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

Inbound -> people coming to the site (instead of salespeople calling them up)

Churn -> people canceling their subscriptions.

Churn Rate -> rate at which they're canceling (ex: 5% a month)

Net Negative Churn Rate -> if the overall dollar amount of people moving from $50/mo plans to $100/mo plans is higher than the dollar amount of people canceling subscriptions.

So while the Churn Rate doesn't change (still 5% a month) the overall monthly revenue is still increasing. This is really hard to do and it's a good indicator that they're making something that people really want and are willing to pay to use.

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 watch Isaac Rudansky's excellent videos on Udemy. One of the most important rules is the 5 second test. Show your landing page to your colleagues/friends/family depending on your target audience. If they can't understand what your business proposition is in 5 seconds you have failed landing page optimization. As simple as that.

The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page:

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The landing page is too complex. Like what does "Full stack adaptive delivery" even mean? I am sure 90% of your paid visitors are just bouncing because that landing page tagline is alien to them. Dumb it down. Make it simple.

Surprisingly, the description in the Indiehackers page makes so much more sense than the one you put up: "File-system-as-a-service that does uploads, storage, and media processing for Web and mobile apps, so you can ship products faster and scale them painlessly"

If you told me that the first time I would have understood your value proposition. 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. There are too many jargons already. Don't complicate it further.

Instead of "Full stack adaptive delivery" just try: "File-system-as-service". Instead of "Serve ultimate UX with better images on any website. One script to rule them all." just have: "Ship products faster with better images on any website". That's it. You will get 50+% higher conversion rates with just this one change.

> 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 modified broad with good negative phrase lists that have been continously honed over many months.

don't hyper-segment keyword or ad variations, it'll become a nightmare to manage with little-to-no benefit.

also, whether paid ads are worth it is highly dependent on your market, competitors, and your typical conversion value.

because our typical orders exceed $500, we see double-digit factor returns on ad spend even though we're an established, well-known mfg name in our market.

and yes, be ready to waste some money when dialing things in - $50k in a month of pure waste is quite a lot but that same amount "wasted" on tweaking over the course of 6mo-1yr is not out of the ballpark, assuming it yields progressively increasing ROI.

YMMV

As someone who is trying to learn and some day launch something like this, thank you so much for this advice!

I've been known to complicate descriptions on my OSS packages but still achieved moderate success, so I'm thinking on how to convert this knowledge into revenue and these comments are super helpful.

Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing?

I was wondering if perhaps they could make it easy for me to handle responsive images & formats.

"Easily implement our Bi-Directional CDN© to personalize on-demand adaptive delivery of UX-relevant content. Engage your target audiences"

Slowly backs away