What we learnt from spending €800 on Google Ads

Thanks for sharing your experience. I spent over $3,000 with Google Ads for T.LY URL Shortener. I saw some conversions, but for every $100 I spent, I made $50. In my case, this is assuming a subscriber will stick around. Ads are tough to figure out because you have to experiment, which usually means you will lose money. I decided to turn them off until I could nail down the keywords and copy to improve my conversions. I think if you had an easy-to-track product, knowing you spent X and made X would be easier to figure out.

I think if an IH had experience and success running large ad campaigns, they could easily do work on the side building campaigns for other Indiehackers.

this is helpful, good to know google ad's isn't the route to go on a small budget and that it is better directed towards a better strategy to generate leads. thanks for this share

Hey Gabriel! Digital marketing can definitely be tricky, that's why I'm working on Growthly (www.trygrowthly.com), to help people figure out digital marketing faster without throwing cash down the drain.

In the past year, I've spent roughly $2m split between Google and Facebook focusing on user acquisition for the company I work for, acquiring 150k+ users. The scaling fast playbook will be directly based on those learnings.

It can be frustrating, we tried to promote our tech staffing and outsourcing agency in the US, and we have spent north of $3000 😢 and with no single lead. Running ads on google used to be very until 2019 - 2020

I wouldn't trust Google's automatic recommendations on keywords. If your website's tracking is bad, AI bidding is also a bad idea.
However, it's indeed possible to generate huge ROI with €800 spent on Ads.
If I had some quick tips to give , it would be to:

• focus on "strong intent' keywords.
• direct traffic to dedicated landing pages

Spent €800 and still no conversion? I don't think it's normal.

The same happened to me, but with LinkedIn's advertising. But it is possible that my product was not interesting enough.

Performance marketing became a scam.
Google will never show your ads to people with a higher tendency to convert.
They optimize blindly for whatever you're optimizing for.
Want traffic? Here is traffic, but god forbids they're gonna do anything on your platform.

I'll write more details in a blog post soon about how Ad networks are discriminating against reach to the right people.

when I read other accounts of spending money on ads and they don't work I see a pattern. The pattern is that you advertise to a new audience, and then get no conversions. But the key here is that it's new people who don't know you exist and you have to guess what words are they searching for..

You can use the ad budget in different ways.

After spending $2,000 on FB ads myself, I will tell anyone starting out to first test with retargeting. You want to just remind people you exist, who already know you exist. This will solve a 3 early issues. 1) Your insights into Ad Copy are going to be dumb so let them be dumb. 2) You don't even know if your existing audience uses this platform (goog ads, or fb ads, or reddit) 3) If people are reminding of you, who already know you exist, and don't buy, then you know your offer sucks. So can fix that before spending more money on ads.

1. You don't' have to create complicated ads. Just merely a little image of your logo or even a screenshot of your site if it's simple enough. Or just some copy about what you already say on your website. It just has to be a reminder you exist.

2. You can find out if your potential buyers even exist on the platform. In this case Google Ads. You should be able to test very very cheaply which key words, and retarget only. should. I am a fool for spending $2,000 on Facebook ads, for example, and THEN setting up retargeting. ugh. I'm a fool. Don't be a fool. Find out. And you can essentially for very very cheaply test every single ad platform in existence. Reddit too. if you retarget and get nothing, you spend nothing.

3. Now, if your ads that remind people of you, don't convert... well that's a completely different problem than the ads themselves. The problems could be the offer. It could be the people you already targeted before. Perhaps product hunt visitors. But now you have a free engine set up to test any and all other platforms for traffic. Get free traffic from PR, PH, IH, and then retarget via any and all platforms. Boom you got a massive engine you already set up.

From my own point of view it's unfair that businesses need a huge budget to successfully run Google Ads. Imagine a startup or a small business that cannot afford having a huge budget or even a good marketing specialist, how would they take advantage of Google Ads without spending much?

I seen conversions from advertising my iOS app on AppStore and nothing when I tried FB ads.
However, best strategy For me was to post on relevant subreddits.

If you are new at Digital Marketing, and want to publish your ads within minutes without complicated dashboards, you should take a look https://usemagnetiq.com/?utm_source=hk-indiehackers

Thanks for sharing.

From what I've heard, FB ads might be more efficient for small budgets, provided that you optimize for conversions and insert FB pixel.

From my own experience, google ads can be quite effective for niche markets when your keywords get less than 1000 searches per month. However, this requires:
a) Landing page dedicated specifically to converting cold visitors from the ad campaign
b) Constand A/B testing to nail down creative and copy.

Some things that helped:

• Hiring a PPC person on a per-hour basis. Even this person won't set up the entire campaign but will provide a consultation for a couple of hours, this may significantly increase your campaign ROI.
• Extending the funnel. We noticed an improvement when we started targeting downloads of lead magnets instead of conversions and then driving those people via email sequences.

One caveat, though, is that we are a B2B product with a 5-digit check and a sales team, so the cost per lead of $30 is totally fine for us. Generally, with paid growth loops, LTV:CAC is the most important metric, and it often requires increasing the price.

So you can test ads with a small budget, but if you want lean in on them as the main growth channel, this may require changes to pricing.

We spent approx $1500 over 3-5 months. No effect. Also google ad specialist always wants to increase our ad budget.

Thanks for sharing gabriel!

In my opinion, you can gain so much value from organic conversations and engagement without spending too much at all.

Conduct audience and customer research.
Understand who your audience is
What their traits are etc.

Go where your audience is!

Having learnt that Google Ads is giving zero return, the question is what 800 euros would return elsewhere?

What are solid bets for promoting a website under $1000 USD?

What I have learned about Google ads is this , don't. First off ,Google ads are ridiculously expensive and two the results are not worth dog shit. Speaking of dog shit Google SEO and Google search results are intentionally bad , so it will drive more suckers into buying their bullshit ads. Don't do it kids!