com 12-year-old perfect name for files.
- milemi 7y agoI wasted 10 seconds reading the beginning of this so I don’t have to read the rest of it.
- brailsafe 7y agoLike others have mentioned, I don't know what the product is from the website. Wth is an acceleration node and why should I care if there's 240k of them? While I'm being cynical, Indiehackers could stand to not load their css in js, at least for the global stylesheet. Surprisingly the content actually renders, but the header svg and so on breaks quite badly.
- aleppe7766 7y agoAgree with the first comment. Landing pages should be customized to the specific point in the customer journey. If you’re targeting a clueless user you should keep it simple and educate all the way to conversion.
- WizardofLeads 7y agoAs a former Google Ads freelancer I very much enjoyed reading this. You seem to have learned your lessons like you said and I actually picked up some interesting things from here. I'll be saving those Google docs! I think the biggest lesson by far to be learned from this is that working with SEM agencies can be a complete clusterf*ck. Most of the time I'd recommend working with a freelancer who has a strong and verifiable background (most can be found in online communities). Like you said the strategy these guys usually use is to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. In some, if not most cases they'll have scripts or software running to automate their campaigns without a human going into the account very frequently to weed out bad search terms. While I 100% agree with most of your conclusions and the conclusions of the people on here commenting on your landing page wording, I do have one question: did you have a good, hard look at the search terms before deciding a keyword had to be removed? O and yes, quality score is important. However I've seen and ran campaigns with a <5/10 quality score but with incredible CPC's. Don't get too hung up on QS - if it works it works, don't question it.
- wusatiuk 7y agoThank you very much for sharing your experience with HN. From my own point of view (as the CEO of a performance marketing agency working with Google Ads & clients budgets daily) I have to add, that this are learnings your agency should have protected you from.
- comment_guy 7y agoAm I the only person who remembers this site from like 2 years ago and looks at it today and doesn't see the same site? Seriously, it looks like a parody of a startup now. Also, I notice that basically nobody puts their side project there anymore, and I bet this "new approach" is why. OP, you fucked up, go back to being indiehackers and dump this bullshit you're trying now.
- tug0fwar 7y agoGood that you decided not to "wallow in buyers’ remorse" and spread the story + your brand. A perfect case of finding opportunity amid crisis.
- neop1x 7y agoLesson #1: Have a solid product or service which really solves problems many people have. Lesson #2: Don't try to boost sales just via marketing. Great product sells itself through word of mouth.