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19 Comments

Open Report August - $8890 MRR 📈

August Open Report for @ScrapingBee

💰 MRR: $8890 (vs $7875 )
💵 Revenue: $9200 (vs $8290)
🤝 New Customers: 31 (vs 18)
😀 Customer Count: 127 (vs 103)
💔 Churn: 7 (vs 7)
👋 New Trial: 634 (vs 651)
🔎 Visitors: 28,800

Here is what @Daolf and I did this month:

Our content is ranking better and better on Google, more traffic, more sign-ups, and more paying customers 🎉 So even the traffic increase is not as impressive as last month, the content strategy is still working well.

This month we didn't have a lot of requests for enterprise plans (>$99/mo), and since we almost rely exclusively on inbound traffic, I guess we didn't have much luck with that.

We've tested different ad channels:

Facebook ads retargeting 😐 - It could work but the cost per sign up is high. We could probably tweak the copy/creative to improve it.

Reddit ads 👎 We didn't find how to target people interested by web scraping. Didn't convert AT ALL
3
Google Display Network retargeting 👎 - The CPC was really high and conversion rates really low.

Reddit Ads 👎- CPC was low, but the traffic didn't convert. The targeting options are limited on Reddit. You cannot target every sub, and the interesting subs for us have very low impressions.

The next step is to test Twitter / Linkedin. 🔥

Ideally, we'd like to leverage our existing traffic to retarget people.

Regarding content marketing, we are working on lot of content but we didn't publish anything this month.

Two articles were updated, like this one:

https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/web-scraping-without-getting-blocked/

👋 Last month we had a HUGE problem of sign-ups abuse (people signing up with disposable email addresses ) and it seems to be solved.

We used a third-party API to detect those emails.

@Daolf added Google Auth and Github Auth to our sign up page... and 50% of new sign-ups are now using either Google or Github Oauth 😱

It also increased our conversion rate on the signup page 🎉

We are soon going to work on our copywriting, both on the landing page and email campaign. I think it is even more important because we are not native English speakers.

Regarding the next marketing steps, there are still too many things we want to try so we need to focus... 😀

🐝 On the product side, we didn't do a lot this month. But lots of things are coming!

And that's it, thanks for reading this far.

--

Kevin & Pierre

  1. 3

    Congrats, gents! Your consistent marketing execution continues to pay off.

  2. 2

    Thanks and great work!

    Can you describe a bit more what you have done on the content marketing side to get yourself ranking higher?

    1. 4

      Thanks for the kind words!

      It's very classic - Basically, everything that you can find on this wonderful Ahrefs course https://ahrefs.com/academy/blogging-for-business

      There is no shortcut:

      • Keyword research
      • Writing great content
      • Building backlinks
      • Rinse & Repeat
  3. 1

    Congratz and thanks for the stats!

    Out of topic:
    I would like to ask a question about legal stuff if you do not mind. How come, Instagram or Google won't open a case because ScrapingBee crawling the data that they do not want to share with other services. Crawling is not technical problem, but legality, isn't it?

    Would be great if you could share your know-how with us.

  4. 1

    Congrats, Best wishes for more sales. :)

    Would you like to share the third-party API to detect disposable emails?

    1. 1

      Hi there, hit me on twitter, we don't really want to share it in the open :)

  5. 1

    How much did it improve conversion when you added Google and Github Auth?

    1. 1

      Hi there, almost 30% on the /register page.

  6. 1

    Great work!, learning a lot from your experience.

    Do you mind sharing the name of the 3rd party api, you used to filter out bogus email addresses?

    1. 1

      Hi there, hit me on twitter, we don't really want to share it in the open :)

  7. 1

    Cool progression Kevin, keep up the good work :)!

  8. 1

    What do you use to get those analytics?

    1. 2

      I'm not sure to understand the question, what analytics are you talking about?

      We use Google Analytics for the website visitors stats, and Chartmorgul for the financial metrics.

      1. 1

        Cool. How do you know the % that logged in using each auth method?

        1. 1

          This can be done with a simple request to your own database

  9. 1

    Thanks for sharing, very interesting stuff...

    1. 2

      Thanks, glad you liked this report!

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