Ask HN: Do Google ads work for user acquisition? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do Google ads work for user acquisition?

31 pointsraghuHack22 comments

We're looking to use google ads to sign up developers on HackerEarth.com. Has anyone else used Google AdWords for a similar activity? Does it work as well as Facebook?

View on HN

This is the wrong question to ask. You should ask, what are the cheapest ways to acquire users? Most companies can successfully market themselves through a dozen or more channels, yet almost all never use more than 3.

Search traffic is bottom of the funnel where people express intent. If there is existing demand for your service, than search traffic is valuable. If there isn't demand but there are competitors, bid on their brands, if you are in a new industry with no real competitors you probably need a reality check but search is not where you will find users.

Because search is bottom of the funnel and demonstrates explicit intent it is the most expensive traffic out there. It definitely works though and anyone who says differently just gave up before finding profitability.

I tell my clients to invest $5k in search the first $1k will return $500 (lose $500). The second $1k will return $800. The third will break even, the fourth will show a 25% profit and the last $1k will find profits you can scale.

If you don't go in planning on losing a bit to find what works (or go in with a site that won't convert) it won't work. If not there is no reason it can't work.

All that being said...Facebook right now has the most robust targeting in the advertising world short of massive enterprise DMPs. Milk it for all its worth if you can.

Read jonloomer.com to master Facebook ads.

I would consider advertising on StackOverflow instead. I sold developer products for 7 years and they were the 2nd best conversion after Google Ads, but our product was a tool where specific search terms were obviously going to convert. Even on SO, we advertised on questions related to our product -- so you might not do as well.

3rd was developer focussed online magazines. I would also try retargeting (from Google) in conjunction.

Google ads works best when you are really the answer the searcher was looking for -- if you have search terms that you think you are legitimately the top result and the competition for ads isn't insane, it's worth a try.

You can go in a little and measure the results for all of these choices.

How do you define "it works" ?

The price of a user is defined by the following formula [0] : CPU = CPC * (C / U)

Google AdWords gives you the CPC and if you have a Google Analytics set up you should be able to know the C / U ratio. That will define how much you have to pay to get a user using Google AdWords.

For the C / U ratio to be precise you should use only the organic search numbers (people coming to your website from Google after a search) because it is closest behavior you can study.

[0] : * CPU : Cost per User

* CPC : Cost per Click [on ad]

* C : Click [visitor comes on the website from ad]

* U : User [visitor becomes a user after he clicked on the ad]

Absolutely it works. I've been doing acquisition marketing for close to 10 years with 200+ million downloads/sign-ups/purchases etc to my name. If it didn't work I wouldn't have much of a job.

Before going down this process you should know how much a developer sign-up worth to you. You can always buy growth, but you need to know if you can buy growth profitably. Generally look to get a short term value plus a life-time value calculate ROMI. It wont be accurate but do the best you can.

Between Google and FB, I've found Google search is the regular winner but the ROI gap is narrowing these days. There's some good hacks you can use to access your audience cheaply if you get creative. I would recommend you trial display as if done well this could provide better results than search (where most companies go first).

There's a pertinent quote for new products: "A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster."

Make sure your monitoring not just sign-ups, but how long people stick around etc.

Best of luck.

What's your budget? It definitely 'works', but you need to see if it 'works for your case' or not. It can look expensive so before you jump in, determine LTV of a customer and then calculate how much of it are you willing to spend on acquiring a customer.

This post will be 100x more effective (in my sample set of 1) Edit: Signed up to see how it worked but don't actually want a public profile indicating I'm looking for a job - how do I delete my profile?

Though I have never worked in this domain, I can say based on my experience that - 1) It does not work if you have competitors (not just for your business but also for the keywords you target), which is a highly likely scenario. 2) It works only when a)you do not have competitors or b) when you target niche keywords, in which case volume might not be as expected. To actually understand whether it works or not before starting the campaign, list out all of the keywords and check the keyword volume associated and the companies that are bidding for the keywords.

How would it not work if there are competitors? Why would businesses be buying ads from the same space if there is no profit? If it didn't work, then there would be no competitors, and then it would work, based on your reasoning, since there is no competition.

It works with competitors, but it's really easy to find products with keywords dominated by expensive enterprise versions who overspend on AdWords, rendering it ineffective for smaller competitors. Just the way it is.

Thanks damoncali for the reply!

I do digital advertising for tech companies as well as "learn to code bootcamps" etc. IMHO Adwords is overpriced. You're much better served by Facebook or Twitter. The social context is likely key for a play like this. I would also tend to stay away from Linkedin based on price. Although if your ltv per customer is high enough, it may make sense. Feel free to shoot me an email if you'd like to chat about it. I'm always happy to give out free advice.

I'd first spend money improving the spelling and grammar across your site...

https://www.hackerearth.com/recruit/source/ for instance, at the bottom under past challenges has a lot of spelling and grammar errors. Hire a US-based copy editor.

Also why not advertise on careers.stackoverflow.com? Or stackoverflow itself in certain markets, is probably more cost effective and targeted than your google ads.

Have you ever clicked an ad? Do you think your target audience clicks ads?

You'd be surprised at how few people click them. If I wasn't at work right now I'd love to go into how some of these people trashing search are flat wrong. Showing up in the organic search results for even a relatively lame search term can increase your views/impressions exponentially.

User acquisition, though, is something that goes way beyond just putting up an ad or getting into search results.

Thank you all for your answers. This was really insightful and I will incorporate some of your suggestion into our digital marketing efforts going forward.

I'm not sure about stack overflow ads. Hackerearth also helps developers find jobs and that might a conflict of interest for stack overflow careers.

I will personally reach out to some of you folks. This has been really useful!

If your LTV > CAC then yes.

LTV = Lifetime Value of your customer

CAC = the customer acqusition cost

Since the CPC on AdWords are quite high and finally the resulting CAC will be also quite high (still depends on your conversion) you need a product with a high LTV. I don't know how much LTV you try to achieve with HackerEarth but it should above be $100.

Cheaper channels: affiliate (so CPA based deals) or SEO

i think nothing works like content creation. For HackerEarth, content would be algorithm tutorials, ACM problem solutions, or simply some language basics. Once you know what kind of content to generate, SEO and google ads on those content is a really effective growth strategy.

To tell you that it works. I actually recently signed up on your website and I found you through your notes section. I think it needs some SEO work..

Also try to be more innovative. Acquiring developer is easy and hard at the same time. Easy because developers are very active online. Hard because there are tons of websites and blogs that are fighting for their attention. As a developer, I have clicked on very few ads. But I have almost always clicked on a good article..

All the best. tweet me @vishal_in if I can help ..

Do not think that we wouldnt see this as an action for user acquisition already! Well played.

You will be able to find developers this way and generate sign ups.

I do not know enough about your business to say whether or not you will be able to do so in a cost effective way.

Not really.

Once upon a time I tried to use Google ads to promote the parent site for my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/devfactor

I spent $100 on ads, which resulted in around 25 new subscribers. The next week, I wrote a really in depth Arduino Morse code tutorial which ended up on some social networks and netted me ~100 subs.

I'd say that Google adds for me where NOT worth the price. Generating more organic content worked better.

Why not do both? They are orthogonal marketing tactics.

Your economics are unique compared to typical SASS, for example. The LTV of a Youtube channel subscriber is basically $0.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com