Left a comment on the IndieHackers page. Keeping a copy here for those who aren't reading the comments section. I have noticed this a lot in various websites I have helped in ad campaigns. Their biggest problem is their landing page. Just like this article uses lots of jargons to explain simple concepts, their landing page reflects the same. For those of you wanting to know more about landing page optimization just watch Isaac Rudansky's excellent videos on Udemy. One of the most important rules is the 5 second test. Show your landing page to your colleagues/friends/family depending on your target audience. If they can't understand what your business proposition is in 5 seconds you have failed landing page optimization. As simple as that.
The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page:
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The landing page is too complex. Like what does "Full stack adaptive delivery" even mean? I am sure 90% of your paid visitors are just bouncing because that landing page tagline is alien to them. Dumb it down. Make it simple.
Surprisingly, the description in the Indiehackers page makes so much more sense than the one you put up: "File-system-as-a-service that does uploads, storage, and media processing for Web and mobile apps, so you can ship products faster and scale them painlessly"
If you told me that the first time I would have understood your value proposition. Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. There are too many jargons already. Don't complicate it further.
Instead of "Full stack adaptive delivery" just try: "File-system-as-service". Instead of "Serve ultimate UX with better images on any website. One script to rule them all." just have: "Ship products faster with better images on any website". That's it. You will get 50+% higher conversion rates with just this one change.
> Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular.
It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be construed to mean just about anything. It would fit just as well on a logistics company page, or on a sticker on the side of an ICBM.
I wish people would just say what they actually do.
> "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be construed to mean just about anything. It would fit just as well on a logistics company page, or on a sticker on the side of an ICBM.
I personally wonder if they used the Startup Generator in earnestness. [1]
But yeah, I'm a senior techie, and often involved in potential procurement discussions, and sweet Jesus, if you want us to give you money, give us some goddamned concrete facts. You synergise enterprise cloud offerings?Oh, you mean you have a templating language that tries to generify Terraform and CloudFormation and does both badly.
I sometimes feel like people in ticket clipping businesses like this (their CDN offering is, um, Akamai, but you can make pictures grayscale using their DSL because that's easier than using a photo editor?) are scared of saying what they actually do because then you'll realise that they don't do much for the money they're asking.
I do recruiting consulting and it blows my mind how every time I ask a startup how they differentiate from other startups and what specific advantages they want me to discuss, they give me a bunch of meaningless phrases. Its like founders are being taught a different language that they think provides value but makes no fucking sense.
I have the feeling that "Full stack adaptive delivery" and its ilk are aimed at VCs or BigCorp sourcing managers instead of anyone that would actually use the product. The sad thing is that they seem to be so mutually exclusive nowadays.
So many times I have to spend ten minutes digging into what some of these companies actually do.
It’s highly frustrating. Give some examples of what you do. Explain it in simple language. Don’t rely on conceptual language because it doesn’t tell me what your offering does.
I think if companies actually said what they did, a portion of them would say things like "we use our massive collection of user data to help you _____".
That's one of my favorite tool to try to get a brainstorming session back on track, to point to the fact that one of the sticky notes or items written on the white board is so vague it could be used for {insert ridiculously out of place business}
My go-to example is Robert DeNiro's line from The Irishmen: "You like steak? I deliver steak. I could deliver you steak."
Granted there was some mob subtext to that line but the world would be a better place if people strove for that level of simplicity in their messaging.
I don't argue with your statement, but I found the summary at the end to be quite good:
$50K of lessons learned, summarized for you
Let’s recap our lessons learned:
Narrow down your extended keyword set and focus on the keyword groups you have polished content and landing pages for, especially when you have a complex product.
Use an awareness ladder to inform keyword segmentation by purchase stage but revisit it often to validate and adjust.
Do not use the same landing pages for different steps of your awareness ladder.
Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time.
Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates.
Run tests to optimize page content, which will reduce your cost per click.
Once you find your winner, you’re ready to go all-in. Now’s the time to pass it off to an agency to scale things up, if you are contracting out campaign management.
Yes I am not saying it is the best. But it is better than "Full stack adaptive delivery". Can it be improved? Surely. But does it need to be complicated further? Definitely not.
You don't need a "filesystem as a service" but if you were one of the few people who did and you saw "full stack adaptive delivery" there's a big chance you're not going to read any further.
Let's say 50% of people actually read past the tagline. People like you might read a bit further and realize they don't need it anyway. People who do need it might not read further though and you'd lose that sale.
You're probably not a target audience. A "file system as a service" is a thought that would probably pop in your head if you faced the problem they're trying to solve.
The "Adaptive Delivery" is the new technology we're currently testing copy for. Actually, we can also discuss the best explainers for "we analyze user context and tailor media content accordingly with our Image Transformations CDN API, serve it from Akamai." The full-stack thing is there to "show" we're leveraging the complete Uploadcare pipeline for just one line of code implementing the "adaptive behavior".
You provide your image URL
It gets fetched to Uploadcare via reverse proxy
Once it's there, it gets to our storage and is cached on CDN layers
Then we analyze the page layout and tell the API which image version we want exactly
API produces the version
It gets served personalized to your every end-client session
Still feels like you're not taking shripadk's advice. Even complex things should be dumbed down. If a potential customer is interested they will click further.
I'm guilty of this as an engineer in a startup. Engineers thrive on the details. But users don't care too much. They just want the service.
Landing pages should preferably be hosted on its own path. Search engines index paths not the query string.
Also, think this way: if you have multiple features, you can have a landing page per feature explaining that one feature in depth. Then you can have your Ads target that one feature page that everyone wants. This helps when you introduce new features tomorrow. Instead of cramming everything into a single landing page (your homepage).
I'm a techie so this may bias me, but I definitely prefer to see What and How before Why. The reason is, you as the solution provider are not in the position to tell me what problems you'll actually solve for me. You can make high-level promises, but whether your solution can realize them in context of my business and my tooling, depends on how they relate to your What and How. So either you tell me your What and How, or I have to tell you everything about my business and my problems - and since I'm on your landing page and we aren't really talking, I care and expect to see primarily your What and How.
Please, this whole "Ship products faster with better ..." has got to stop. Just the other day I went looking for some Shopify apps. Every single one described themselves as "Increase conversion, more money, better faster etc" on the bloody search page. Not a single word about what problem they where actually solving until far under the fold on the product page. I've been at this for days, and I still don't know if my needs have a turn-key solution.
I am not his ad campaign manager or landing page optimizer. I just gave a quick tip. If I were to do it I would have done it differently. The idea is not to say that this is the best way to go about it. The idea is to steer him in the direction of keeping it simple. If you have a better tagline you can suggest it.
And yes, the tagline I mentioned may not be the best but it will definitely get him more conversions compared to the one he currently has. At the end of the day conversions matter the most. No sales, no business. Doesn't matter how much analysis you do.
As someone who is trying to learn and some day launch something like this, thank you so much for this advice!
I've been known to complicate descriptions on my OSS packages but still achieved moderate success, so I'm thinking on how to convert this knowledge into revenue and these comments are super helpful.
Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing?
> Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing?
SEO should be as natural as possible. Keyword stuffing actually has a negative impact on your Quality Score (if you are running Google Ads) in the long run. Do not forget that Google is always optimizing its algorithms. What was possible before isn't possible now. And what is possible to do today isn't possible to do in the future. Don't start by gaming the system. Start by doing it as natural as you can. Optimizations can always be made later on (if required). From my experience I have seen that SEO works best only if it has relevant content tagged along with it.
Sometimes, you might be in a niche where you don't even need to do any optimizations. And most products/services fall under this category. Just like you do not prematurely optimize your software, there is no need to do the same anywhere else. Even marketing.
> As someone who is trying to learn and some day launch something like this, thank you so much for this advice!
Thank you. Just sharing what I learned from the masters in the field. The best of which is Isaac Rudansky. Marketing is made unnecessarily complex these days. It is not rocket science. Anyone can do it.
> It reduces size of PNG/JPEG images as they get uploaded.
My first thought was that someone is going to upload a 43 meg animated GIF and then complain that it's loading slow. Not a comment on your product, just past experience tells me it will happen.
But you aren't putting up a website to test the intelligence of your audience. You are putting up a website to sell your product/service. When you walk through a market you find vendors shouting out what they have on offer. They keep it precise: the item they are selling and the price. That is it. This is a tried and tested method of selling. One that humans have adapted to over generations. Tufte might have said that in the context of visualizations. Doesn't mean it applies to marketing as well.
What's with the mobile oriented design that every startup that's trying to be cool has? Little text that doesn't say anything, check. Loads of whitespace, check. Pretty photos that don't mean anything, check. Even if your description was less technobabbleish, i'd just close the page and move on.
As someone else said in this thread, do you optimize for venture capitalists instead of customers?
I'm really sick of all that "your keywords are too complex" or "people don't understand what you're saying", most of the times coming from people that know nothing about that niche or industry.
If those people are not your target market, don't give a shit about what they say related to the landing page content. You're not selling to them. If they don't understand the terminology used and they are not potential clients, you don't have to make a "less complex" landing page or change the wording just to make them happy.
You can have your opinions but this is not how marketing or sales work. It isn't some new tech. This is age old stuff that has been going on since humans started trading. You always, always dumb it down even for your potential clients. The reason is more to do with cognition than to do with the client's knowledge. Your brain is not always focused on everything around you. It is more psychological. You are thinking in binary (or in other words: logically). The brain is more complex than that. It can sometimes fail to do the simplest of tasks but at the same time be capable of solving the most complex of problems.
The idea behind a tagline is to capture the user's attention. You can build up on the complexity as the user goes further down the page. But to start with a complicated tagline will cause your users to quit.
If someone is selling mangoes in a market and he shouts "Mangifera Indica for 5$" will people purchase from him? He is still selling Mangoes and dare I say he is more accurate (because the scientific name for Mango is Mangifera Indica). His potential customers will be those who are botanists because only they understand the scientific nomenclature. But those won't be his real customers too. What if the botanist hears the scientific name but his/her brain ignores it as the brain triggers only in certain environments (like in a lab)? What if the botanist is not interested in Mangoes even after understanding it? As you can see, your potential customers are narrowing down with every filter applied. This is exactly antithesis to "selling to as many as possible".
But if he shouts "Mangos for 5$" he attracts everyone interested in a Mango, including the botanist.
And I don't want to sound nasty but no technology is so advanced that it cannot be simplified. Also don't forget that people can smell bullshit from a mile away. That is what I have learnt from experience. We Engineers like to overcomplicate and overpromise stuff that will only come back to bite us later. Just follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Op had some good tactics but an ass backwards strategy. Should have let the agency do the thing they where paid to do.
> Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale things
This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again.
I work in an agency, I won't work with you if you do this, because you will get the same results and blame me.
> Lesson #2: Focus on page quality and CTR when doing paid tests
Nope don't do this. When testing ads you should focus on the ads you are testing.
Make as many as you can, test, review and reduce to the winning ads then repeat. When you have found the ads with good CTR it's time to start working on page quality (making your page relevant to the ad).
> Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for
Again no don't do this, write ads to test your keywords build pages for the ads that work, not the other way around this isn't SEO.
> Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid
Different ads target customers at different stages of the buying journey, ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic.
> Lesson #5: Analytics will save (some of) your bacon
> Lesson #6: Revisit your awareness ladder often to validate and update it
> Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale things
This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again.
Unless I misunderstand you, you misunderstood them. They are saying that they didn't test and trim first and paid a lot of money to the agency that they didn't need to. They should have started with a smaller set.
> Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid
Different ads target customers at different stages of the buying journey, ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic.
So do organic searches. The initial Google hypothesis was that if someone was searching they would be interested in buying, and showing them an ad right then would be optimal because they are interested in buying (or else they wouldn't click it).
The idea that conversion is better with organic than ad does indeed seem to falsify that hypothesis. But maybe not. There could be click-fraud involved, too, which can dramatically drop the conversion rate.
The agency will add 20% on the spend because they can get better results than the client doing keyword research, writing ads and testing them.
The client did the hard work for the agency basically made the campaign themselves and then paid the agency 20% to set it live.
They should have done it the other way around get the agency to setup the campaign and then "scale" it themselves and they would have been able to an extra 20% ad spend for nothing.
The second point you are right again. I mean more that the funnel should start at the point of contact with the end user (the ad) and the landing page should be built for that ad, they seem to have tried to do it the other way around.
They obviously know what they are doing as far as tactics, it looks like they learned it from SEO, but I think they have tried to apply an SEO strategy of content first to their ad campaign and it didn't work.
You can't change advertising channels so you need to change your content to fit the channel not the other way around.
From the user's perspective, the funnel can have several stages before they even arrive at your website. E.g. becoming aware they have a problem, researching the problem in general and what approaches have been tried, deciding which type of approach is applicable them, comparing different products. An organic search is likely to be in one of the earlier phases, but a paid search campaign can target keywords indicative of later phases, as well as different value propositions.
This user-centric idea of a funnel is different than the website-centric view of the funnel where you start with a landing page and end with a lead form or purchase. The phrase "Customer Journey" usually gets bandied about to refer to the former, although it also often gets bandied about without referring to anything at all.
I like this discussion more than the article. Someone should do a follow-up. We wasted $50K and then we wasted a write-up of our learnings, so you don't have to.
I feel like this a really uncharitable reading of the article. This is a real business that has built itself up from nothing to $100,000 per month in revenue (which is important as it means they aren't just burning VC cash in random acts of marketing) and they're speaking in precise terms about specific actions they've taken and the results they've gotten.
I've no doubt that if you're unfamiliar with marketing that these terms are new (in the same way that if you're a marketer and reading about database indexing you're going to have to do a little work to figure out what everything means.)
This is important to me not because I've any stake in this (I've no affiliation with Uploadcare) but because I worry that the knee jerk rejection of any kind of marketing by developers really hurts startups and bootstrappers.
There is definitely blather in the marketing world [1], I'm just saying this isn't it.
You can’t say “hey ordinary person I’ll save you wasting $50k on AdWords” then instantly drop straight deep into the most arcane of mumbled, cryptic, faded rune digital marketing magic speak.
Refer to the comment below from HN user 83457 who explains same but in English.
When doing my own writing, I try to remember a quotation from Kenneth Hudson's The Jargon of the Professions:
> The best minds in any profession are never guilty of jargon, expect when they are very tired. Pedestrian minds are drawn towards it automatically and to the most frightening extent. Jargon, one could suggest, is the natural weapon of highly paid people with very little of any value to say. It is a sad and ironical comment on our society that many people feel released from the pressure to use jargon only when they have reached the top of their profession, by which time it may be too late to change one's habits. , however one might wish to. Ambitious people, still busy climbing the ladder, may well consider it professional dangerous to use straightforward language. One therefore has the paradox that only the person who has finally arrived, with [their] reputation secure, can afford to be simple and jargon-free. Lesser mortals appear to need their jargon, as a membership-badge of their profession. They do not have the confidence to face the world without it.
Do I escape the tendency towards jargon? No, not by a long shot, but pieces like this are a good reminder as to why it is worth the effort to keep trying.
>>> Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we’re fortunate to have a constant and growing inbound flow of leads and net negative churn, meaning the value of usage-driven upgrades outweighs the loss in revenue from subscription cancellations.
I’m glad they clarified what “net negative churn” means, that really cleared things up.
It reads like a Markov chain autocomplete. Let's see what my phone produces if prompted with the first bit:
Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we are looking for ways to improve the quality of our products by providing a service to our clients with the highest level of service for the remainder of the year.
They are getting more new customers (edit: others have pointed out it also includes increased revenue from existing customers), thanks primarily to personal recommendations (word of mouth), than they are losing customers.
Inbound -> people coming to the site (instead of salespeople calling them up)
Churn -> people canceling their subscriptions.
Churn Rate -> rate at which they're canceling (ex: 5% a month)
Net Negative Churn Rate -> if the overall dollar amount of people moving from $50/mo plans to $100/mo plans is higher than the dollar amount of people canceling subscriptions.
So while the Churn Rate doesn't change (still 5% a month) the overall monthly revenue is still increasing. This is really hard to do and it's a good indicator that they're making something that people really want and are willing to pay to use.
I don't think this is that jargony. Anyone in the target audience for the article should know what "churn" means, and given that knowledge should be able to work out what "net negative churn" means. Probably the clarification would've been better if it had started "meaning the revenue from usage-driven upgrades" (and likewise "usage-driven" and "net" in "net negative" don't add anything) but overall it should still be comprehensible.
It kind of reminds me of people discussing stock using what looks to me like numerology. They don't really focus on the underlying company or what it does, they mainly look at the stock graph and use more or less complicated models to try to predict future performance. Sometimes they actually have no idea what the company does.
I feel a bit the same way reading this article. There's a lot of talk about conversion rates and funnels and semantic cores and awareness ladders but in the end does do they have a product that people actually want?
Having bad SEO and a confusing website is bad because it could make it harder for people to buy your product but it's not going to magically make people buy something they don't want.
Also I wonder if focusing entirely on "conversion rate" is fair. There are other benefits to advertisement, such as increasing brand awareness for instance. After all look at the vast majority of real world ads, there's basically a 0% conversion rate. People don't see a Coca Cola ad on TV and immediately go the supermacket to buy a bottle. I don't see a football player wearing Nikes and immediately go online to shop for shoes.
Maybe somebody will click on your ad, browse your website for a bit, think it's interesting and months later they'll convince their boss to use it for their next big product.
I think focusing on conversion rate is fair in this case. I would think Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is more for conversions and less for brand awareness.
Their example query of "file upload php" is someone who's looking for a solution right this second, so it's not unreasonable that they would sign up and try out the service right this second.
Did you read the article? Your last paragraph refers to a demographic and should be accounted for in a rung in the awareness ladder.
The reason people focus on conversion rate is because you can easily calculate spend and predict RoI. Coke can spend on a TV ad because it's a drop in the bucket but every dollar is valuable to a bootstrapped company. Exactly why you want to know what you'll get before one blow 50k on adwords.
I’ve spent the last year in a marketing role and as I read this article I was thinking to myself “would I have understood an HN post like this 1 year ago?” Thanks for confirming that I probably wouldn’t have! It is a lot of jargon.
Basic for a consumer-facing SaaS company, perhaps. I work for a SaaS company, but B2B, and I agree with the other comments - it could almost be a satirical take on a founder's pitch.
If you operate an online SaaS business you will know most of these terms (and if you do run such a business and don’t know them it would be highly advisable to learn them). This isn’t an article for the general public but specifically for people that bootstrap (SaaS) businesses, so I think it’s adequate to use the terminology of the field.
I was expecting the worst after reading comments like these but it was actually quite easy to read. If terms like CTR/CPC need to be explained then it would be safe to say you were not the target group for this article.
> CTR is the most important component of Quality Score
this is because that's how google gets paid.
you can create a great ad that's not terribly relevant to a specific audience, get good ctr but poor conversion.
some tips:
make sure to watch your search query reports and continuously refine your [hopefully shared] carefully-applied negative keywords lists.
avoid broad match like the plague. we use mostly phrase and modified broad with good negative phrase lists that have been continously honed over many months.
don't hyper-segment keyword or ad variations, it'll become a nightmare to manage with little-to-no benefit.
also, whether paid ads are worth it is highly dependent on your market, competitors, and your typical conversion value.
because our typical orders exceed $500, we see double-digit factor returns on ad spend even though we're an established, well-known mfg name in our market.
and yes, be ready to waste some money when dialing things in - $50k in a month of pure waste is quite a lot but that same amount "wasted" on tweaking over the course of 6mo-1yr is not out of the ballpark, assuming it yields progressively increasing ROI.
While Google may be paid per click, the value of that click (how much companies are willing to pay), is directly dependent on their conversion rates. So Google is incentivized to get you the most converting clicks as possible.
i think it's safe to say that the incentives are not exactly aligned.
if i was google, i would make sure that the ctr was as high as possible while the conversion rate was just enough to be worth it.
there are a lot of fine-grained controls missing from the adwords backend which waste money. for example, you cannot segment iphones from android, or forcibly exclude ie11 because you have chosen not to support it any more and the site falls apart on it. you cannot prevent ads from showing to visitors who've already come and bounced. they keep expanding how much "modified broad" sucks in by making the matching looser - with little notice. and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
lots of things that can easily save you money do not exist in their backend. imo these are not oversights but are left out intentionally.
> "...a customer acquisition cost way above one-third of customer lifetime value"
Is this really so terrible? As I understand it a lot of mobile games pay more for acquisition than they'll make from the user in e.g. IAP's to scale up their player base and climb the charts. What is a normal CPA vs LTV in the SaaS space?
Also, if you pay less to acquire these customers than you will make from them over time, you haven't quite wasted 50k have you?
Climbing the charts with a mobile game has the potential for activating a virtuous cycle with eCPMs for advertising as a parallel benefit to player acquisition. The acquisition and eCPMs can feed the cycle and self-sustain for a while. That's how the Voodoo and Ketchapp's of the world create their arbitrage markets that keep their throwaway hyper casual games dominant in the top of the charts. They've effectively gamed and broken the charts that way, reaping enormous benefits.
It depends on the industry. In retail, for instance, a customer acquisition cost of more than 10% their expected lifetime value is unsustainably expensive. Is suspect retail having only 5-8% profit margin is part of that though.
I guess the issue here is that your current LTV may not match the LTV of this cohort of customers, and the closer the CAC for this cohort gets to your LTV, the more you risk that actually there isn't margin there?
I saw that and assumed that the $50k wasn't actually wasted ... they just ended up with a cohort of customers that wasn't as profitable (unless of course the cost of maintaining those customers exceeds the other 2/3rds of their LTV).
A product could already have the engineering bits in place but without a landing page calling out that very feature or usecase, sending traffic to a mismatched page is a diservice.
People click an ad to learn more, if they are presented with a specific use-case but land on a generic marketing page they will click the back button.
And yet the company is paying for all those pointless clicks. Hopefully they’ll consider “misleading ads” as a possible reason for a low conversion rate.
There is a winter coming for the online ad model when more people realize, as this author has, that most online ad spend was probably a total waste.
That combined with the increasing crackdown by the consumer on blocking data tracking raises serious questions on the long term viability of the business models of some big players in the industry.
I'm in adtech and godddamn, I can't wait for the industry to wean itself off user tracking, shaking and crying like a heroin addict.
For years myself and other engineers have been warning the product owners that third party user tracking's life span is very much finite - Firefox was going to block 3rd party cookies by default several years back, but walked it back because Google weren't ready for that and threatened to withdraw the money Mozilla makes from them, but it was the sign of the end times.
Now that Google can identify you with reasonable probability without using cookies, they won't hold Firefox back, they don't need to, and it suits them to roll out the third party blocking in Chromium, alongside browser cache partitioning to avoid the classic circumventions - ETags, steganographed PNGs etc. as first implemented by Safari. UA strings, often used in fingerprinting, are also not long for this world.
And of course, now that Google has a solution that doesn't require cookies or fingerprinting, Chrome is all about that privacy lol - the fact that it hurts Google's competitors is merely happy circumstance.
The amount of panic in adtech companies now is hilarious because they chose to mimic an ostrich until the browsers left them no choice - but they're still flailing around and demanding devs try to find alternatives to 3rd party cookies.
The cookie based user tracking paradigm is dead, but there's a shit ton of people, especially in DSPs and DMPs whose salary relies on them not believing that.
What the author realized was that they should have gone about it differently, not that ads are a waste in a general sense. Their post-mortem had real recommendations that would have helped them had they followed them from the start.
> A clear funnel with established conversion rates, check
Is it checked? > 20% of people hitting our landing page block Segment which then blocks a portion of our analytics. It's pretty hard to get the full picture on your users, especially those coming from ads.
What more companies should look into is YouTube advertising. You have many youtubers including myself who get paid from multi-billion dollar companies every month to deliver their message to a highly targeted niche market. It's a better alternative to Ad Sense and you'll get quadruple the impressions for a similar price. The landing page is what it is though, if it doesn't capture the customers attention, that's the fault of the company paying to advertise.
Readit News
The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page:
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The landing page is too complex. Like what does "Full stack adaptive delivery" even mean? I am sure 90% of your paid visitors are just bouncing because that landing page tagline is alien to them. Dumb it down. Make it simple.
Surprisingly, the description in the Indiehackers page makes so much more sense than the one you put up: "File-system-as-a-service that does uploads, storage, and media processing for Web and mobile apps, so you can ship products faster and scale them painlessly"
If you told me that the first time I would have understood your value proposition. Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. There are too many jargons already. Don't complicate it further.
Instead of "Full stack adaptive delivery" just try: "File-system-as-service". Instead of "Serve ultimate UX with better images on any website. One script to rule them all." just have: "Ship products faster with better images on any website". That's it. You will get 50+% higher conversion rates with just this one change.
It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be construed to mean just about anything. It would fit just as well on a logistics company page, or on a sticker on the side of an ICBM.
I wish people would just say what they actually do.
I personally wonder if they used the Startup Generator in earnestness. [1]
But yeah, I'm a senior techie, and often involved in potential procurement discussions, and sweet Jesus, if you want us to give you money, give us some goddamned concrete facts. You synergise enterprise cloud offerings?Oh, you mean you have a templating language that tries to generify Terraform and CloudFormation and does both badly.
I sometimes feel like people in ticket clipping businesses like this (their CDN offering is, um, Akamai, but you can make pictures grayscale using their DSL because that's easier than using a photo editor?) are scared of saying what they actually do because then you'll realise that they don't do much for the money they're asking.
[1] http://tiffzhang.com/startup
So many times I have to spend ten minutes digging into what some of these companies actually do.
It’s highly frustrating. Give some examples of what you do. Explain it in simple language. Don’t rely on conceptual language because it doesn’t tell me what your offering does.
Maybe pay that $50k to a consultant to fix your copy.
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Granted there was some mob subtext to that line but the world would be a better place if people strove for that level of simplicity in their messaging.
"Easily implement our Bi-Directional CDN© to personalize on-demand adaptive delivery of UX-relevant content. Engage your target audiences"
Slowly backs away
$50K of lessons learned, summarized for you Let’s recap our lessons learned:
Narrow down your extended keyword set and focus on the keyword groups you have polished content and landing pages for, especially when you have a complex product.
Use an awareness ladder to inform keyword segmentation by purchase stage but revisit it often to validate and adjust.
Do not use the same landing pages for different steps of your awareness ladder.
Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time.
Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates.
Run tests to optimize page content, which will reduce your cost per click.
Once you find your winner, you’re ready to go all-in. Now’s the time to pass it off to an agency to scale things up, if you are contracting out campaign management.
I have a file system, it comes included in every/any os that matters. How does filesystem as a service help me?
Let's say 50% of people actually read past the tagline. People like you might read a bit further and realize they don't need it anyway. People who do need it might not read further though and you'd lose that sale.
[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/efs/
[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/
The "Adaptive Delivery" is the new technology we're currently testing copy for. Actually, we can also discuss the best explainers for "we analyze user context and tailor media content accordingly with our Image Transformations CDN API, serve it from Akamai." The full-stack thing is there to "show" we're leveraging the complete Uploadcare pipeline for just one line of code implementing the "adaptive behavior".
You provide your image URL It gets fetched to Uploadcare via reverse proxy Once it's there, it gets to our storage and is cached on CDN layers Then we analyze the page layout and tell the API which image version we want exactly API produces the version It gets served personalized to your every end-client session
I'm guilty of this as an engineer in a startup. Engineers thrive on the details. But users don't care too much. They just want the service.
https://imgz.org/?v=s
Also, should landing pages differentiate based on the query string ("?v=s" here), or be hosted on a new path?
Landing pages should preferably be hosted on its own path. Search engines index paths not the query string.
Also, think this way: if you have multiple features, you can have a landing page per feature explaining that one feature in depth. Then you can have your Ads target that one feature page that everyone wants. This helps when you introduce new features tomorrow. Instead of cramming everything into a single landing page (your homepage).
I think flipping it around would be even more impactful. Start with Why ;)
And yes, the tagline I mentioned may not be the best but it will definitely get him more conversions compared to the one he currently has. At the end of the day conversions matter the most. No sales, no business. Doesn't matter how much analysis you do.
I've been known to complicate descriptions on my OSS packages but still achieved moderate success, so I'm thinking on how to convert this knowledge into revenue and these comments are super helpful.
Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing?
SEO should be as natural as possible. Keyword stuffing actually has a negative impact on your Quality Score (if you are running Google Ads) in the long run. Do not forget that Google is always optimizing its algorithms. What was possible before isn't possible now. And what is possible to do today isn't possible to do in the future. Don't start by gaming the system. Start by doing it as natural as you can. Optimizations can always be made later on (if required). From my experience I have seen that SEO works best only if it has relevant content tagged along with it.
Sometimes, you might be in a niche where you don't even need to do any optimizations. And most products/services fall under this category. Just like you do not prematurely optimize your software, there is no need to do the same anywhere else. Even marketing.
Thank you. Just sharing what I learned from the masters in the field. The best of which is Isaac Rudansky. Marketing is made unnecessarily complex these days. It is not rocket science. Anyone can do it.
My first thought was that someone is going to upload a 43 meg animated GIF and then complain that it's loading slow. Not a comment on your product, just past experience tells me it will happen.
As someone else said in this thread, do you optimize for venture capitalists instead of customers?
Are these people searching through Google for a company like yours though?
If those people are not your target market, don't give a shit about what they say related to the landing page content. You're not selling to them. If they don't understand the terminology used and they are not potential clients, you don't have to make a "less complex" landing page or change the wording just to make them happy.
The idea behind a tagline is to capture the user's attention. You can build up on the complexity as the user goes further down the page. But to start with a complicated tagline will cause your users to quit.
If someone is selling mangoes in a market and he shouts "Mangifera Indica for 5$" will people purchase from him? He is still selling Mangoes and dare I say he is more accurate (because the scientific name for Mango is Mangifera Indica). His potential customers will be those who are botanists because only they understand the scientific nomenclature. But those won't be his real customers too. What if the botanist hears the scientific name but his/her brain ignores it as the brain triggers only in certain environments (like in a lab)? What if the botanist is not interested in Mangoes even after understanding it? As you can see, your potential customers are narrowing down with every filter applied. This is exactly antithesis to "selling to as many as possible".
But if he shouts "Mangos for 5$" he attracts everyone interested in a Mango, including the botanist.
And I don't want to sound nasty but no technology is so advanced that it cannot be simplified. Also don't forget that people can smell bullshit from a mile away. That is what I have learnt from experience. We Engineers like to overcomplicate and overpromise stuff that will only come back to bite us later. Just follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
> Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale things
This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again.
I work in an agency, I won't work with you if you do this, because you will get the same results and blame me.
> Lesson #2: Focus on page quality and CTR when doing paid tests
Nope don't do this. When testing ads you should focus on the ads you are testing.
Make as many as you can, test, review and reduce to the winning ads then repeat. When you have found the ads with good CTR it's time to start working on page quality (making your page relevant to the ad).
> Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for
Again no don't do this, write ads to test your keywords build pages for the ads that work, not the other way around this isn't SEO.
> Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid
Different ads target customers at different stages of the buying journey, ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic.
> Lesson #5: Analytics will save (some of) your bacon > Lesson #6: Revisit your awareness ladder often to validate and update it
Winner winner chicken dinner, some good advice.
This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again.
Unless I misunderstand you, you misunderstood them. They are saying that they didn't test and trim first and paid a lot of money to the agency that they didn't need to. They should have started with a smaller set.
> Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid
Different ads target customers at different stages of the buying journey, ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic.
So do organic searches. The initial Google hypothesis was that if someone was searching they would be interested in buying, and showing them an ad right then would be optimal because they are interested in buying (or else they wouldn't click it).
The idea that conversion is better with organic than ad does indeed seem to falsify that hypothesis. But maybe not. There could be click-fraud involved, too, which can dramatically drop the conversion rate.
The agency will add 20% on the spend because they can get better results than the client doing keyword research, writing ads and testing them.
The client did the hard work for the agency basically made the campaign themselves and then paid the agency 20% to set it live.
They should have done it the other way around get the agency to setup the campaign and then "scale" it themselves and they would have been able to an extra 20% ad spend for nothing.
The second point you are right again. I mean more that the funnel should start at the point of contact with the end user (the ad) and the landing page should be built for that ad, they seem to have tried to do it the other way around.
They obviously know what they are doing as far as tactics, it looks like they learned it from SEO, but I think they have tried to apply an SEO strategy of content first to their ad campaign and it didn't work.
You can't change advertising channels so you need to change your content to fit the channel not the other way around.
Regarding this:
> ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic.
What do you mean exactly? Isn't a landing page the top of the funnel by definition?
This user-centric idea of a funnel is different than the website-centric view of the funnel where you start with a landing page and end with a lead form or purchase. The phrase "Customer Journey" usually gets bandied about to refer to the former, although it also often gets bandied about without referring to anything at all.
It may as well have been written by an ancient alien civilization for all I understood.
Probably we’ll hear something very like this when SETI receives a signal from another star system.
I've no doubt that if you're unfamiliar with marketing that these terms are new (in the same way that if you're a marketer and reading about database indexing you're going to have to do a little work to figure out what everything means.)
This is important to me not because I've any stake in this (I've no affiliation with Uploadcare) but because I worry that the knee jerk rejection of any kind of marketing by developers really hurts startups and bootstrappers.
There is definitely blather in the marketing world [1], I'm just saying this isn't it.
1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...
You can’t say “hey ordinary person I’ll save you wasting $50k on AdWords” then instantly drop straight deep into the most arcane of mumbled, cryptic, faded rune digital marketing magic speak.
Refer to the comment below from HN user 83457 who explains same but in English.
> The best minds in any profession are never guilty of jargon, expect when they are very tired. Pedestrian minds are drawn towards it automatically and to the most frightening extent. Jargon, one could suggest, is the natural weapon of highly paid people with very little of any value to say. It is a sad and ironical comment on our society that many people feel released from the pressure to use jargon only when they have reached the top of their profession, by which time it may be too late to change one's habits. , however one might wish to. Ambitious people, still busy climbing the ladder, may well consider it professional dangerous to use straightforward language. One therefore has the paradox that only the person who has finally arrived, with [their] reputation secure, can afford to be simple and jargon-free. Lesser mortals appear to need their jargon, as a membership-badge of their profession. They do not have the confidence to face the world without it.
Do I escape the tendency towards jargon? No, not by a long shot, but pieces like this are a good reminder as to why it is worth the effort to keep trying.
And so just like you wouldn't remove the jargon from a medical journal not sure why you would want to in this case.
I saw one where they where talking about keyword density and counting the names of the <div> elements.
The name of the consultancy is redacted
I’m glad they clarified what “net negative churn” means, that really cleared things up.
Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we are looking for ways to improve the quality of our products by providing a service to our clients with the highest level of service for the remainder of the year.
New customers spending new money (net new)
Current customers increasing spend (expansion)
Current customers decreasing spend (contraction)
Current customers leaving (traditional churn)
Net negative churn means when you add up the bottom three, revenue has increased.
Another way to say it is you don’t have to add new customers to keep growing revenue.
Churn -> people canceling their subscriptions.
Churn Rate -> rate at which they're canceling (ex: 5% a month)
Net Negative Churn Rate -> if the overall dollar amount of people moving from $50/mo plans to $100/mo plans is higher than the dollar amount of people canceling subscriptions.
So while the Churn Rate doesn't change (still 5% a month) the overall monthly revenue is still increasing. This is really hard to do and it's a good indicator that they're making something that people really want and are willing to pay to use.
let use_increase = (Increased income from existing customers using the service more)
assert churn > use_increase;
net_churn = churn - use_increase;
assert is_negative(net_churn);
I feel a bit the same way reading this article. There's a lot of talk about conversion rates and funnels and semantic cores and awareness ladders but in the end does do they have a product that people actually want?
Having bad SEO and a confusing website is bad because it could make it harder for people to buy your product but it's not going to magically make people buy something they don't want.
Also I wonder if focusing entirely on "conversion rate" is fair. There are other benefits to advertisement, such as increasing brand awareness for instance. After all look at the vast majority of real world ads, there's basically a 0% conversion rate. People don't see a Coca Cola ad on TV and immediately go the supermacket to buy a bottle. I don't see a football player wearing Nikes and immediately go online to shop for shoes.
Maybe somebody will click on your ad, browse your website for a bit, think it's interesting and months later they'll convince their boss to use it for their next big product.
Their example query of "file upload php" is someone who's looking for a solution right this second, so it's not unreasonable that they would sign up and try out the service right this second.
The reason people focus on conversion rate is because you can easily calculate spend and predict RoI. Coke can spend on a TV ad because it's a drop in the bucket but every dollar is valuable to a bootstrapped company. Exactly why you want to know what you'll get before one blow 50k on adwords.
Then when I go to the website: "Full stack adaptive delivery"
I have no idea why their adverts aren't converting, I mean who isn't into full stack adaptive delivery? So. Damn. Compelling...
Might be worth watching some of the YC Startup School videos to get up to speed.
Now, where are the statistical metrics and causal inference assessments?
this is because that's how google gets paid.
you can create a great ad that's not terribly relevant to a specific audience, get good ctr but poor conversion.
some tips:
make sure to watch your search query reports and continuously refine your [hopefully shared] carefully-applied negative keywords lists.
avoid broad match like the plague. we use mostly phrase and modified broad with good negative phrase lists that have been continously honed over many months.
don't hyper-segment keyword or ad variations, it'll become a nightmare to manage with little-to-no benefit.
also, whether paid ads are worth it is highly dependent on your market, competitors, and your typical conversion value.
because our typical orders exceed $500, we see double-digit factor returns on ad spend even though we're an established, well-known mfg name in our market.
and yes, be ready to waste some money when dialing things in - $50k in a month of pure waste is quite a lot but that same amount "wasted" on tweaking over the course of 6mo-1yr is not out of the ballpark, assuming it yields progressively increasing ROI.
YMMV
if i was google, i would make sure that the ctr was as high as possible while the conversion rate was just enough to be worth it.
there are a lot of fine-grained controls missing from the adwords backend which waste money. for example, you cannot segment iphones from android, or forcibly exclude ie11 because you have chosen not to support it any more and the site falls apart on it. you cannot prevent ads from showing to visitors who've already come and bounced. they keep expanding how much "modified broad" sucks in by making the matching looser - with little notice. and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
lots of things that can easily save you money do not exist in their backend. imo these are not oversights but are left out intentionally.
> "...a customer acquisition cost way above one-third of customer lifetime value"
Is this really so terrible? As I understand it a lot of mobile games pay more for acquisition than they'll make from the user in e.g. IAP's to scale up their player base and climb the charts. What is a normal CPA vs LTV in the SaaS space?
Also, if you pay less to acquire these customers than you will make from them over time, you haven't quite wasted 50k have you?
This sounds self-evident but we all know sales people who sell a fiction and then engineering has to scramble to (try to) turn it into reality.
People click an ad to learn more, if they are presented with a specific use-case but land on a generic marketing page they will click the back button.
That combined with the increasing crackdown by the consumer on blocking data tracking raises serious questions on the long term viability of the business models of some big players in the industry.
For years myself and other engineers have been warning the product owners that third party user tracking's life span is very much finite - Firefox was going to block 3rd party cookies by default several years back, but walked it back because Google weren't ready for that and threatened to withdraw the money Mozilla makes from them, but it was the sign of the end times.
Now that Google can identify you with reasonable probability without using cookies, they won't hold Firefox back, they don't need to, and it suits them to roll out the third party blocking in Chromium, alongside browser cache partitioning to avoid the classic circumventions - ETags, steganographed PNGs etc. as first implemented by Safari. UA strings, often used in fingerprinting, are also not long for this world.
And of course, now that Google has a solution that doesn't require cookies or fingerprinting, Chrome is all about that privacy lol - the fact that it hurts Google's competitors is merely happy circumstance.
The amount of panic in adtech companies now is hilarious because they chose to mimic an ostrich until the browsers left them no choice - but they're still flailing around and demanding devs try to find alternatives to 3rd party cookies.
The cookie based user tracking paradigm is dead, but there's a shit ton of people, especially in DSPs and DMPs whose salary relies on them not believing that.
> A clear funnel with established conversion rates, check
Is it checked? > 20% of people hitting our landing page block Segment which then blocks a portion of our analytics. It's pretty hard to get the full picture on your users, especially those coming from ads.