

Free course: How to buy ads for your startup w/ founder of MixRank (YC S11) - il
http://mixergy.com/free-first-sections-ad-buying-course-weekend2

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MJR
The HN title is misleading. From the site:

 _What you’re watching above is the first few sections of the course._

You have to be a paid member to get access to the FULL course.

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il
Apologies for the confusion. I believe this is a free, full 40 minute course
that covers a lot of the content about researching and optimizing media buys.
It's not like a 2 minute preview/trailer or anything like that.

The second part of the course is available to Mixergy subscribers only, as is
all of their other premium content.

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il
I didn't have enough time to cover everything, so I would be happy to answer
questions or expand on anything in the comments here.

The main theme is that buying display ads isn't just for brands any more- any
small startup can do it profitably and get massive ROI from a budget of just a
few hundred dollars.

~~~
kayhi
It was mentioned that ROI tracking stems from the urls created using the
google url builder tool.

Do you have any insights on how to best set up the funnel tracking with
google? The interview briefly mentions seeing the help docs from google (is
there a better resource you use?).

In my experience, google misses some sales and perhaps you have developed some
best practices, thanks again!

~~~
il
I'll try to write a blog post about this soon. Basically, you want to be sure
to track every ad separately all the way down the funnel. So you want to set
up goals in Google Analytics as normal, but then create a custom report
segmented by the utm_source or utm_content variable.

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forcer
This was the reason why I bought Mixergy membership. We already pursue this
strategy for our products and so it was great to see some tips how to improve
what we are doing. Definitely one of the best courses on how to get traffic to
your site. Well done Ilya!

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rockarage
If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. First thing you should ask
yourself, do you really need ads for your startup ? If your startup is not
compelling enough to get the tech media attention, is it really a good idea to
invest in ads ? Good ads that work like ads on thedeck are expensive and
typically not a good idea for small startups here are some suggestions:

<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch13_Ride_the_Blog_Wave.php>

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/741-ask-37signals-10-ways-
to-...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/741-ask-37signals-10-ways-to-get-ink)

~~~
mrkurt
The first thing you should ask yourself is "can I spend money to acquire
users?" The second thing you should ask yourself is "is it a price that makes
it worthwhile?"

The Deck is probably not a good investment for an early stage startup, but The
Deck isn't where you go if you're measuring conversion based ROI on an ad
campaign either. Companies that use The Deck are buying brand recognition from
an audience that they feel should know about their business. This is an
entirely different advertising goal than Ilya is talking about.

~~~
rockarage
I think even with brand awareness, you still have to measure that, there still
has to be a ROI, even if the return is just increase awareness.

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noelsequeira
@il: Thank you, this is really insightful content.

I might be digressing here, but since you've offered to answer a few
questions, here goes - I'd love to know what categories / sites I want to be
looking at if my product's a small business CRM (like Highrise). To be more
specific, it's a CRM tool that integrates deeply with Google Apps.

Maybe it's just me, but identifying a list of target categories that fits your
audience well seems just as hard as optimizing the spend, especially when the
audience isn't exactly niche.

~~~
il
You want to segment your audience really finely and then build out a target
list based on that. Who is your CRM for? Technology startups? Computer
repairmen? Telemarketers? And then work backwards from there to keywords/sites
that you think would be most relevant.

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nobody_nowhere
General comment on display advertising -- it can be surprisingly effective for
_consumer_ brands in particular (b2b can be really tough). It sounds like
Mixrank is talking about a specific technique (direct site buys), which can
work great. There are additional techniques you can use (retargeting, audience
buying, automated optimization) which include transparency (to varying
degrees) and direct ROI, which you can get started on really quickly.

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moses1400
Boo - this isn't free - it is a few sections with a paid sub to watch the rest
- please fix the title.

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dholowiski
This seems like borderline spam to me.

