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We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

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201–210 of 211 posts

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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…

I understand how ETag works foe tracking, but can you point me in the direction to learn more about steganographed PNGs?

Evercookie's a great resource for dubious techniques to track people - look at the HTML canvas example for how it's done with a PNG: https://github.com/samyk/evercookie/blob/6d44cb8ad1eda23c9a5...

Luckily, the partitioning of browser caches on a per domain basis as pioneered by Safari has now made its way to Firefox (I think it's been released) and I presume will eventually be turned on by default in Chromium: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5730772021411840

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect. Clear, concise and to the point. Landing pages should preferably be hosted on its own path. Search engines index paths not the query string. Also, think this way: if you have multiple features, you can have a landing page per feature explaining that one feature in depth. Then you can have your Ads target that one feature page that everyone wants. This helps when you introduce new features tomorrow. Instead o…

That makes sense, thank you. I'm also guessing they need to go into the sitemap so search engines discover them, right? I'm not sure I've ever searched for something and got a different landing page as a result (though maybe I just didn't notice), so I didn't realize this was something people do.

Yes sitemaps are great for search engines. Makes it easy for indexing.

> I'm not sure I've ever searched for something and got a different landing page as a result

That is probably because Google was shortening the destination URL. If you are running Google Ads you can set your own URL destination even though the actual landing page might be something totally different. You can check it out if you like by searching for something and focusing on the Ad. You'll typically have the landing page different from the Ad URL.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#204

Left 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…

I'm really sick of all that "your keywords are too complex" or "people don't understand what you're saying", most of the times coming from people that know nothing about that niche or industry. If those people are not your target market, don't give a shit about what they say related to the landing page content. You're not selling to them. If they don't understand the terminology used and they are not potential client…

You can have your opinions but this is not how marketing or sales work. It isn't some new tech. This is age old stuff that has been going on since humans started trading. You always, always dumb it down even for your potential clients. The reason is more to do with cognition than to do with the client's knowledge. Your brain is not always focused on everything around you. It is more psychological. You are thinking in binary (or in other words: logically). The brain is more complex than that. It can sometimes fail to do the simplest of tasks but at the same time be capable of solving the most complex of problems.

The idea behind a tagline is to capture the user's attention. You can build up on the complexity as the user goes further down the page. But to start with a complicated tagline will cause your users to quit.

If someone is selling mangoes in a market and he shouts "Mangifera Indica for 5$" will people purchase from him? He is still selling Mangoes and dare I say he is more accurate (because the scientific name for Mango is Mangifera Indica). His potential customers will be those who are botanists because only they understand the scientific nomenclature. But those won't be his real customers too. What if the botanist hears the scientific name but his/her brain ignores it as the brain triggers only in certain environments (like in a lab)? What if the botanist is not interested in Mangoes even after understanding it? As you can see, your potential customers are narrowing down with every filter applied. This is exactly antithesis to "selling to as many as possible".

But if he shouts "Mangos for 5$" he attracts everyone interested in a Mango, including the botanist.

And I don't want to sound nasty but no technology is so advanced that it cannot be simplified. Also don't forget that people can smell bullshit from a mile away. That is what I have learnt from experience. We Engineers like to overcomplicate and overpromise stuff that will only come back to bite us later. Just follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who is trying to learn and some day launch something like this, thank you so much for this advice! Thank you. Just sharing what I learned from the masters in the field. The best of which is Isaac Rudansky. Marketing is made unnecessarily complex these days. It is not rocket science. Anyone can do it.

> Marketing is made unnecessarily complex these days. I have a cynical theory for that too! The reason marketing is made complex is because it's not just marketers pushing products to the rest of the world, but also marketers pushing marketing tools to each other. Just like a marketer may exploit my fear for health of my kids, or desire for social status, they can exploit other marketer's fear of low campaign success…

So it’s sorta like npm for marketing people? They share meaningless phraseology packages arranged in a way-too-deep dependency graph?

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#207

Op 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…

Ok, but would you outline the "whys" for your corrections to approach?

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#208
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great advise, but it reads as What, How and then Why. I think flipping it around would be even more impactful. Start with Why ;)

I'm a techie so this may bias me, but I definitely prefer to see What and How before Why. The reason is, you as the solution provider are not in the position to tell me what problems you'll actually solve for me. You can make high-level promises, but whether your solution can realize them in context of my business and my tooling, depends on how they relate to your What and How. So either you tell me your What and How…

I was riffing on the famous book/Ted talk - https://youtu.be/IPYeCltXpxw

I agree the what often works for me, but if you want mass appeal it appears to be the Why that hooks people.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#209
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many companies, the home page is probably simply not used for selling their product or informing new people about the company, and instead serves more as a symbol of the company's aesthetic and a way to welcome and comfort visitors. Think of it more like the well-appointed lobby of an office headquarters. I don't think anyone would expect the lobby of an office building to explain what the company does. It's just…

I disagree on Airtable. Their homepage currently says "Part spreadsheet, part database, and entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way." I'm a software developer. I have no idea what they are selling, based on that. Is this some sort of souped up Google Sheets competitor? If so, what does it do better? Is this a team workflow management tool? If so, why bring up spreadsheets and databases…

> I have no idea what they are selling, based on that.

I'm not sure why you don't have an idea of what they are selling, unless you just don't believe what their website says. "Part spreadsheet, part database" really is an accurate explanation of their product. It's basically how I would start any explanation of the Airtable product.

The rest of it ("entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way") is certainly market-speak, and doesn't give much more information, but it also doesn't obfuscate anything.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i 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 mo…

Do you have any recommended reading for things you can do to easily save you money before spending your first cent on ads?
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