Hacking Adwords: can you get more customers for $20 a day?

Marketing for a bootstrapped startup.

This summer, we launched Popforms Sparks, our online email-based courses that help users be smarter, happier, and better at their jobs. We were lucky enough to have lots of early adopters try out our earliest courses and give us tons of amazing feedback, which helped us to create better and more valuable courses, which we have been releasing every couple of weeks since then.

We were using the sparks as a way to validate customers (was the vision we were hoping Popforms would sell actually something people would pay for?) and it turned out that people did want what we had to offer.

So now that we had a product people wanted, Kate M and I started looking at ways to get this product in front of more people than just our launch list and blog readers. This blog post is a breakdown of our first attempt at growing our sparks reach: Google Adwords.

You have to start somewhere

As our team’s writer-turning-but-not-quite-yet-turned-marketer, it was my job to try to make this thing work. We decided to use our “Overcome And Manage Your Stress” spark as the one we would try to sell using Google Adwords.

Initially, Kate M created two ads for the spark, with a budget of $20 per day. We are bootstrapped, after all, and this was just an experiment, so we couldn’t go nuts with the advertising money until we knew if it worked.

Here’s what the two ads looked like:

We heard from a marketing friend that setting a CPC (cost per click) rate of $3.00 would work well, so we started there. We set a couple dozen keywords that we hoped people would be searching for who would also be likely to click on an ad for a stress-management course. Some of these included:

• ways to manage stress
• how to manage stress
• stress management tips
• stress management technique
• managing stress
• stress techniques
• ways to deal with stress

There were many more, but you probably get the picture. We wanted to do many variations on the idea, “Hey, I need help with my stress.”

We did one ad that included the price, and one that didn’t.

Our first changes — copy and cost

After a few days, we assessed what had happened so far. In a word: nothing. Nothing had happened.

Well, that’s not true. We had maxed out our $20 budget in clicks every day, but not a single one of them had translated into a sale. So we looked at a few things.

• CPC rate. By spending $3.00 per click, we were reaching our $20 daily budget easily, since it didn’t take very many clicks to add up to our limit. We got the maximum number of clicks we could each day, but we weren’t making any sales. Our CTR (clickthrough rate — the number of people who actually clicked on the ad, out of everyone who saw it) was 0.27%.
  We reduced our CPC rate to $0.50 for every keyword, thinking that at least that way we could get more clicks for our $20.
• Ad copy. Our copy was not particularly snazzy or click-grabbing, but it was straightforward. Our thinking was that by telling people exactly what they’d get, and including the price in our ad copy, we would make sure the people who clicked through were doing so because they actually wanted what we had to offer.
  Knowing that, and hoping to maximize the clicks we were getting each day, we removed the second ad (the one without the $19 price in it) and focused our daily $20 on just on the one ad.

Finally, after 14 days, and 170 clicks, it finally happened: we sold a spark via our ad!

It was great news until you did the math; in two weeks, we had spent nearly $300 to make that one $19 sale. Realizing how much that one sale had cost us made us realize that, even with our tweaks, our strategy was just not working.

Dear Google, please help

We got an email from the Google Adwords team offering us a free consultation. I made the call, bracing myself for what I thought would likely be sales pitch telling me the only way to improve my results would be to raise my budget (which was just not an option).

What I got was just the opposite; I was connected with a friendly, nervous-sounding man who spend the entire call referring to my campaigns as “our campaigns” and talked a lot about the work “we” were going to do to make it better. We were a team. He was going to help me. I breathed a sigh of relief.

He told me a number of interesting things about Adwords that I never would have guessed:

• Your ads should have every word capitalized. He said it didn’t know why it worked, but it worked. Ads that had every word capitalized just performed better than ones following traditional grammar rules. So we changed our copy:

• Use the Search Network only, not the Display Network. The default option on Google Adwords is to have your ads appear on the Search Network and the Display Network. The Search Network is the ads that show up on pages when you make a search on Google; the Display Network is the ads that show up on blogs and sites that have Google ads enabled.
• He explained that the Search Network is more effective for making sales, as most clicks go through there (since people are searching for that topic). The Display Network is better for branding, since it gets your name seen on many sites, but people are less likely to click through.
• Use fewer keywords, and pay more per click. If you want to sell, he said, you need to target a few keywords (20-30) that are converting well for you. A 1% clickthrough rate is considered “doing well”. Once you know which keywords are bringing the most clicks for you, then put all of your money into getting those ranked as highly as possible. In other words, you want a high CPC, which supposedly will get your ad placed high up on the 1st page of search results.
• This meant, for some of our best-performing (most highly clicked on) keywords, raising our CPC bid as high at $5.00 per click.
• A few days earlier, we had been prompted by a popup on our Adwords page to tack on over 100 additional keywords to boost our campaign’s power. However, our Google rep said that with our budget, focused keywords were better for sales. Rather than trying to broadly target as many people as possible, we wanted to target as specific a group as possible based on who was most likely to buy our product.
• He said, “The magic word is relevancy.”

Where we go from here

After making the changes suggested by our Adwords assistant, we anxiously awaited the results of our new ads. We had made the changes on a Friday, so on Monday we took a look at the numbers.

And, well, there were no sales. We had new ads and a new strategy, but were still maxing out our $20 a day budget and making no sales. We got fewer clicks per day, but at a higher cost per click, and still no sales.

We decided to try one last strategy: reducing our CPC to $0.50 per keyword. That way, we might not show up on the first page and we might not get tons of clicks per day, but at least we wouldn’t be blowing through $20 a day on a handful of clicks that went nowhere.

It’s a more cost-effective way to keep testing something we are pretty sure isn’t working. After a few more days, if we still haven’t made another sale, we are likely going to shut it down. Not all experiments are successful, but they do all have lots to teach us.

Lessons learned:

You probably need a bigger budget to make Adwords work for you.

The strategy laid out by the Google rep made sense: target specific keywords that have proven clickthroughs and sales, and then pay as much as possible to show up near the top as often as possible for those keywords. Invest in what is working for you.

However, with only $20 a day, we just weren’t getting that many clicks. The rep told me that a highly successful CTR is 1%. That’s a tiny percentage of all the people who are shown your ads, and of those few people who click through, even fewer will make a purchase. At $20 a day, the number of clicks and potential customers we had access to was just so small that those tiny percentages were almost insignificant. If we continued at our current rate of making 1 sale per 170 clicks, it would be a lot of days spending $20 with no sales before we saw one $19 return.

It’s not just the ad, it’s the landing page too.

The place that people were clicking through to, we realized, was not particularly inspiring. Our original landing page was somewhat dense with text, and the “Buy now!” call-to-action was not especially obvious.

We redid the landing page to make the value proposition a bit more obvious. We also removed a lot of the unnecessary text, and focused on just the words that encouraged people to buy and to think about the value the course would add to their lives.

This is something we’ll continue to experiment with, on this spark and on others. Kate M and I both shy away from being “too sales-y” but I think it’s something we’ll have to bear down on more going forward. After all, we are trying to sell something, right?

Marketing with trusted sources might be more effective.

We offered a free spark to one of our customers, Stacy-Marie Ishmael who had sent us some terrific feedback and a testimonial, and she came back at us with a brilliant idea. Instead of taking the free spark for herself, as she was already enrolled in a couple, she asked if she could instead share a free spark with subscribers to her email newsletter #awesomewomen.

Genius! We went ahead with it, and ended up getting three new sparks users via her newsletter.

In thinking more about this model for marketing sparks, we have decided to go for promo prices for bloggers or people with newsletters, rather than giving out free sparks, since the free ones tend to have extremely low engagement rates compared to paid ones.

But the model makes sense. When people share a sparks promo with their subscribers, we are coming with the trust and endorsement of the blogger that these potential customers already know and follow. They are more likely to sign up if it comes from someone they know, as opposed to some anonymous ad on their Google sidebar.

So this is probably the next step we are going to take in our marketing strategy. (Which means — if you reading this, have a newsletter, and want to offer discounted sparks to your readers, let me know! kates@popforms.com yo.)

Other networks are an option.

Google isn’t the only network that offers CPC advertising. We are considering seeing how our product might work on Facebook or Linkedin, where we can target our audience more specifically, and hopefully reach people more effectively. There are also promoted tweets on Twitter, and a number of other more “niche” sites we could try recruiting customers on.

We have been offering free sparks to customers on our Facebook fan page, for followers who want early access to the newest content before it is released on our site. This has been a good way to see how interested people are in a specific spark or topic before we launch it, and is also a great way to start a conversation with customers that can turn into feedback, testimonials, and future sales later on.

Content is working for us.

Writing is something that both of us can do, and so far, it’s been an effective marketing tool for us via the blog, our email launch list, and guest posts. Our blog traffic, for a site that only launched a few months ago, is doing pretty well. So far in November we’ve had a little over 4,400 visits, which is putting us on track to do better this month than we have done in any other month since we launched the site in June.

On our launch list, we share updates about our company and links to good leadership reads, along with discounts and promos for new sparks. (PS. If you want to receive our launch list and these promos, you can sign up now!) This is a strategy we are going to continue to implement.

We are also going to work on spreading our content around to other sites via guest posts. We haven’t had as much time as we’d like to devote to guest posts, but it is something we are going to do more of once the software tool launches soon.

Have your own tips for hacking Adwords or for doing effective marketing on a bootstrapped budget? Leave a comment or send an email to kates@popforms.com. Let’s chat about it!