Finding ideas that you can grow through ads

My day job is running ads for brands, with a particular focus on Google (paid search) and Facebook ads. There are a couple of tools in these platforms that are pretty good for forecasting how well you could run campaigns for a particular product or service. Often I find it quite fun just plugging in different ideas, to get a sense of how easy it'd be to generate revenue in that space.

A good example of one of these tools is Google's Keyword Planner. You:

Enter some initial keyword ideas, to generate search terms with volume estimates
Add all the search terms you like to a 'plan'
Use the forecasting tool to see how much volume you could get bidding different amounts on the keywords in your plan
Add in conversion metrics (conversion rate, margin per conversion) to get an idea of ROI and revenue

You can even record revenue forecasts for all the different bid levels, use them to perform a regression analysis, and work out the maximum profit you could generate on those keywords.

Using the above, you can validate with some confidence whether you'd be able to run paid search ads profitably. Paid search is great if you can run it; it requires minimal maintenance and brings in a steady stream of traffic.

Being an ads guy first and foremost, I've never followed through and actually built a brand using these methods, but I figured they might be of interest to people who are looking for ideas.

To that end - I've started an email that looks at a different validated idea each week. It looks at not just all of the profit forecasting above, but also shares all of the keywords, a paid search campaign (what you actually put into the ad platform to start running ads) and some creative + Facebook targeting ideas.

Keen to hear what you think, or if you have any ideas for products I could validate in future weeks :)

mack grenfell

posted to

Growth

on January 15, 2021

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2

Awesome, I was looking for something like this!

Wenzel

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3 years ago
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Thanks for sharing. Speaking of Google Ads - have you ever tried Single Keyword Group (SKG)? I'm wondering how'd you measure the effectiveness and at what scenario you would use SKG?

felix12777

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3 years ago
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  Thanks Felix!
  
  Yep I'm a big fan of running SKAGs/SKGs. In the actual posts (https://growthstrategies.substack.com/) I give a SKAG campaign build for each of the ideas.
  
  In terms of measuring effectiveness, you could build sets of campaigns which are identical except for whether they use SKAGs, and use drafts & experiments to test against one another. I've done this a number of times and never seen SKAGs lose, but it depends massively on how well built the SKAG campaign is.
  
  In terms of scenarios for using SKAGs, I honestly don't think there is a scenario where they're the worse option. In some situations, there may be little performance difference between SKAG and non-SKAG campaigns (e.g. where keyword-level tailoring makes little difference), but I'll always still build SKAGs.
  
  Can take a bit longer to build them if you don't have tech for it, which is the only downside. If you're interested I'm also building a free SKAG campaign tool called https://ads.studio, which is about to go into beta testing. Would love for your thoughts!
  
  mackgrenfell
  
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  3 years ago
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  1. 1
    
    That sounds awesome @mackgrenfell thanks for sharing your insights
    
    Do you also do mentor hours as well, in return I pay your coffee(s) ;)?
    
    felix12777
    
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    3 years ago
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      I haven't done before, but happy to work something out. Feel free to get in touch: https://mackgrenfell.com/contact
      
      mackgrenfell
      
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      3 years ago
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Hi @mackgrenfell

Good post.
We are planning to start a paid google search campaign but we have a problem.
Our product is a Twitter app, i.e. it must target people that owns a Twitter account.

Any advice on how to create a campaign?

We a small budget so we need to optimize on this.

Br.
Ricardo

rymchyster

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3 years ago
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  Thanks!
  
  This is a tough one, my thoughts are:
  
  Your only real option for running app -> paid search via Google, as you likely know, is using universal app campaigns (UACs).
  
  The danger here is that these are fairly black-box; you can't tell Google to target just people who use Twitter.
  
  Given that the ads will optimise for installs, and users who have Twitter are presumably much more likely to install your app than users who don't have Twitter, Google should end up optimising for Twitter users fairly effectively.
  
  You could improve this by optimising the campaigns for users who complete an action which guarantees they have a Twitter account. For example, I presume that at some point in your user journey you ask users to authenticate via Twitter. You could tag that point up and optimise your campaigns towards users most likely to get to that point (and who therefore use Twitter).
  
  You may have already considered the above - those are just my initial thoughts.
  mackgrenfell
  
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  3 years ago
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    Thanks very much for your advice.
    we did not have in mind to set this optimization for users to complete the action. It is a very good way to proceed.
    
    Br.
    Ricardo
    
    rymchyster
    
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    3 years ago
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  This is our app, called Tweetline Podcast
  
  Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mtheorysoft.twitterapitabbed
  
  iOS: https://apps.apple.com/uy/app/twitter-podcast-your-radio/id1525562367?l=es
  
  rymchyster
  
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  3 years ago
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