21–24 of 24 posts
Damn that was good. Very similar to my own experiences. I especially liked the point of not blowing money on ads and such. Getting ads right is hard, and most times you will waste your ad money. Feel free to dabble, but realize that your ROI will probably be dismal. Make sure to track your ROI somehow, or you won't even know how badly you're doing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His talk is at Ignite RailsConf. Talks are limited to 5 minutes. Slides are advanced every 15 seconds.
This Pecha Kucha format is really great!
It seemed odd that an extra 1 minute and 40 seconds would make any difference, but Ignite talks seems to have more pep, perhaps because the slides advance 5 seconds faster.
But both formats are hard to do well. Too many presentations end up being a list of items matched to Flickr images and Helvetica-rendered slogans or quips.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We'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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We'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…
Dude, 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).