I 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.
We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
111–120 of 211 posts
Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do recruiting consulting and it blows my mind how every time I ask a startup how they differentiate from other startups and what specific advantages they want me to discuss, they give me a bunch of meaningless phrases. Its like founders are being taught a different language that they think provides value but makes no fucking sense.
The emperor has no clothes... there is a skill in speaking in an optimistic way using a series of intentionally vague words which smart people feel bad about not understanding so they just pretend they do and think positively about a product because for the life of them they could not articulate why the pitch/business/product didn't have any value. There's nothing to argue against because "I don't know what you're ta…
> The emperor has no clothes... there is a skill in speaking in an optimistic way using a series of intentionally vague words which smart people feel bad about not understanding so they just pretend they do and think positively about a product because for the life of them they could not articulate why the pitch/business/product didn't have any value. There's nothing to argue against because "I don't know what you're talking about" is an apparent argument against yourself.
Sounds like WeWork. If you've ever seen that Neumann/Kutcher interview, that's exactly how it went.
Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand ! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be con…
I have the feeling that "Full stack adaptive delivery" and its ilk are aimed at VCs or BigCorp sourcing managers instead of anyone that would actually use the product. The sad thing is that they seem to be so mutually exclusive nowadays.
That's definitely what it is. We are looking at it from the perspective of developers but I don't think that's the target
Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
#114Left 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 w…
What's with the mobile oriented design that every startup that's trying to be cool has? Little text that doesn't say anything, check. Loads of whitespace, check. Pretty photos that don't mean anything, check. Even if your description was less technobabbleish, i'd just close the page and move on.
As someone else said in this thread, do you optimize for venture capitalists instead of customers?
Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
#115Op 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…
> 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. Unless I misunderstand you, you misunderstood them. They are saying that they didn't test and trim first and paid a lot of money to the agency that they didn't need to. They should have started with a smaller set. >…
The first point I was being too hard on them.
The agency will add 20% on the spend because they can get better results than the client doing keyword research, writing ads and testing them.
The client did the hard work for the agency basically made the campaign themselves and then paid the agency 20% to set it live.
They should have done it the other way around get the agency to setup the campaign and then "scale" it themselves and they would have been able to an extra 20% ad spend for nothing.
The second point you are right again. I mean more that the funnel should start at the point of contact with the end user (the ad) and the landing page should be built for that ad, they seem to have tried to do it the other way around.
They obviously know what they are doing as far as tactics, it looks like they learned it from SEO, but I think they have tried to apply an SEO strategy of content first to their ad campaign and it didn't work.
You can't change advertising channels so you need to change your content to fit the channel not the other way around.
Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
#116Left 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 w…
> 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. It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand ! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be con…
[deleted]
Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
#117Excerpt:
"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."
Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
#118This 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.
I 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.
Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
#119> 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…
While 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.
Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)
#120This 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.