Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like this a really uncharitable reading of the article. This is a real business that has built itself up from nothing to $100,000 per month in revenue (which is important as it means they aren't just burning VC cash in random acts of marketing) and they're speaking in precise terms about specific actions they've taken and the results they've gotten.

I've no doubt that if you're unfamiliar with marketing that these terms are new (in the same way that if you're a marketer and reading about database indexing you're going to have to do a little work to figure out what everything means.)

This is important to me not because I've any stake in this (I've no affiliation with Uploadcare) but because I worry that the knee jerk rejection of any kind of marketing by developers really hurts startups and bootstrappers.

There is definitely blather in the marketing world [1], I'm just saying this isn't it.

1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...

The fact that they admit to targeting keywords that have no relevance to their product is just... I dunno.

Slight clarification: they targeted keywords that they didn't have a specific landing page for, this might be like sending people to a landing page that generically talks about "file uploads" instead of a landing page that hyper-specifically talks about "file uploads for laravel".

They were saying they should have held off on targeting those more specific terms until they had those matching and more specific landing pages in place.

Michael .... it’s really bad writing.

You can’t say “hey ordinary person I’ll save you wasting $50k on AdWords” then instantly drop straight deep into the most arcane of mumbled, cryptic, faded rune digital marketing magic speak.

Refer to the comment below from HN user 83457 who explains same but in English.

It is not aimed at ordinary person, though... it is a technical post-mortem for digital marketing insiders.

The structure of the article is weird yes but the sections are entirely relevant to marketing analytics.

The writer establishes they have some baseline analytics and understanding of demand generation prior to embarking on paid.

Then they embark on paid.

Then they tell you what they learned.

FWIW for any organization new to paid, this article will probably save you some 10s of thousands in spend if you internalize it properly.

The arguments and rationales are all sound and pretty detailed. You get a sense of the goals and the steps taken and lessons learnt. A simple Google will tell you what CTR rates are did you want the author to explain these concepts? Good luck starting a ad words ccampaign not knowing these words

This article is shop talk for digital marketing and I see nothing particularly wrong with it. It’s actually a pretty interesting write up from a nuts and bolts perspective.

I am _not_ a marketer and I did not find this cryptic. If you've at all ever been involved in startups, you will know most terms.

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