The real ad is the blog post on front page of HN.
What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
201–210 of 263 posts
Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spot on. Old talk by Simon Sinek presents it pretty well, start with the why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4&t=3m20s
I've seen that one before, and the only thing I get out of it is "I wouldn't buy a used car from this guy".
lol
'Every car you've ever bought has been used by the time you take it home. Ours just happen to have been used by someone else. Wanna buy one?'
Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand you mainly asked the questions to provide feedback, but as a subscriber i can give you some info that might help you decide: A lot of the sweets are made with cane sugar, which tastes distinctly different from the typical american fare. Beyond that they also have some taste combinations that you usually don't encounter in the us. Savoury snacks with sea weed tastes are pretty nice.
> A lot of the sweets are made with cane sugar A good point for an American, but most other countries in the world use cane sugar too, right?
Cane grows in the tropical areas, so other countries more often use sugar beets.
Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Additionally, just because someone is interested in Japanese candies, doesn't mean they like anime. The high-pitched annoying cartoon voice really turned me off right away, and it's not immediately obvious in the first 10 seconds (which is how long you have to watch before you can skip on YouTube) what it's for (after all, CrunchyRoll is a service for watching anime online, not ordering crunchy rolls.)
I believe that is intentional. Sentence missing from the blog post is still up on the reddit post[1]: > Here's the end result. If the video tingles your weeaboo senses, that's intentional, as I want clearly uninterested people to skip the video as fast as possible. I'll explain why next. ... > Now you might understand why I want to get people not in my target audience to skip – it's cheaper because you don't pay when…
Just because the admaker thinks that he has a particular audience to target, doesn't mean he does. This is called leaving money on the table and not understanding your customer base. I'd seen the ad, I found it annoying as well. Somehow I doubt they did a great deal of focus research on people who buy in this industry, or their own current customer-base. Otherwise the ad wouldn't have been shit.
Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
#205A few things that struck me. Note I primarily do Facebook consulting so I'm pulling broad generalizations from there but I do run youtube ads as well. 1. Using predefined broad audience categories rarely works. Doing keyword targeting or specific video targeting usually works out better. 2. $10 cpm isn't high. I regularly spend $40+ on Facebook that can be 5x+ profitable ROI. Judging an ad buy only by cpm is short si…
For someone just starting in this world, any orientation or advice in how to improve with facebook ads or this world in general? I am following tutorials and forming more formally but 3 to 5 ROI would be huge for me professionaly, since we deal with not so big companies that would have, in the best of scenarios, a budget similar to the post, normally even smaller.
So it feels quite hard to stablish a relationship between the money spent and what we directly get the client in return.
So your comment was extremely useful for me!!
Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
#206Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
#207People inexperienced in online adversities often think that they can pay for conversions. That is not the case. You’re paying to get your message out. Very very few people will immediately act because of an ad. But if you hit them enough, they may later convert. Tracking those late conversions is imprecise. This does not mean advertising is useless. But it is not generally a game for those with a tiny budget or a sho…
Disagree. I had a startup selling a piece of software that immediately solved a major problem for a small niche of users. Paid for conversions on common search terms and they were ROI positive since each click converted at 25% to signup, and then the product spread around the companies where one user adopted. Sold the company for >$10m.
Wow, that's awesome! I have a product that also solves a problem for a small niche of users [1], but I think my niche is a bit smaller than yours. I recently increased the AdWords budget and I'm trying a lot of different ads to see what works. Anyway, thanks for sharing your story, that's really encouraging.
Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brand building investment exists today, but like all other channels unless you can prove the return you're just gambling. It's certainly not the best place to start if performance marketing is a viable channel.
I know such investments still exist - specially in well established brands where a more "classical" marketing approach is still used. But small companies don't even know how to measure such returns, or can't afford to measure their return beyond sales and analytics data. That's why it will always be a gamble for them, specially like you said, it's not the best place to start.
It's not just that they can't afford to measure their return, but that often you can't afford to spend money on marketing that doesn't have a direct return.
When I started consulting, I spent some money on marketing, but my big constraint was that if a given channel didn't at least break even on direct conversions, there was only so much money and time I could afford to spend on that channel for conversions down the road by increasing my brand: It's not just total lifetime returns from the advertising that matters, but how the timing of those returns affect cash flow.
If the time it takes to break even is too long, you might be bankrupt first, even if the potential lifetime return is fantastic.
Sometimes it costs a lot to not have the time and budgets to take a longer term view.
Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you find the niche? Any reading material I should see?
I had a CS degree but was working outside the field in pharmaceuticals. I was having the problem myself and wrote a crazy Excel spreadsheet with tens of thousands of lines of poorly written copy pasted code to do it. I knew that there would be a market for it so I contacted an old classmate of mine who rewrote it much better as a web service. That is why I think CS and software engineering should be part of every col…
Reminds me of this AMA answer by @patio11 [1]
> Here's an exercise you can do: do you understand what a life insurance agent does all day every day? Make it your mission for a week to do so, well enough to explain it to a close friend who has no access to your sources. All you have to do to learn this is read and make conversations happen. (People are happy to talk to you!)
I really need to take that seriously, and talk to people in a lot of different industries.
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/im-patio11-patrick-mckenz...
Re: What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Individual contracts around $50,000 per year per customer.
And you were getting these customers from AdWords campaigns, instead of high-touch sales? That's incredible.
If true, an incredibly bad sales process. If you have a product that can be sold for $50K via Adwords and you don't also use high touch sales you are an idiot.