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.<p>The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page:<p>------------------<p>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.<p>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"<p>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.<p>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.
Op had some good tactics but an ass backwards strategy. Should have let the agency do the thing they where paid to do.<p>> Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale things<p>This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again.<p>I work in an agency, I won't work with you if you do this, because you will get the same results and blame me.<p>> Lesson #2: Focus on page quality and CTR when doing paid tests<p>Nope don't do this. When testing ads you should focus on the ads you are testing.<p>Make as many as you can, test, review and reduce to the winning ads then repeat. When you have found the ads with good CTR it's time to start working on page quality (making your page relevant to the ad).<p>> Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for<p>Again no don't do this, write ads to test your keywords build pages for the ads that work, not the other way around this isn't SEO.<p>> Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid<p>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.<p>> Lesson #5: Analytics will save (some of) your bacon
> Lesson #6: Revisit your awareness ladder often to validate and update it<p>Winner winner chicken dinner, some good advice.
This is such impressive blather that I’m now convinced I know nothing at all about modern sales and marketing.<p>It may as well have been written by an ancient alien civilization for all I understood.<p>Probably we’ll hear something very like this when SETI receives a signal from another star system.
> CTR is the most important component of Quality Score<p>this is because that's how google gets paid.<p>you can create a great ad that's not terribly relevant to a specific audience, get good ctr but poor conversion.<p>some tips:<p>make sure to watch your search query reports and continuously refine your [hopefully shared] carefully-applied negative keywords lists.<p>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.<p>don't hyper-segment keyword or ad variations, it'll become a nightmare to manage with little-to-no benefit.<p>also, whether paid ads are worth it is highly dependent on your market, competitors, and your typical conversion value.<p>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.<p>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.<p>YMMV
Interesting...<p>> "...a customer acquisition cost way above one-third of customer lifetime value"<p>Is this really so terrible? As I understand it a lot of mobile games pay more for acquisition than they'll make from the user in e.g. IAP's to scale up their player base and climb the charts. What is a normal CPA vs LTV in the SaaS space?<p>Also, if you pay less to acquire these customers than you will make from them over time, you haven't quite <i>wasted</i> 50k have you?
"Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for"<p>This sounds self-evident but we all know sales people who sell a fiction and then engineering has to scramble to (try to) turn it into reality.
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.<p>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.
What more companies should look into is YouTube advertising. You have many youtubers including myself who get paid from multi-billion dollar companies every month to deliver their message to a highly targeted niche market. It's a better alternative to Ad Sense and you'll get quadruple the impressions for a similar price. The landing page is what it is though, if it doesn't capture the customers attention, that's the fault of the company paying to advertise.
> Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid<p>Explained in more detail here:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21469677" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21469677</a><p>Prepare to be disappointed by paid traffic conversion going in. Paid traffic isn't there to convert, like you hope since it costs you money. It is primarily there for brand awareness which only works if your branding is visible.
"Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time."<p>This sounds very familiar... in fact it sounds a lot like "Respond to change instead of following a rigid plan" from the agile manifesto.
"Full stack adaptive delivery" - wut ?<p>Wouldn't surprise me if bounce rates are high. Took quite a bit of reading to figure out what industries and use cases are
This headline is a little sensational.<p>When I ran a brick and mortar business where we took bookings, Google Ads were imperative to us getting new business. So were Facebook Ads. When they weren't running for some reason, or weren't optimized, we could feel it in the pocket book. AND, it wasn't too expensive. I was able to pay around $300 per month and get a lot of business.<p>Anyway, every business is different, and I think local business owners need to consider whether Google Ads are good for them based on their own unique situation.
As a former Google Ads freelancer I very much enjoyed reading this.<p>You seem to have learned your lessons like you said and I actually picked up some interesting things from here. I'll be saving those Google docs!<p>I think the biggest lesson by far to be learned from this is that working with SEM agencies can be a complete clusterf*ck. Most of the time I'd recommend working with a freelancer who has a strong and verifiable background (most can be found in online communities).<p>Like you said the strategy these guys usually use is to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. In some, if not most cases they'll have scripts or software running to automate their campaigns without a human going into the account very frequently to weed out bad search terms.<p>While I 100% agree with most of your conclusions and the conclusions of the people on here commenting on your landing page wording, I do have one question: did you have a good, hard look at the search terms before deciding a keyword had to be removed?<p>O and yes, quality score is important. However I've seen and ran campaigns with a <5/10 quality score but with incredible CPC's. Don't get too hung up on QS - if it works it works, don't question it.
Lots of great lessons. For those wanting more, I wrote a blog post a while back about our own lessons learned with Google Ads:<p><a href="https://www.getleadup.com/post/the-startup-founders-guide-to-setting-up-google-ads" rel="nofollow">https://www.getleadup.com/post/the-startup-founders-guide-to...</a>
Excerpt:<p>"o Narrow down your extended keyword set and focus on the keyword groups you have polished content and landing pages for, especially when you have a complex product.<p>o Use an awareness ladder to inform keyword segmentation by purchase stage but revisit it often to validate and adjust.<p>o Do not use the same landing pages for different steps of your awareness ladder.<p>o Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time.<p>o Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates.<p>o Run tests to optimize page content, which will reduce your cost per click.<p>o Once you find your winner, you’re ready to go all-in. Now’s the time to pass it off to an agency to scale things up, if you are contracting out campaign management."
Thank you very much for sharing your experience with HN. From my own point of view (as the CEO of a performance marketing agency working with Google Ads & clients budgets daily) I have to add, that this are learnings your agency should have protected you from.
Agree with the first comment. Landing pages should be customized to the specific point in the customer journey. If you’re targeting a clueless user you should keep it simple and educate all the way to conversion.
I know this advertising campaign isn’t perfect, but I have to wonder if Google isn’t digging too deep. They’ve let advertising dominate their search pages so their page becomes less valuable to the user and advertisers get less value per dollar paid. Where the original concept was to put only a few relevant advertisements up which users would actually be interested in, now they pile on advertisements thick and deep and I rarely find them valuable. At some point this has to affect the ROI for advertisers.
Just want to say I'm grateful you took the time to share this lesson - there were some insights there I'll be thinking about ways to action on our side of things. Thanks!
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.
Like others have mentioned, I don't know what the product is from the website. Wth is an acceleration node and why should I care if there's 240k of them?<p>While I'm being cynical, Indiehackers could stand to not load their css in js, at least for the global stylesheet. Surprisingly the content actually renders, but the header svg and so on breaks quite badly.
><i>Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates.</i><p>A good reminder that you can apply The Lean Startup methodology (Build > Measure > Learn) to projects of all sizes from forming a new company to running an ad campaign. Ship early, test often, rinse and repeat.
Lesson #1: Have a solid product or service which really solves problems many people have.<p>Lesson #2: Don't try to boost sales just via marketing. Great product sells itself through word of mouth.
Another story blaming Google ads, plenty of methods to measure why people exit a page including 3rd party tools to even survey the user "why you leaving?" to get some feedback.
With a solid post mortem like that, its not entirely lost. But with Adwords we're doing it to ourselves, drives bids up to a level where profitability becomes very difficult.
Good that you decided not to "wallow in buyers’ remorse" and spread the story + your brand.<p>A perfect case of finding opportunity amid crisis.