I spent $10 on Google Ads and this happened

@jviide wasn’t too keen on the idea at first. He thought it would ruin our image as a scrappy small startup just doing a public service. I told him and his perfectly crafted bed hair to go choke on his latte.

A new business model: advertise a service. Profit.

HowNetWorks released a free tool called URI:teller recently. With URI:teller the user can create a trap URL, paste it to a supposedly private channel, such as secret chat in Telegram and monitor if any third parties fetch the URL.

The service was well received in social media. Net warriors were Tweeting about it and our stats were pointing towards 2 o’clock. But there was a problem. URI:teller was not showing up in search results! Privacy-minded people are searching with terms like “WhatsApp Privacy” or “Encrypted Messaging”, but miss URI:teller completely. We can’t have that.

Being a resourceful self-guiding marketing-missile, I drafted a plan to change all this.

Marketing plan.

Step 1: find and take control over the company’s 2016 marketing & Christmas present budget.

Step 2: burn the whole $10 to Google Ads!

Figure 2: Badly hidden marketing budget.

Did it work out?

Yes. And no. We didn’t have any dollars so I had to use euros instead. The campaign itself was a great success. We got whopping 23 clicks through this campaign. Budget well spent.

People who seek information about encrypted messaging were most interested in URI:teller. “text secure” seekers could not care less.

Return of investment calculation with big data science.

*Snap*. I just became a data scientist.

Now that I’m a data scientist, it is time for a RoI-calculation.

Fact #1: URI:teller converts about 30% of visitors to evaluations.
Fact #2: we had 23 clicks with 10€.
Fact #3: 10% of the evaluators buy the product (Fig. 3.)

Figure 3: Finnish version of the Stetson-Harrison hat is up to 15% more accurate in generating scientific numbers, according to the hat.

23 clicks * 30% evaluation rate * 10% buy rate = 0.69 buyers with 10€. So URI:teller needs to cost at minimum 15€ for this campaign to be profitable. I shall contact the HowNetWorks’ sales department or scroll back to the beginning of this blog to check the current price for URI:teller. I’ll do that later. I need to collect my achievement bonus.

Warning — may contain traces of serious analysis.

• The actual conversion rate for the campaign was 0%. 30% is the rate for all visitors.
• We don’t have a marketing budget.
• Big data analysis was applied to a small dataset.
• The hat in the picture is not mine.
• The data gathered from Google Analytics is somewhat inaccurate, due to the URI:teller’s privacy-oriented logging approach.

This was our first go on understanding Google Analytics and campaigning with AdWords. No browser was injected with third party javascript while running this experiment.