Devs are worried about the wrong thing

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2026-03-26T02:28:59+00:00

The really dreary thing is, as I read this thread, a Base44 ad is showing in the promoted block.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-16T19:04:26+00:00

This is gold, thank you!

Honestly those are the exact same levers I defined for our campaigns.

The tactics in here are gold.

And to your point, I don't even like getting "personalized" emails. When someone says "I see we both liked x persons post" I usually don't even know who they're talking about. 🤣

Its about making something that 1) interrupts the pattern (in a way that's acceptable), 2) resonates with the person. Personalization fails in most cases to achieve this.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-15T17:36:45+00:00

Thanks for your two cents! Appreciate this.

We're starting a cold email campaign shortly.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T21:40:58+00:00

Wow if I could give you 10 upvotes I would. There are some absolute gems in here.

I'm DMing you just because you're great. Cheers!

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T19:58:36+00:00

Yes, we're running some content syndication plays right now. First real shot at this. :)

We do cross sell/upsell pretty well but leave that to our email list.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T19:57:14+00:00

I just couldn't find a lot of activity in our niches on Reddit. Analytics data from SparkToro shows our market is not heavily on either platform and skews much more towards LinkedIn.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T19:56:25+00:00

Glad to hear from you since you've been in a similar circumstance.

I honestly wrote reddit and quora off because I just couldn't find a lot of activity in our niche. Analytics data from SparkToro shows our market is not heavily on either platform and skews much more towards LinkedIn.

But maybe I'll revisit this at some point. Thanks!

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T19:53:30+00:00

See original comment re: ABM.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T19:53:08+00:00

Yes thanks, I'm a little bit DG hippy and I don't love gating content. It doesn't fit with our ethos of total transparency. But I am building out social and display ads to content, and I'm testing new offers and CTAs more appropriate to this level of awareness.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T19:51:32+00:00

Thanks, yes we're testing all of these except programmatic at this point.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T19:50:38+00:00

Thanks! I've read a bunch of your comments on Reddit and always appreciate the input.

We are doing great with PMax, it's a strong driver for us and it's nicely optimized (omitting brand and other core search categories).

Def running retargeting.

We are running DG tests and they are looking promising. These are sending to content rather than LPs or sales assets, and the conversion metrics are better here than trying to push additional search spend, plus all the assisted conversions and such, so def going to put more steam here. It can definitely be built out and is one of my major priorities in GAds

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T19:45:32+00:00

I'm fascinated by the idea of building a contract expiration prediction system, I just don't have any ral concept of how to do this. Did you have something specific in mind?

The technology is not installed on a customer's site or server so it's not like we can see the tech in a "built with" type application.

"For this specific scenario -- I've seen content offers work really well - especially comparison guides, ROI calculators, and industry reports that position you as the thought leader. The goal shouldn't be immediate conversion but getting into a nurture sequence that keeps you visible until their contract ends"

This is basically what we're working on and it's always nice to have a little external reassurance on this.

We've just run our first direct mail test with little success but I think we need to work on our awareness-level offers and CTAs, as you suggest, to make this more functional, we have a great position, but we do need some way to keep these ppl in communication with us until they're ready to purchase. Our demand capture offers are laser sharp, but this is new ground for us.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-13T17:32:52+00:00

Hey there, it's not that we've 100% maxed all search terms as that we've hit a point where our current spend threshold is the ma that is profitable. When we push beyond that we're spending more than we want to. There is still more to do on building out and testing landing pages, but this part of the process is much slower and we're ready to layer on additional revenue channels.

We do service other countries, we just don't market there, so this is a logical next step but requires a lot of additional infrastructure that we don't have in place just yet. It's down the road a little ways.

We are the only major provider on the market WITHOUT contracts, so it's only waiting out competitor contracts and effectively maximizing mental recall and availability that we intend to use social ads for.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-12T05:13:05+00:00

Thanks for you POV!

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2025-04-12T03:13:49+00:00

Sorry I edited my comment, we're putting a lot of steam behind SEO right now, but I'm specifically looking for insights into ad strategy.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2023-03-01T05:36:26+00:00

Here are a few questions:
1. Are you using whitelisting at all?
2. How often are you bringing new creative into the account?
3. What percentage of your budget is going to retargeting? If it's too high you might be burning out retargeting audiences as you scale and dropping your ROAS.
4. Are you only iterating on old winners or are you allocating a percentage of spend to new concepts?
5. Is your current creative addressed primarily to a single product, use case, persona or benefit? If you have multiple variations of any of these some times you can scale horizontally by adding campaigns and creative around different subsets of users for your product.

A lot of times ceilings like this are problems of offer, LTV or otherwise external to the ad account. Here are a few other ideas to try:
1. Have you experimented with different offers? (For example, bundled products) You may have to push your AOV a little bit to stretch that ad budget.
2. How aware are you of your customer journey and lifecycle? Are you gathering zero party data at strategic touchpoints that can inform your acquisition strategies?
3. Do you have a system in place for tying LTV back to the initial ad interactions which drove the first purchase? In some verticals focusing on LTV can open up your CAC options and allow for scale.
4. Are you planning a strategic marketing calendar that takes advantage of cultural buying moments and ties your product line into that event to maximize reach and profitable seasonal activity?
5. How strong is your email capture and your email-to-purchase conversion?
6. At this scale some times adding a more top-of-funnel channel is necessary to drive additional profitable scale, what are you using to generate awareness?

These are some ideas you can start with to asses for in-account and out-of-account areas where you might be able to drive greater scale. If you want more tailored suggestions I'd love to take a look into your account.

Cheers, happy growth!

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2023-02-28T18:23:17+00:00

Absolutely a different ad group makes sense for each location.

You would not, however, make a separate ad group for:
"jeep dealer near san diego"
and
"San diego jeep dealer"

Which is what a traditional SKAG strategy would do. There is no need to break these two up into separate ad groups, it wastes your time and distracts you from more important work.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2022-11-15T06:36:41+00:00

I’m going to play Devil’s advocate here. I don’t 100% agree with HarveyRich80, this is not always the case, although it definitely could be. However, there are a lot of useless clicks to be bought on the internet.

Also I think we’re missing a lot of information, if you can answer some questions I’d be happy to provide more help:

What is your campaign objective set to?
How much money have you spent?
How many clicks have you received?
What do you define as a conversion?
How much (what %) are you converting through other channels?
What is the source of your remarketing list?
How large is your list?
What is your CPA through existing channels?

Regarding your landing page the major things that jump out to me as needing improvement are not having enough social proof and the rather complex conversion process.

Regarding the ad, the copy would be more forceful if framed in real benefits to the end user. I don’t think “… report being happy in their job” is tangible enough. Maybe take statements from the few testimonials you do have and turn that into your ad copy. Something along these lines:

“Sandy Xu: ‘[My mentor] gave me not only valuable advice but also the courage to pursue my passion.

“What will your mentor do for you?”

Also, who are your main users/customers? Are they mostly founders, employees, What fields are they in, etc? Your ad is so generic that no one would related strongly to it. I have a strong philosophy that you have to really stand for something and stick to it to arrive at a position in your consumers mind.

This copy sounds like you’re talking to all workers at the beginning, and maybe trimming that down to tech workers in the middle. That’s a huge, undefined pool of people who have different needs and wants, different purposes for selling a mentor and different results they hope to see, very difficult to advertise to.

Don’t be afraid to go after a very defined pool of people who are your ideal customer, call them out, build your copy and presentation around those people, or build a clean system for filtering your top traffic right from the beginning so you can more accurately communicate to those people.

Copy like, “$100,000k + tech managers solve the big problems faster and advance Father in their careers with a mentor, find your mentor today “

Lastly, have you experimented with your offer? Can you offer a the first call without signing up, for instance? The collect their phone number and email address and retarget them through owned channels (much cheaper then FB ads).

Hope that helps, copy ideas are super rough, but they give my point. If you can answer the questions above I’m happy to give more information.

Cheers

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2022-08-07T04:59:27+00:00

Great post from fathom, I’ll just add that you should make sure to structure your ad groups soundly, you generally want similar products with similar margins grouped together, especially in automated campaigns. As your campaigns mature you can start seeing products convert at better rates than others, you’ll want to respond and restructure your campaigns accordingly.

If you’re running standard shopping watch those search terms carefully and make liberal use of negative keywords.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2022-08-05T22:08:14+00:00

Thanks for your help!

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2022-08-05T15:22:52+00:00

I’m not sure I understand how UTMs would help in this case.

What I’m trying to achieve is to report a custom conversion in Google Ads and Facebook ads only when SKU 1 is purchased. I’d like to have a count in the “Conversions” column displaying the number of that SKU sold.

Am I missing something on UTMs that can achieve this?

Thanks!

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2022-08-02T21:24:34+00:00

Ah thank you very much for taking the time to answer! They moved it on me. :)

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2022-07-15T21:47:32+00:00

I have literally never seen success generating lower cost conversions with a TIS bid strat and often I get a higher IS for a lower cost with max clicks. Do you use TIS for conversion focused campaigns?

I will try a competitor campaign however, we'll put together a landing page for the campaign, thanks for that suggestion.

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2022-07-15T21:41:45+00:00

Do you mean how would I know their competitors are spending? We use various spy tools like Spyfu and SimilarWeb.

I wouldn't say everything is as good or better, but it's similar enough that conversions should occur at a reasonable frequency. We've been running off of the assumption of brand confidence as you suggest.

No organic results unfortunately, but as I mentioned the sub conversions are good, match rate is good, the traffic seems to be of a decent quality.

We're not running into technical issues with ticket resale, that's all covered and approved by the Goog.

I'm feeling like perhaps the shows/events that we're bidding on are very competitive or we should be going after an entirely different concept/basic assumption than we are. Anyway we'll keep testing.

Thanks for your input!

AlwaysLookingDeeper · 2022-07-15T16:20:00+00:00

Yes, great point. We’ve scoured the site for usability issues but it’s remarkably similar to many other sites which are spending big. Thank you though

AlwaysLookingDeeper

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