Dev Diary 2 - Google Ads, Youtube and landing pages vs demos
Aron Schüler Published
What happened today
Ads for Shotmetrics AI
I’ve been struggling with Google Ads today.
Since Shotmetrics AI is now in a reasonably loveable state, I wanted to start running some ads.
Unfortunately, Google has something against this. Already the suggested price-per-day is absurdly high.
Normally, I try to aim at like $300/month, but today I was greeted with the recommendation to spend at least $450 A DAY to compete with other ads.
Also, they’ve blocked one account that I used to run ads for CronJS. Their issue was that the site did not really offer a product and no privacy notice. Fair enough. I’ll add one soon, I think.
But, for the better or worse, I created my ads for Shotmetrics AI finally by just creating a new campaign. The budget is now set at $15/day,
which is also higher than I’d like but I will run it for a week and check how many signups I get. The ads are very targeted and lead to my blog posts,
not to my main landing site. Since each blog post mentions the benefits of Shotmetrics AI in some way or another, I hope to convert from there.
Running ads just for the Golf target group seems totally silly, its just very expensive and you cannot be sure that they actually own a launch monitor.
Which is a requirement for the product.
I hope that this will be different for the more specific ads I’m trying out now.
Currently, the ads are yet to make their first impression somewhere in Google Search, yet I hope to get some signups over night.
I wish I could afford some kind of marketing agency to do this for me, though - I find ads to be super tedious. Landing pages and everything is okay, since it has some code - but creating Ads with Googles ever-changing wizards is just a pain. I have my headlines and my keywords and my content ready ahead of time and still spent two hours trying to get them up and running.
Youtube
My newest video is also out. It’s performing super bad, and I am unsure why, but I also don’t make too much of it. Its something I wanted to get out and nothing I poured my heart into. Also, its the second video on that channel, it might also just take YouTube a while to promote that channel. It took 3 videos for the golf channel, too. Speaking of, I’ll have to focus on more content for my golf channel, which is on its way to the first 100 subs. Kinda cool.
Landing page vs demo for marketing
Today, I discussed what projects need landing pages and what projects should rather offer a direct demo. I find that an interesting thought: At what point does an app provide enough “Wow”-effect to generate a meaningful impact, so that users sign up and buy your product? Which SaaS should rather have a pretty landing page explaining all benefits and maybe provide screenshots?
Tom raised a good point with how OpenAIs ChatGPT and other AI tools just give the user the product to try out and win them over simply by how good that product is. But are most products that good? Aren’t most of them just a tool for an unspectectular task? Jira has a landing page, but no demo. eBay works directly out of the box, you don’t really need to signup to experience the product. I guess you can draw some fine line between the “Wow” factor and the “Ah, okay” factor. The first group can offer a demo, the second needs to provide more information to be intriguing.
What I need to do next
- I’ll have to work through the settings of Shotmetrics AI. It’s still a very rough layout and UX experience. Tabs do not magically make a great layout.
- I’ll have to think about what to do with Storygenie
- CronJS needs also some implementation effort. I’m still stuck and making sure the runtimes are safe sandboxes. It needs to be secure from the start, I don’t want users accessing other jobs logs and environment and all that.
- I am also trying to hit Platinum in Rainbow Six: Siege
- And I had a Golf lesson on why I slice. Turns out, too much hip rotation does as much damage to your swing as no hip rotation!