Spent close to €10K on paid ads. Here's what I learned.
In late 2022 and early 2023 I spent close to €10k on paid ads promoting Wide Angle Analytics.
And I got atrocious, almost non-existent conversion from that channel. Could have just as well set this money on fire.
Lessons learned:
- Promoting privacy-focused product with paid ads is not going to reach the right audience.
- Google and Bing are not respecting your defined targeting/audience. Having our web analytics tool means we can easily verify traffic. Neither Google nor Bing appeared to respect our geographic restrictions.
- Plenty of bots auto-clicking ads.
- The Bing audience was much more engaged based on time spent on the website.
- The Google AdSense web interface is the worst piece of software I ever interacted with. And I spent years working for enterprise.
- Bing Ads, although equally useless, are much more flexible to set up than Google AdSense.
That's a wrap.
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I am not really surprised, creating a PPC campaign for a niche service is very tricky because the high intent keyword traffic is low and fairly broad. Google is always trying to broaden the ad display and you likely needed to set up excluded areas as well as included areas to box google ads in tightly. The app is truly the worst as you mention, if it were straightforward and intuitive lots of PPC specialists would be out of a job. Having said that it might have been better to actually find one of these folks, even if they ate 2k of the 10k budget (unlikely) as they would have been able to build out the campaign using expertise and previous experience. You didn't just spend 10k on ads, you tried to build your first ever PPC ad campaign while spending 10k on ads.
Thanks for saving our time & money.
I hear you, back in the good old days of overture and Google ads (early days) it may have been worth it. These days g ads are basically used to re-target and get whole bunch of non targeted eyeballs.
I had more success with bing ads for business traffic then chrome users.
Thanks for sharing. I wanted to hypertarget an audience for one specific keyword via Google Ads, but I actually never finished it, because of this:
I never managed to setup the target audience group in the first place, because the wording of the UI is so bad, I just didn't understand it.
But since it seems to be not respected anyways, I'm glad I skipped this one. You saved me quite a bit of money I guess, thanks!
A few questions come to my mind:
Didn't limit to Google Ads nor Bing Ads. This was just a post, a subset of marketing effort. There were other things like newsletters, LinkedIn, Outbrain, and much more.
This post is solely about Google Ads and Bing Ads as these were total waste of money. Probably the only worse experience was Outbrain, but for different reason.
Do you mean Google Ads interface instead of Google Adsense?
You bet. Somehow, the AdSense got stuck in my head.
wow, thatnks for sharing this. we've been toying with whether it's a good idea to spend money on google ads - will def think twice!
Can you tell me more about what you exactly did there? I mean your targeting, KW research & bidding strategy.
This would let me tell you if you could improve anything.
It's better to hire someone professional on Google Ads and make a plan ahead of spending it. With and without experience made a loooot of difference. But great lesson though.
Yea, Google Ads cost a lot making it hard to to rely solely on them for marketing, they should be part of a broader marketing strategy that includes social media and content marketing. I'm surprised though that it cost $10k before realizing the campaign is ineffective. A more cost-effective approach is buying 50-100 clicks to experiment, which should cost no more than a few hundred dollars and allows you to evaluate the campaign's effectiveness. And if it's not yielding results, you can cut your losses and stop the campaign without wasting too much money.
Not USD but EUR, but that minor point.
This experience of spending money over the course of ~5 months. Multiple campaigns, and experiments, each with small experiments within serving different ads.
I always thought I was doing something wrong. Aiming at DACH/Benelux/Spain/Nordic countries and getting 40% entries from US/China/Russia (these were excluded) was ridiculous.
So tried different campaigns, then Bing. Bing was better. Less ad fraud. But the audience on Bing wasn't great. The Bing Chat wave was not what we expected to bring.
I built a web analytics platform, we approached this with tests and experiments in mind.
Admittedly, messaging on our website was lacking, that was also part of the problem, but we had better feedback from direct outreach and personalize social media presence than from mass ads.
I think the bottom line of my experiment was, that in this budget, the ad fraud eats too big of chunk of impression to capture meaningful audience and once should account for waste.
I don't recommend going straight to advertising right from the start. I suggest that you should clarify your ICP after launching. because you don't have the initial traction yet
We launched in Nov 2021. It wasn't our start :)
There's always a mix of reasons for success or setbacks. Messaging, design, finding the right niche, etc. Learning from your journey is incredibly valuable. Thanks for sharing.
What's the roi?
I learned a lot, if that's what you are asking about :D
Before spending, Look at competitors to get an idea of what the general audience of that industry is then narrow it down. This way, you can get some quality results in every ad you do.