

From Minimum Viable Product to Landing Pages - ashmaurya
http://www.ashmaurya.com/2009/11/from-minimum-viable-product-to-landing-pages/

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patio11
I've said it before and I'll say it again: any process which includes, as one
step, "Start an AdWords campaign" tests _your ability to work AdWords_ more
than it tests anything about your market, customers, ability to craft a
landing page, etc etc.

"This validated my earlier finding that [search engine marketing -- by which I
think they mean exclusively CPC ads] might not actually be a viable
distribution channel for CloudFire."

No, it did not. It only proved that, today, you were not able to create a
profitable AdWords campaign.

I can't bang on this enough: AdWords doesn't have a skill curve associated
with it. It has a gentle skill slope followed by a 1,000 foot-tall basalt
monolith slicked with ice, guarded by ill-tempered yeti, and governed under
rules of physics different than the rest of the world which change constantly
and cannot be disclosed to you.

For example, trust me on this: there is much, much, muuuuuuch cheaper
inventory available for those keywords. (Check the content network. You'll be
amazed.) The blogger just wasn't getting it because _ahem_ it is not in
Google's interest to give everyone cheap inventory when they could be
overcharging them for worthless Youtube page views.

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zaidf
Isn't the content network clicks generally of much lower quality? The idea
being non-content network clicks come from people _proactively_ searching
while content network is more passive.

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patio11
Content clicks _are_ of much lower quality, but for selling things to middle
American housewives, there are many, many content clicks which are _really_
search clicks.

Are you familiar with about.com, Demand Media, et al? Here's one inch on the
basalt monolith: they get the overwhelming majority of their traffic directly
from Google, and exist so that they can get a click on their AdWords ad.
Classic arbitrage -- Google should hate it but, well, after you reach a
certain scale the rules that can't be disclosed to you change.

Thus you get a frequent scenario such as this:

1) Customer Googles some keyword of value with a very, very high CPC. Say,
[halloween bingo], which probably costs in the vicinity of $2-$3 on Google. (I
don't know because it is higher than where I could profitably monetize it, but
I have a general idea of where the ceiling should be.)

2) Customer lands on a page on about.com. The page is garbage and does not
satisfy the customer's desire.

3) Customer clicks on the first thing they see which advances their interests
-- an AdWords ad. Because content clicks are severely undervalued, that click
costs 6 cents rather than $2, even though it is essentially a search click.

One of Google's _many_ dirty little secrets is that the Content Network is
essentially a second bite at the apple for getting folks to click on AdWords
ads when they didn't on the SERP.

~~~
zaidf
Ah I hadn't thought of that, which is kinda stupid considering I have a site
that gets thousands of adsense clicks with >75% of them coming right out of a
google search.

I haven't used adwords much. Can you target content networks to very specific
domains or pages within domains?

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AlexTheFounder
Seems like A/B testing for the new sites is a chicken/egg problem of its own -
you first have to have users to test how to get users.

For me too, Adsense was either too expensive or gave too little traffic, both
without any real learning opportunities.

~~~
teej
I don't see the chicken & egg problem. This article pretty clearly showed that
he was able to learn about user's needs with only time, persistence, and money

