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

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

#91

Post by underdown » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

ryanlol wrote: post #72

shripadk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing? SEO should be as natural as possible. Keyword stuffing actually has a negative impact on your Quality Score (if you are running Google Ads) in the long run. Do not forget that Google is always optimizing its algorithms. What was possible before isn't possible now. And what is possible to do today isn't p…

> SEO should be as natural as possible Natural looking to googles algos, not actually as natural as possible. There are highly effective “unnatural” SEO strategies, for example you could just generate fake bounces on your competitors pages using proxies. > Don't start by gaming the system. Start by doing it as natural as you can. This is good advice. You can always game the system, but you probably shouldn’t start ou…

> There are highly effective “unnatural” SEO strategies, for example you could just generate fake bounces on your competitors pages using proxies.

That's not unnatural seo it's negative seo.

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

#92

Post by dhimes » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

dangerface wrote: post #53

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…

> 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.

> Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid

Different ads target customers at different stages of the buying journey, ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic.

So do organic searches. The initial Google hypothesis was that if someone was searching they would be interested in buying, and showing them an ad right then would be optimal because they are interested in buying (or else they wouldn't click it).

The idea that conversion is better with organic than ad does indeed seem to falsify that hypothesis. But maybe not. There could be click-fraud involved, too, which can dramatically drop the conversion rate.

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

#93

Post by mritchie712 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

code4tee wrote: post #33

There is a winter coming for the online ad model when more people realize, as this author has, that most online ad spend was probably a total waste. That combined with the increasing crackdown by the consumer on blocking data tracking raises serious questions on the long term viability of the business models of some big players in the industry.

right, the OP even mentioned:

> A clear funnel with established conversion rates, check

Is it checked? > 20% of people hitting our landing page block Segment which then blocks a portion of our analytics. It's pretty hard to get the full picture on your users, especially those coming from ads.

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

#94

Post by steve76 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #77

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67

Earlier 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…

Exactly this. So many times I have to spend ten minutes digging into what some of these companies actually do. It’s highly frustrating. Give some examples of what you do. Explain it in simple language. Don’t rely on conceptual language because it doesn’t tell me what your offering does.

Lead with the benefits. Also put "free" in front of whatever you are selling. Whenever you run a google trends report, compare against the term "free". Every time I do it, it dwarfs whatever the next term is.

"Full stack adaptive delivery" -> Sign Up Now!

vs.

"Free file upload PaaS" -> Website | Mobile

Also, with 50K spend, I would put ad arbitrage in front of my product. At the very least, I'm breaking even and have all that traffic. I would tag it, to get user context, since google gives intent, and work in a suite of apps in my portfolio. Swap out the conversion opportunity. Show another ad, or a newsletter signup, or a straight out credit card form, and let it run going for a 40% ROI.

Wow, if I had the opportunity for 50K. Sad that you squandered it.

--- --- --- === === == ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ = === === --- --- ---

Since Friday, let's close this post out with a story:

--- --- --- === === == ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ = === === --- --- ---

Feral bulls, also known as "micky's" in Australia, run wild much more than most people know. Surely there's a cave, deep in the woods, with many boars and hogs running around.

One day, the bull sniffs out the scene, and starts goring everything in site. All the squealing is going to wake up the bear, who's going to emerge from his cave, all angry.

The bear's going to take two looks around, take a giant dump on everything and just shrug. Then it will just go back to the cave with a few hogs under his paws and one in his mouth.

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

#95

Post by pc86 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

ryguytilidie wrote: post #83

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67

Earlier 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 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.

I'm curious how often you push back on that and say "no, 'full stack adaptive delivery' doesn't really mean anything. Tell. Me. What. You Do."

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

#96

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

ljf wrote: post #50

shripadk wrote: post #43

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…

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, or I have to tell you everything about my business and my problems - and since I'm on your landing page and we aren't really talking, I care and expect to see primarily your What and How.

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

#97

Post by ses1984 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71

ses1984 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the target audience has business problems not file system problems. File system as a service doesn't tell me what business problems can be solved with this.

I think the immediate target audience are still technical people. Business people dealing with business problems indeed don't think about stuff like this. But the tech people that solve business problems for business people - they absolutely do. And they're the ones that select tools and design architectures for the solution.

"Filesystem as a service" can mean too many different things to technical people, that it's basically meaningless.

Even if I was squarely in the target audience, if I saw that, I wouldn't necessarily know it applied to me.

Maybe I'm wrong about that.

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

#98

Post by EdwardDiego » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:23 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67

shripadk wrote: post #43

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…

> 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…

> "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be construed to mean just about anything. It would fit just as well on a logistics company page, or on a sticker on the side of an ICBM.

I personally wonder if they used the Startup Generator in earnestness. [1]

But yeah, I'm a senior techie, and often involved in potential procurement discussions, and sweet Jesus, if you want us to give you money, give us some goddamned concrete facts. You synergise enterprise cloud offerings?Oh, you mean you have a templating language that tries to generify Terraform and CloudFormation and does both badly.

I sometimes feel like people in ticket clipping businesses like this (their CDN offering is, um, Akamai, but you can make pictures grayscale using their DSL because that's easier than using a photo editor?) are scared of saying what they actually do because then you'll realise that they don't do much for the money they're asking.

[1] http://tiffzhang.com/startup

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

#99

Post by jsonne » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

I see this sort of complaint kind of a lot unfortunately and mostly from engineers who think marketing should work like engineering. $1 in should equal $X out. Unfortunately it usually isn't that linear and the whole, when everything is working, tends to be more than the sum of the parts. You get the disproportionate outcomes when all the pieces fit together and not in a linear fashion. Marketing, like startup growth in general is on a hockey stick pattern.

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

#100

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

shripadk wrote: post #57

franciscop wrote: post #47

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! 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…

> 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 or a desire for being a premium brand. Etc. So the industry gets increasingly opaque and full of voodoo, because the more complexity can be built in, the more people can make money without delivering any value that could be reliably attributed to them. Everyone buys each other's bullshit, money changes hands, everyone is happy, little actual value is created.