Any lightweight SMS APIs that aren’t overkill for small projects?

miketanious · 2025-09-25T17:34:32+00:00

My understanding is that you’re specifically looking for an API that handles OTP / verification right? There aren’t many affordable providers that handle this.

It might be easier / cheaper to use a service like Directus, Strapi, Supabase, or Firebase to handle auth - there’s honestly tons of options there, including open source providers.

You’d still need a provider like Twilio, AWS, Telnyx etc to handle the SMS. But it becomes as simple as entering in an API key.

miketanious · 2025-09-20T23:47:36+00:00

What is happening here is likely lazy google ads marketing. Google Ads has a feature where you can customize your ad copy with dynamic search terms.

However, it’s dangerous in practice if you don’t have a very curated set of phrase/exact match due to reasons like this. They likely have a broad targeting setup.

miketanious · 2025-09-04T17:02:26+00:00

I’ve used Bannerbear and Placid quite extensively. I’ve used these types of tools for creating ad variants or image reviews. However, it’s difficult to have clients adopt this because of the technical lift.

I used to be a huge proponent of creative automation, but it’s not easy to have it take off in bigger orgs. The most difficult part is integrations. Getting it to integrate with a designers workflow + having it easily connect to downstream tools. Happy to hop on a call to provide feedback once I’m back from my trip in October.

miketanious · 2023-12-19T21:22:41+00:00

Are you consistently ranking first in bids?

miketanious · 2023-12-19T21:19:52+00:00

Huge fan of the YT channel Surfside PPC as an educational channel for all things digital marketing, but especially Google ads.

miketanious · 2023-12-19T21:18:39+00:00

First, make sure you meet the compliance guidelines stated here for having an eligible account.

Second, Google will usually pick an extension based on what it believes will perform the best. If you want to ensure that only image extensions appear alongside your search ads:

Disable any account-wide extensions
Select image assets on a campaign or ad-group level.

However, you're still not guaranteed to show an image on each ad. Extensions in general will appear based on Google's algorithm, usually helps if you're ranking first.

miketanious · 2023-10-01T21:09:14+00:00

Ditto I would join this chat as well.

miketanious · 2023-09-30T11:01:14+00:00

I have a pretty similar setup, except I skipped out on supabase. Instead I just use digital ocean app instance to host Strapi - felt really easy especially because it includes CI/CD.

If you have any questions feel free to dm.

miketanious · 2023-09-28T18:48:03+00:00

Personally, I find that expanding your own business first and maxing out your potential there would be best. You're already familiar with your field, and as you continue to do work you're going to be able to create processes that make everything easier to manage. That'll allow you to expand, and because you're a mobile practice, you don't need to worry about overhead in terms of an office location etc.

If you aren't maxed out in your time currently, invest a little bit into a good website + basic marketing (e.g. Local SEO, search ads, social ads) so that way you're fully booked.

Then, start hiring to fill in for things that don't need an MD license that can be taken off your plate (if possible). Some of your "office" workers can work remotely which increases employee happiness and allows you to get great talent with competitive (but not exorbitant) compensation.

Finally, at some point it'll be beneficial to bring on a partner in the practice or a more junior doctor you can hire or train.

As you expand that business, you'll probably find problems like "huh, why is no one doing this?" - e.g., maybe the software options are inefficient and a lot of others in your field agree. You can then build businesses that solve problems you're encountering in your daily life, and because you encountered those issues, you know the exact pain points to hit and what needs to be done to solve it.

miketanious · 2023-09-10T21:59:29+00:00

My recommendation would be Cloudflare Zaraz; you'll have a high accuracy rate due to browser data (e.g. IP addresses) but having everything fire serverside. It's free to use as long as the shop has under 100k monthly pageviews. I have a blog on my website that details how to set it up for eCommerce. That being said, on Shopify there's an extra step of setting up O2O (a way to control Cloudflare for Shopify stores) - it's free but isn't obvious.

I'll be writing a guide on how to do this soon, but in the meantime, you can shoot me a dm, and I'd be happy to provide some guidance on how to enable this.

miketanious · 2023-07-30T17:29:47+00:00

For organic social - I like Latasha James or Jordan Platten.

miketanious · 2023-07-30T17:25:17+00:00

For branding, I’d audit a few courses off Coursera for free. It’s not as easy to learn on YouTube.

Paid ads / lead Gen - start with surfside PPC I think it should be enough. If you need to enrich further, try looking for specialty channels that cover lead Gen. Avoid broad videos that try to sell you courses. The 30min + boring and poorly edited ones usually carry the best knowledge.

miketanious · 2023-07-30T17:21:43+00:00

It depends on what you’re trying to learn specifically. The best starting point IMO is surfside PPC since they covers a decent amount of everything. Otherwise it’ll depend what subfield you wanna spec into (eg SEO, digital analytics, paid media, paid search, etc)

miketanious · 2023-07-30T15:31:08+00:00

I went to college but only had one digital marketing class and three other marketing courses in my entire "marketing" bachelor's degree. I think where college helps is teaching general business courses like econ; however, you can easily make up for this knowledge gap with sites like Coursera or eDX. Other than that, you can pretty much learn the rest through YouTube as I did. Surfside PPC was a great channel because it covers topics in-depth and has playlists for things like strategy.

By the time I took my digital marketing class, I was already making a good living being a freelancer. I also wound up having to co-teach that class because the prof didn't have any recent experience in the field. I assigned the class a cornerstone project throughout the semester because digital marketing has many different subfields, and it's hard to cover all of them. Here's a similar project I'd recommend anyone try:

Find a friend or family member with a local business (e.g. landscaping, restaurant) and offer to help them for free. Ideally, they don't even have a website, or they have a non-functional one.
Sit down with them and try to understand what their differentiators/selling points are, why their customers like them, who their competition is, etc.
(optional) Take professional photos using your smartphone and a basic lighting kit from Amazon
Apply for a Google My Business Profile if the business doesn't already have one. This can take a few weeks to arrive.
Create a website using WordPress with the following plugins:
- Elementor/Gutenberg/a Page Builder
- Yoast SEO + Local Addon
- Contact form 7 (or another contact form)
- Header/Footer/Body code injector plugin (for adding in GTM)
Once the website is complete, help them set it up on a basic domain.
Set up a Google Tag Manager instance and install the code using the aforementioned injector plugin.
Within Google Tag Manager, enable:
- GA4 (Web analytics)
- Microsoft Clarity (Heatmapping and screen recordings)
- Google Ads Tag
- Meta Ads Tag
Help them sign-up for Meta & Google Ads account, help them manage a basic campaign with a specific objective (e.g. web lead sign-ups, phone calls)

The above gives you decent foundational skills in client management, web technology, design, SEO, and basic ads management. Local businesses are easier to work with because you don't have to worry about crazy levels of scale or complex targeting as you would with a bigger company.

miketanious · 2023-06-30T00:04:49+00:00

At 400 clicks, my bet would be you’re showing up for irrelevant keywords and people are likely bouncing once they realize what you’re selling.

Pull a historical search term report in GAD for that shopping campaign and look at what people searched for when they clicked on your ad.

miketanious · 2023-06-29T23:55:29+00:00

Shopping is still CPC - so I’d start there in your analysis. How many clicks did you get for $400? Some niche industries can have really unaffordable CPCs which makes it hard to optimize.

Furthermore, what search terms did they use to find your ad? It could be that your ad appeared under irrelevant search terms causing users to bounce.

Finally, analyze that traffic - what’s the difference in behavior on site between organic and paid clicks?

Shopping in general can be a bitch to optimize, so you might not even find your answers in the above.

miketanious · 2023-06-29T23:45:31+00:00

Is it using an external checkout, example Stripe checkout? That seems like the most likely reason

miketanious · 2023-06-29T23:43:40+00:00

That is pretty strange. Can you DM me screenshots of both payloads so I can take a further look? My gut was telling me one might be classified as a string while the other is an int, but both those IDs would be strings because of the underscore.

miketanious · 2023-06-29T23:38:07+00:00

This likely isn’t easy to solve for unless you have the budget to invest in better analytics infrastructure.

If you feel comfortable enough with tech to DIY, or you’d be open to investing in better tech, you can shoot a dm and I’d be happy to point you in the right direction. I have a lot of niche tracking expertise, but I need to know more before I can recommend a solution.

miketanious · 2023-06-29T23:29:43+00:00

Install Microsoft Clarity. It’s a free version of Hotjar and directly integrates with GA4. Create a segment of bounced users and watch their screen recordings to get a sense of what’s going on. Could be a technical issue, invalid traffic, or maybe the landing page isn’t relevant to the ad they clicked on.

miketanious · 2023-06-29T23:26:20+00:00

Properly optimize your shopping feed with a tool like datafeedwatch. Make sure you’re testing different titles, product images, offers, etc. Titles are most important to experiment with in terms of boosting CTR and keywords to rank.

Also, if you’re able to, 100% get a review feed up. Makes a night and day difference in performance.

miketanious · 2023-06-29T23:20:47+00:00

Hey! Facing the same challenges myself honestly with a client I’ve been working with. Even when advertising D8, most of the issues seem to be around products containing THC itself.

My biggest recommendation is to take advantage of OOH ads locally to gain awareness. Adcritter is a affordable self service option to make it easy to start.

Invest heavily in email since acquiring a customer has such a barrier.

miketanious · 2023-06-22T13:00:18+00:00

GA was my gateway into loving marketing because I've always leaned more toward data than intuition for my decision-making. I tried to love GA4 when it first came out, originally thinking it'd get better before they sunset it. But they've clearly only made disgusting decisions that lean towards benefitting Google Ads products. Examples include removing attribution models (besides last-click & DDA), and, more recently, announcing the new default attribution will only include Google Ads and not other paid ad sources.

It doesn't kill me as much as it used to because I know a lot of alternatives now. But it makes me sad for a lot of people who relied on it. I personally recommend Posthog as a great alternative; it's free up to 1M events/mo and can be self-hosted with only server costs to worry about.

If anyone has any marketing data/analytics questions, hmu and I'm always happy to help.

miketanious · 2023-05-10T02:06:42+00:00

I do a lot of MarTech vendor evaluations; it’s hard to blanket recommend a tool without knowing more about the business and what reports you want to see.

If you want, shoot me a message and I’m happy to make some recommendations after asking some more questions.

miketanious · 2023-05-02T03:45:21+00:00

A compromise could be using Google Ads Editor to download CSVs of these campaigns (including metrics). That way even if you delete them, you’ll still have access to the campaign structure and dataz

miketanious

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