While I try reading this, the site loads something and scrolls to the top of the page, even on 2. try. Who designed this? This page sucks.
MacOS Firefox fine.
Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
51–60 of 290 posts
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#52I’ve had my own startups and worked with tens of others. I don’t know anybody who has had good experience or ROI with paid ads. There is something “emperors new clothes” about the whole industry where we all play the game but nobody admits they just aren’t very good. Yet we all keep paying the Google bills thinking it’s something you have to do.
> we all play the game but nobody admits they just aren’t very good
I don't think that's common. Do you mean like in big corp where they use their deep pockets to make sure they don't leave room for competition?
In other cases, people just expirement in order to find the right channel, similar to this post, which ultimately depends on the objective and target audience. Then they focus their efforts there.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#53> Quora > > Dark horse – good for conversion and awareness. > Quite cheap, good targeting. > Seriously, I don't know why more people don't use Quora. Amazed to hear that. All my homies hate Quora, I would assume its the same amongst other developer groups.
I was quite convinced that Quora only consists of SEO spam nowadays - kind of a surprise reading that there are real people using it.
And surprisingly there are real people giving more than decent answers in Quora on things ranging from relationships through electric cars to software engineering.
Who are those people is a good question, as I never met or heard of someone answering in Quora, and it is rare to see links to answers in it.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#54I was surprised youtube channel sponsorships didn't make this list, at least for consideration. I have multiple specialized adblockers installed (as I'm sure many here do) and so the only ads I encounter are baked into content I'm otherwise interested in. Currently vpn products and tutorial sites dominate these channels and so I'd almost welcome something else.
SponsorBlock ( https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock ) to the rescue!
I feel more bad about using this than a regular ad blocker. With a regular ad blocker it's blocking ads for which the lion's share is probably going to $facelessabusivecorporation, whereas sponsorships go 100% into the pockets of content creators who typically aren't exactly rich.
It feels less like downloading pirated music and more like sneaking into an indie concert without paying.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#55> This is why we ask all users where they heard about PostHog whenever they sign up or book a demo – it's a simple (optional) free text field. Enough of our users say 'ad on Google' or similar that we know paid ads do actually reach a large chunk of them. You have to be careful with how you word questions. If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad may well be it because ads are so in your…
Even negative discussion can be a positive signal sometimes, e.g. if it's someone complaining about the rough edges that they still use a product in spite of - because it still ultimately solves their problems.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a very techy product; would the audience be there? It's a question as I don't know, but if I see my own usage as a techy, it's not; I don't know anyone who even likes/uses these platform in my cto/decision making circles. But I would really like to know as if there is significant conversion opportunity there (and not just tossing away money) for a very tech product (with code examples on the homepage…
I think it’s a mistake to underestimate the amount of tech people on social media. A lot of people who have privacy awareness and say that Meta and ByteDance are evil surveillance capitalism companies still use their services. I might even go as far as arguing that it’s hard not to without feeling left out of the cultural zeitgeist. My social feeds are filled with ads for enterprise software products. If a product ca…
> My social feeds are filled with ads for enterprise software products.
But what's the conversion; as the article (and many more anecdotes and articles and real life P&L's) shows, is that very many companies are just randomly burning money on ads without conversion. So that you see the ads doesn't mean they convert at all. Did you ever buy anything via them? Or even sign up or click one?
I'm not saying you are wrong or so, but it would be good to hear from a similar product to what this posthog company has who has experience and knows conversions.
I think enterprises often just buy enormous inventory of ads and don't really are on top of how they convert; when i'm doing competitor analysis (and I shall include tiktok/insta now), I click on many competitor ads to see what their landing is and their flow; at least 5% of ads I click go to a 404/500/dns error page. So these enterprises are paying for that click (and many more) but cannot convert because it's not actually working. So those are simply monitoring nothing and throwing money in the river for 0 conversions. Probably hired some company to handle the campaigns and seeing it as 'cost of doing business' not expecting much in return in the first place?
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#57> This is why we ask all users where they heard about PostHog whenever they sign up or book a demo – it's a simple (optional) free text field. Enough of our users say 'ad on Google' or similar that we know paid ads do actually reach a large chunk of them. You have to be careful with how you word questions. If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad may well be it because ads are so in your…
> If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad
Yes, that’s the point of a “branding” ad campaign - to drive upper funnel interest in a company/product.
They can also use retargeting to show the same people “performance” ad campaigns, which are meant to drive a lower funnel conversion like a signup, purchase, or even a demo.
Depending on the product, you can even use an organic discussion about your product as marketing material to get people to see the interest others have in it. Or market a conference or dev day where they show off its capabilities.
There’s a lot of layers to marketing, it’s not as simple as HN makes it out to be.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is 'not really good'? We had spectacular ROI on adwords ads. BUT, and the article mentions this somewhat, not for tech/freemium saas products. Developers avoid ads like the plague. For consumer stuff that are just immediately paid (there is no free; you pay or you leave the landing page) it works incredibly well in our experience.
"Developers avoid ads like the plague." If they can. They can't avoid them on Instagram or Tiktok.
No, I guess that's where my age or echo chamber shines through; I don't know any developers using those platforms. My colleagues don't; most are > 40, but the 20somethings we work with also don't. That's just my experience, so it says very little. Like I say somewhere else, I'm curious what the conversion for tech products on those forced ad platforms is. Actual numbers.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#59I was surprised youtube channel sponsorships didn't make this list, at least for consideration. I have multiple specialized adblockers installed (as I'm sure many here do) and so the only ads I encounter are baked into content I'm otherwise interested in. Currently vpn products and tutorial sites dominate these channels and so I'd almost welcome something else.
Broad appeal to a casual technical audience is why you see the same type of sponsorships. VPNs are very high margin and easy to convert. You’ll see the same in across other types of content, e.g: recipe boxes (Hello Fresh) are very common for lifestyle channels, grooming (Manscaped) is very common for male audience channels and language learning apps are very common in educational circles.
A platform like PostHog would struggle to find the right audience on YouTube because it’s such a niche product.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
SponsorBlock ( https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock ) to the rescue!
I feel more bad about using this than a regular ad blocker. With a regular ad blocker it's blocking ads for which the lion's share is probably going to $facelessabusivecorporation, whereas sponsorships go 100% into the pockets of content creators who typically aren't exactly rich. It feels less like downloading pirated music and more like sneaking into an indie concert without paying.
Sponsorships rarely go 100% into the pockets of creators. The share varies but it can be anywhere from 25% to 75% because these sponsorships typically come through agencies and management takes a cut too.