
We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019) - sloka
https://www.indiehackers.com/article/we-wasted-50k-on-google-ads-so-you-dont-have-to-355a425b27
======
shripadk
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.

The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page:

\------------------

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.

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"

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.

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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _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 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 wish people would just say what they actually do.

~~~
ryguytilidie
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'd love to know where they learn that.

In my university years, I used to invent such ridiculously overblown phrases
for simple things I did, as a form of mockery of corporate culture and my
general pastime. But at some point I did realize that these phrases are
_hashing functions_ \- like the ones you use in a hash table to put objects
into buckets. So for a particular thing I do, say "adding colors to terminal
applications", I could invent a bunch of nonsense phrases - "enriching the
user experience of advanced software", or "delivering visual artistry to
professional digital media" or whatnot. It was fun going in this direction,
and we'd have a good laugh - but a person seeing just the output could never
arrive at my original input, "adding colors to CLI apps". It was one of
infinitely many things I could hash under the same phrase, and they could
never know which one I did.

So in my eyes, if you're trying to explain something to someone, then using
these phrases is essentially equivalent to taking MD5 of what you wanted to
say and pasting that hash.

~~~
bob33212
"We find null and empty values in your tables and Excel files and prompt your
users to fix them" sounds like a 10 dollar idea. How are you going to get
employees and investors to really jump on board with that.

"We revolutionize Enterprise Data Quality with next generation AI in the
cloud" sounds better to employees, investors, and in some cases buyers

~~~
WWLink
So you're saying that there's a lot of con artists out there? No surprise
really lol.

------
dangerface
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 and blame me.

> Lesson #2: Focus on page quality and CTR when doing paid tests

Nope don't do this. When testing ads you should focus on the ads you are
testing.

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).

> Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for

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.

> 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.

> Lesson #5: Analytics will save (some of) your bacon > Lesson #6: Revisit
> your awareness ladder often to validate and update it

Winner winner chicken dinner, some good advice.

~~~
dhimes
_> 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.

~~~
dangerface
The first point I was being too hard on them.

The agency will add 20% on the spend because they can get better results than
the client doing keyword research, writing ads and testing them.

The client did the hard work for the agency basically made the campaign
themselves and then paid the agency 20% to set it live.

They should have done it the other way around get the agency to setup the
campaign and then "scale" it themselves and they would have been able to an
extra 20% ad spend for nothing.

The second point you are right again. I mean more that the funnel should start
at the point of contact with the end user (the ad) and the landing page should
be built for that ad, they seem to have tried to do it the other way around.

They obviously know what they are doing as far as tactics, it looks like they
learned it from SEO, but I think they have tried to apply an SEO strategy of
content first to their ad campaign and it didn't work.

You can't change advertising channels so you need to change your content to
fit the channel not the other way around.

------
trimboffle
This is such impressive blather that I’m now convinced I know nothing at all
about modern sales and marketing.

It may as well have been written by an ancient alien civilization for all I
understood.

Probably we’ll hear something very like this when SETI receives a signal from
another star system.

~~~
trimboffle
>>> Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their
recommendations, we’re fortunate to have a constant and growing inbound flow
of leads and net negative churn, meaning the value of usage-driven upgrades
outweighs the loss in revenue from subscription cancellations.

I’m glad they clarified what “net negative churn” means, that really cleared
things up.

~~~
83457
They are getting more new customers (edit: others have pointed out it also
includes increased revenue from existing customers), thanks primarily to
personal recommendations (word of mouth), than they are losing customers.

~~~
trimboffle
You sir, should have written the article.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Except that this rewritten version is not correct!

They aren’t necessarily getting more new customers than old customers
cancelling, but the combination of revenue from new customers and added
revenue from upgrades from existing customers is more than the revenue lost
from customers who cancel.

Which, btw, is exactly what they say, using standard industry terms, and it’s
not ambiguous. It just wasn’t written for you, that’s all.

------
leeoniya
> CTR is the most important component of Quality Score

this is because that's how google gets paid.

you can create a great ad that's not terribly relevant to a specific audience,
get good ctr but poor conversion.

some tips:

make sure to watch your search query reports and continuously refine your
[hopefully shared] carefully-applied negative keywords lists.

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.

don't hyper-segment keyword or ad variations, it'll become a nightmare to
manage with little-to-no benefit.

also, whether paid ads are worth it is highly dependent on your market,
competitors, and your typical conversion value.

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.

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.

YMMV

~~~
asperous
While Google may be paid per click, the value of that click (how much
companies are willing to pay), is directly dependent on their conversion
rates. So Google is incentivized to get you the most converting clicks as
possible.

~~~
leeoniya
i think it's safe to say that the incentives are not _exactly_ aligned.

if i was google, i would make sure that the ctr was as high as possible while
the conversion rate was just enough to be worth it.

there are a lot of fine-grained controls missing from the adwords backend
which waste money. for example, you cannot segment iphones from android, or
forcibly exclude ie11 because you have chosen not to support it any more and
the site falls apart on it. you cannot prevent ads from showing to visitors
who've already come and bounced. they keep expanding how much "modified broad"
sucks in by making the matching looser - with little notice. and that's just
the tip of the iceberg.

lots of things that can easily save _you_ money do not exist in their backend.
imo these are not oversights but are left out intentionally.

~~~
leeoniya
ok, i guess there is a way to target to specific mobile devices:

[https://support.google.com/google-
ads/answer/7101715?hl=en](https://support.google.com/google-
ads/answer/7101715?hl=en)

------
davedx
Interesting...

> "...a customer acquisition cost way above one-third of customer lifetime
> value"

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?

Also, if you pay less to acquire these customers than you will make from them
over time, you haven't quite _wasted_ 50k have you?

~~~
nrjames
Climbing the charts with a mobile game has the potential for activating a
virtuous cycle with eCPMs for advertising as a parallel benefit to player
acquisition. The acquisition and eCPMs can feed the cycle and self-sustain for
a while. That's how the Voodoo and Ketchapp's of the world create their
arbitrage markets that keep their throwaway hyper casual games dominant in the
top of the charts. They've effectively gamed and broken the charts that way,
reaping enormous benefits.

------
mikece
"Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for"

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.

~~~
foxhop
A product could already have the engineering bits in place but without a
landing page calling out that very feature or usecase, sending traffic to a
mismatched page is a diservice.

People click an ad to learn more, if they are presented with a specific use-
case but land on a generic marketing page they will click the back button.

~~~
GarrisonPrime
And yet the company is paying for all those pointless clicks. Hopefully
they’ll consider “misleading ads” as a possible reason for a low conversion
rate.

------
code4tee
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.

~~~
EdwardDiego
I'm in adtech and godddamn, I can't wait for the industry to wean itself off
user tracking, shaking and crying like a heroin addict.

For years myself and other engineers have been warning the product owners that
third party user tracking's life span is very much finite - Firefox was going
to block 3rd party cookies by default several years back, but walked it back
because Google weren't ready for that and threatened to withdraw the money
Mozilla makes from them, but it was the sign of the end times.

Now that Google can identify you with reasonable probability without using
cookies, they won't hold Firefox back, they don't need to, and it suits them
to roll out the third party blocking in Chromium, alongside browser cache
partitioning to avoid the classic circumventions - ETags, steganographed PNGs
etc. as first implemented by Safari. UA strings, often used in fingerprinting,
are also not long for this world.

And of course, now that Google has a solution that doesn't require cookies or
fingerprinting, Chrome is all about that privacy lol - the fact that it hurts
Google's competitors is merely happy circumstance.

The amount of panic in adtech companies now is hilarious because they chose to
mimic an ostrich until the browsers left them no choice - but they're still
flailing around and demanding devs try to find alternatives to 3rd party
cookies.

The cookie based user tracking paradigm is dead, but there's a shit ton of
people, especially in DSPs and DMPs whose salary relies on them not believing
that.

~~~
aschatten
I understand how ETag works foe tracking, but can you point me in the
direction to learn more about steganographed PNGs?

~~~
EdwardDiego
Evercookie's a great resource for dubious techniques to track people - look at
the HTML canvas example for how it's done with a PNG:
[https://github.com/samyk/evercookie/blob/6d44cb8ad1eda23c9a5...](https://github.com/samyk/evercookie/blob/6d44cb8ad1eda23c9a53f89dd5410b42cd29451a/js/evercookie.js#L679)

Luckily, the partitioning of browser caches on a per domain basis as pioneered
by Safari has now made its way to Firefox (I think it's been released) and I
presume will eventually be turned on by default in Chromium:
[https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5730772021411840](https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5730772021411840)

------
chrshawkes
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.

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

Explained in more detail here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21469677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21469677)

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.

------
mikece
"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."

This sounds very familiar... in fact it sounds a lot like "Respond to change
instead of following a rigid plan" from the agile manifesto.

------
flokie
"Full stack adaptive delivery" \- wut ?

Wouldn't surprise me if bounce rates are high. Took quite a bit of reading to
figure out what industries and use cases are

------
dpcan
This headline is a little sensational.

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.

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.

------
WizardofLeads
As a former Google Ads freelancer I very much enjoyed reading this.

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!

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).

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.

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?

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.

------
njay
Lots of great lessons. For those wanting more, I wrote a blog post a while
back about our own lessons learned with Google Ads:

[https://www.getleadup.com/post/the-startup-founders-guide-
to...](https://www.getleadup.com/post/the-startup-founders-guide-to-setting-
up-google-ads)

------
peter_d_sherman
Excerpt:

"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.

o Use an awareness ladder to inform keyword segmentation by purchase stage but
revisit it often to validate and adjust.

o Do not use the same landing pages for different steps of your awareness
ladder.

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.

o Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune
campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates.

o Run tests to optimize page content, which will reduce your cost per click.

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."

------
wusatiuk
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.

------
aleppe7766
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.

------
ogre_codes
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.

------
ddri
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!

------
jsonne
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.

------
nurettin
previously, on HN
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18904625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18904625)

------
brailsafe
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?

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.

------
brianna_dickey
> _Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune
> campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates._

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.

------
neop1x
Lesson #1: Have a solid product or service which really solves problems many
people have.

Lesson #2: Don't try to boost sales just via marketing. Great product sells
itself through word of mouth.

------
sumoboy
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.

------
lbj
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.

------
tug0fwar
Good that you decided not to "wallow in buyers’ remorse" and spread the story
+ your brand.

A perfect case of finding opportunity amid crisis.

------
milemi
I wasted 10 seconds reading the beginning of this so I don’t have to read the
rest of it.

------
PaulDavisThe1st
If my making a living depended on doing stuff like this, I'd find another way
to make a living.

------
dealpete
My content blocker wouldn’t let me see this site... did I miss anything
important?

~~~
jeen02
People who didn't know how to do ads spent $50k on them and complain that they
lost $50k.

------
Stjerrild
Nothing new, for an experienced marketer this is ABC.

~~~
pantulis
Sharing the lessons learned is good for everyone else, though.

~~~
zadlan
As someone totally new to throwing cash at google in exchange for eyeballs, I
have picked up so much useful knowledge from this article and the comments on
IH and HN

