Do you run paid ads for your product? How is your experience with it?

Anil Matcha
44 replies

Replies

Frank Sondors
No, unless you've raised a bunch of cash, it's just not smart to do paid advertising. In B2B cold email will give you the most scale at a really good efficiency level.
Dennis Zax
@profy17 How effective are cold emails for indie developers and small teams? My product is meant for smaller projects, similar to the Firebase demographic. It's something I've considered but I have shot down the idea because I would think people just ignore the emails 99.9% of the time.
Anil Matcha
@profy17 How to find the email list for sending cold email ?
Frank Sondors
@matcha_anil sure thing. I run Salesforge if you would like to send personalized emails at scale. Check it out.
Frank Sondors
@deds3t they work if you know what you're doing. Problem is majority don't know what they're doing, which is why I built Salesforge to simplify the process.
Dennis Zax
@profy17 Cool ill check it out. Could you elaborate on what "know what you are doing" means? Like is it personalization?
Renat Abyasov
In the previous project, we used all the paid advertising options. And our big mistake was consider their effectiveness by last click. If you connect paid channels, you need to evaluate their weight and consider their effectiveness in the aggregate
Kate Tyshchenko
So I have a non profit called Cash for Refugees which helps Ukrainians. We got Google grant to run ads and I have been totally failing with it:( 0 conversions in 1 months (since I started). Someone please HELP! We now have a lot of demand because of the dam collapse and it would be great to master ads. if you know google ads well - email me at Kate.tyshchenko@cashforrefugees.org
Burak
Yes i always did, lately i spend $10 daily for testing my landing pages. Its better to play low costs instead of big ones. App, 2 weeks long.
Dávid Sipos
Yes, and I learned some things about Facebook ads. If you create a Facebook page and start spending to get likes you will build an audience and for your paid ads you can use that audience or a similar audience and your CoC will be much lower. If you need any help feel free to find my throw my profile on LinkedIn
Shushant Lakhyani
I've never run paid ads yet, but I'm planning to do so in the future
Anil Matcha
@shushant_lakhyani Awesome, what you plan to run ads on ?
Daniel Burns
We still haven't done so far. Our team does not have a lot of experience with it, so it doesn't seem to be a very good idea to do it now, but we are definitely seeking to do it in the near future.
Filippo Pietrantonio
Having real success on paid media nowadays is pretty hard; things have changed quite a bit compared to a couple of years ago. With higher CPCs, competition, and a reduced ability to attribute conversions, I would run ads only if I had high enough budgets to launch generic campaigns. Otherwise, I think you're better off running alternative marketing campaigns.
Carter Michael
Bad. I cut corners then cost cut me.
Oscar Mairey
I do run paid ads for my products, and my experience has been positive overall. Here are some of my key takeaways: 1) Seems ubvious but It's crucial to advertise where your target audience is. I've had good results with Google Ads for intent-based targeting and Facebook/Instagram Ads for demographic and interest-based targeting. 2) Paid advertising requires consistent monitoring and optimization. 3) It's important to keep a close eye on costs. Paid ads can also be expensive, especially in competitive industries. I always ensure I have a clear budget.
Anil Matcha
@cesarioo Awesome, thanks for sharing your insights
Nuno Reis
We did and got some good results in acquisition of sign ups, lower than 30€ each. But our retention still isn't great so no point right now, as we're too early. But at least we know we can convert them when we get retention solved.
I did it on Facebook between 2018 and 2020, and the effect was positive because it allowed me to build a community and advertise my product. Currently, I am focusing on micro-influencers because they have a targeted audience. If your product is not a scam, using micro-influencers can be a win-win strategy
@realvladgolub how do you find these micro-influencers and what kind of deals do you strike with them?
@heyjoshua It depends. Sometimes I use "word of mouth" or just find someone on Twitter and analyze their engagement before making a decision.
Deepti
I have tried generic Twitter, Reddit and Google ads only once, If you are early in the game you should try Google ads, they are expensive but you can Target audience based on keyword, followed by reddit they give some $100 free credit. last should be Twitter ad, you gain more conversions only if you know the right target audience that's why presence in Twitter matters the most This is my understanding but it may differ for others, ultimately we need to calculate CAC and see what worked.
AppManager by CompanyDNA AI
AppManager by CompanyDNA AI
Not yet, but once we get an investment there will be a budget for that for sure.
Tej Garikapati
I run paid ads for my clients all the time. Your results will mostly depend on the quality if the ad itself and who you target with a limited budget. We use something called fashvertising instead of running ads all the time. We take a trendy topic/meme/song that is going viral, try to pair it up with our product, create an ad around it and then run it for 3 days. Now, onto the next trendy topic. This has pretty much been the standard for me over the last year, great results.
Apostolos Toptsis
@tej_sai Can you link an example. I would love to see some of your ads and how you pair your products with trendy topics/songs/memes
Tej Garikapati
@apostolos_toptsis I'll give you an example, remember when wordle was all viral, we created a mini version of wordle but for sports fans and ran ads on it. It acted as a lead for my client who ran a sports blog. Over 100k visitors just from it.
Roop Reddy
Paperguide
Paperguide
Launching soon!
@tej_sai that's very smart. Have you tried to apply the same strategy for other forms of marketing such as link building? Curious to know the results.
Tej Garikapati
@roopreddy Thanks! Not really, haven't really tried it for link building, but pretty sure it should work. This is how ryan Reynolds did marketing for his cellphone brand. If you are building lists for newsletters, try using the ad examples of MilkRoad (The best in this genre of advertising).
@tej_sai , that's interesting. Definitely something to note.
Diana Washington
Running paid ads can be a game of hits and misses. It takes some tweaking to hit the sweet spot. I've had varying experiences, some fantastic, others, not so much.
Daniel Zaitzow
From my experience I've found it to be fruitful if you have a really narrowed / niched down target market but the shotgun approach (like in most marketing) is akin to throwing throwing money off a cliff. I'd suggest starting by AB testing certain niched down / defined segments on small spend campaigns and going from there.
Savannah Scott
Paid ads' success hinges on ad targeting, quality, budget management, and ongoing optimization. Monitoring performance and making adjustments are crucial for achieving optimal outcomes.
No, but eager to learn some experience about campaigns that worked! Subscribed)
I'm in the middle of this exact project now. Mainly focused on Meta and on average delivering 5x ROAS, though it's mainly focused on remarketing campaigns. My main issue is attribution. For a user to enter our remarketing funnel, they are already warm, so I couldn't fully attribute that to Meta. The problem is, how do we decide how much? That is the part that we are still trying to figure out.