Pairwise

A week or two ago we decided to include some international tech hubs in our ad targeting. This is Google Ads mind you, so we were picking cities around the world where we thought there would be a receptive audience.

The language problem (or lack thereof)

Promoting ourselves internationally means targeting markets where English is not the native language. What we are (hopefully) discovering is that this is not a barrier to entry.

Why not?

Our guess is that when it comes to technical education, i.e. learning programming, English is the de facto lingua franca of software engineering. This is not surprising, considering the overwhelming majority of programming languages use English (if, else, while, etc).

This is only speculation—we don't have any confirmation of this theory even anecdotally—but so far our analytics say we might right.

What about the US?

So, human language requirements aside why are we not targeting the US?

• High price
• Low click through

Perhaps we are just terrible at writing ad copy (quite possible), but we were seeing pretty terrible click through rates for our add in the US. Not being able to identify exactly why points to just how green we are when it comes to online advertising, but even without knowing the US was underperforming I saw clearly that our international campaign was performing better.

For now we're doubling down on our international targeting and we'll see how things go. Perhaps we can utilize the less onerous time difference to set up some feedback sessions with our users via video chat.

We're a company with two technical founders. This was great for getting the initial product built, but now that we're moving into user acquisition mode we're feeling the lack of experience with marketing.

For the past week we've been experimenting with Google ads and that experimentation continues this week.

During our past experiments we saw a decent drop in CPC when we targeted international markets rather than the US. This week we're going to double down on that strategy and see if a new ad campaign in international markets can drive some more traffic.

It's still early days and we're figuring out what we're doing. We of course don't want to be selling ads forever, but right now our feeling is that an initial cohort of users—users we don't know personally—will be vital to tweak the product and ensure it's actually teaching people.