I turned some ads off.
Michael Apte
One of the challenging things about starting something new is how many wild guesses you are making. The wildest of guesses are often on things you could find out pretty easily (removing the guess work) but you just haven’t gotten to that work yet. So you either jump into wild guesses knowing you are probably doing most things wrong or you wait until things are built better (which feels like forever).
Everything is a trade-off and the bias needs to be on moving forward with pace. One tiny example - every image in my blog isn't the right dimension for sharing on social. I know this but it it's just not critical enough vs the time to get it right.
Some educated guess work is completely normal in marketing. You aren’t doing enough experimenting if you know everything before you jump in. But in a startup community you are pretty much guessing at everything. And it’s not a very educated guess.
I went live with a couple of test ads just to get a feeling for what might resonate. I’ve got tagging set up but a lot comes up as organic social rather than the ads (?!?). Plus no API connection yet (I’m using Hubspot Starter in these early days) so I’m just targeting traffic rather than membership.
The initial response was great – 13 sign-ups on day 1! And then it dropped for the next few days, which is fine. And then dropped further, to just 2 sign-ups.
That was a concern. And what made it 100x worse is my attribution is so basic at this point I have very little clue as to why any of this was happening.
And then I had a fairly basic but profound realisation. Just turn them off.
You don’t need to nail conversions in week one of tests, when you don’t know anything and have little history to work from. It’s ok not to know things and act anyway.
I turned it all off.
The next day I re-grouped, turned the best performing ads back on, created some new ones, went again. Cost per landing page visit on the new ones is as low as 15c, vs 50c on the previous ads. Conversions remain low so that’s where I’m focused now.
An unofficial tagline of SMC is Connect, Learn, Grow. Good learning this week on the expectations we place on ourselves. Hoping there's also some experts in the community who can correct anything I've gotten wrong on basic attribution above!
