

Ask HN: Do you advertise online? (research project questions) - NyxWulf

I am doing a research project for my advanced marketing class.  I would greatly appreciate anyone who would take the time to answer these questions for me.  Answering each and every question is clearly not mandatory, anything you feel comfortable providing would be very helpful.<p>A little background about me: I have been building software since 1994, and web software since 1998, I have a degree in Computer Science, currently work as a development team lead at a big company which is a wholly owned subsidiary of a mega company.  I ran my own software company for several years but made some big mistakes in business partners and terms raising venture money.  I am 16 months into a 21 month executive MBA program, and am planning to go back out on my own in the near future.  For my advanced marketing class I am doing some research on how people make decisions about spending money for online marketing.  If you have any experience in this area and wouldn't mind answering some of the questions below I would be deeply grateful.  If you are uncomfortable posting the reply here you can send it to the e-mail listed for my account or to ask_hn_project.closure@recursor.net (spamgourmet e-mail)<p>A couple of quick items:
I am not looking for experts necessarily, if you sell something online and you do any type of advertising, I would love to hear from you.<p>I am not selling anything, nor am I interesting in buying anything, this is really just a research project for my marketing class.<p>I thought the responses to this survey would be of interest to other members of HN so I thought I would post these here.  If people are interested, I will post the results of the interview responses I receive.<p>Questions:<p>Please give a brief background of you and your experience advertising online<p>What is the nature of the business you perform online? (site url(s), products you sell, how long etc?)<p>Where do you currently advertise online? (e.g. google adwords, yahoo, bing, facebook, double click etc)<p>What do you like most about these services?<p>What do you like least about these services?<p>Why did you choose them?<p>How do you measure overall success with your online advertising?<p>In terms of the services listed above, which ones are the most effective?<p>Is there anything you would change or improve?<p>How do you determine if a specific advertisement was effective?<p>What metrics are most important to you with this?<p>Are there any metrics that you would like to see or like to see more effective?<p>How do you determine how much to spend on each channel (website, keywords)?
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iuguy
What is the nature of the business you perform online? (site url(s), products
you sell, how long etc?)

<http://www.mandalorian.com/> \- We do information security stuff. Penetration
testing and Incident response mostly, we don't sell directly online, but we've
been around for about 5 years.

Where do you currently advertise online? (e.g. google adwords, yahoo, bing,
facebook, double click etc)

Currently, we have one adwords campaign running for a particular subset of UK
local government compliance testing. In the past we've run a general adwords
campaign, with mixed results, and we've tested ads on other networks such as
facebook and chikita.

What do you like most about these services?

The adwords analytics is really good. In the past our campaigns were very
general and not tightly focused. At the moment we're testing a highly focused
online campaign with offline marketing followup. The results are essentially
similar, with the exception that it's costing us about an order of magnitude
less, so it becomes more realistic to continue.

What do you like least about these services?

Facebook and Reddit ads don't provide decent analytics (at least for us
compared to google). We also found that Facebook and Reddit users, whilst
amongst our clientele aren't actually interested in what we're selling.

Why did you choose them?

Facebook, Reddit and Chitika were experiments. Chitika wasn't too bad but
didn't really offer anything over Google. We asked our target markets what
search engines they use, and all of the people we asked said that they use
Google. That told us that Google was the right way to reach them.

How do you measure overall success with your online advertising?

Goal conversions in adwords. We pay for the clicks (as the impression rate is
fairly low - it's long tail terms and we're not highly ranked organically) and
will do so until we're happy with organic ranking, but we track goal
conversions (lead generation). We've spent about £50 so far with a total of 3
leads worth around £2,500 - £7,000 each. The campaign's been running for a few
weeks.

In terms of the services listed above, which ones are the most effective?

Adwords, by a country mile.

Is there anything you would change or improve? Google's quality ranking system
is a bit off. Having to change your content to improve your quality rating for
target keywords seems less about providing useful content and more about
gaming the system. People searching for the keywords we want to list for have
a reasonable click through rate, but because we don't keyword stuff Google
doesn't want our ad listed for certain things.

How do you determine if a specific advertisement was effective?

I check Google analytics once a week for the current campaign, sometimes
twice. I usually sit down and go through that and adwords with someone from
our sales team or a Director.

What metrics are most important to you with this? Goal conversions, CTR,
Location and Impressions, in that order.

Are there any metrics that you would like to see or like to see more
effective? For adwords, there's nothing that I think we'd use. There's a whole
load of analytics stuff we don't use at all.

How do you determine how much to spend on each channel (website, keywords)? If
we organically rank in the top 10, we don't pay much for the keyword. If we're
in the top 4 then we don't advertise. If we don't rank on the first page we'll
pay for a top 3 ad listing for specific keywords that have led to fulfilled
goals. If we hit the goal a lot we'd pay more. If we don't, then we won't.

~~~
NyxWulf
Thank you so much the response. I am very appreciative.

