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Most of the other commenters have focused on whether the business is viable - but it may just be you need to try a different marketing tactic. Paid search is ve

by thegrif 12y ago

Most of the other commenters have focused on whether the business is viable - but it may just be you need to try a different marketing tactic. Paid search is very difficult to turn an ROI on. I ran a search consultancy for awhile and I would tell people that PPC was a lot like blackjack - you can lose a lot of money if you're not paying attention or are new to the game. The big players like themeforest are going to enjoy higher conversion rates off their paid traffic because (a) they are well-known and (b) they also rank well organically (there have been multiple quantitate studies examining the correlation of high converting paid search campaigns with high organic search rankings). Try a few other marketing vehicles, get more data, and only then make decisions about what to do next.

andyakb 12y ago
Exactly. It is the same story when people say "Facebook ads don't work" or whatever the new ad platform is. If you could simply hand $X to an ad company and reliably return $2X or even $1.2X then the money would simply not last because there would be no barriers to entry. Customer acquisition is not something you can leave to chance, it would be like placing a bet a blackjack table and saying you better quit if you lose. If you dont know how to count cards, you should have quit before even sitting down. If you dont know how to utilize different ad channels, you are better off studying them before betting anything, otherwise you are just playing blind. Find a repeatable way to profitably onboard customers. If you cannot do that and have truly put the effort in to understand the different channels, then it may be time to pivot. Otherwise, you are just gambling.
jonathanleane 12y ago
Many thanks thegrif. I'm actually quite experienced with PPC - though admittedly in completely different industries to this one - and it had occurred to me before I started that PPC was simply not a viable strategy for this particular market. Having said that, I'd still expected to get a lot closer to break-even, and the fact that more people aren't clicking through to the various theme description pages (regardless of whether they're actually buying or not) makes me think I've screwed something up on the ux side of things, particularly as the traffic coming in should be pretty highly targeted. As I mentioned in my initial post, the fact that I personally would still use something more conventional (like themeforest) to find a new theme makes me think I am missing a crucial piece of the ux puzzle.

by thegrif 12y ago

andyakb 12y ago

Exactly. It is the same story when people say "Facebook ads don't work" or whatever the new ad platform is. If you could simply hand $X to an ad company and reliably return $2X or even $1.2X then the money would simply not last because there would be no barriers to entry. Customer acquisition is not something you can leave to chance, it would be like placing a bet a blackjack table and saying you better quit if you lose. If you dont know how to count cards, you should have quit before even sitting down. If you dont know how to utilize different ad channels, you are better off studying them before betting anything, otherwise you are just playing blind. Find a repeatable way to profitably onboard customers. If you cannot do that and have truly put the effort in to understand the different channels, then it may be time to pivot. Otherwise, you are just gambling.

jonathanleane 12y ago

Many thanks thegrif. I'm actually quite experienced with PPC - though admittedly in completely different industries to this one - and it had occurred to me before I started that PPC was simply not a viable strategy for this particular market. Having said that, I'd still expected to get a lot closer to break-even, and the fact that more people aren't clicking through to the various theme description pages (regardless of whether they're actually buying or not) makes me think I've screwed something up on the ux side of things, particularly as the traffic coming in should be pretty highly targeted. As I mentioned in my initial post, the fact that I personally would still use something more conventional (like themeforest) to find a new theme makes me think I am missing a crucial piece of the ux puzzle.