Few weeks ago I decided to try my first adwords campaign for The Booking Bee beta sign up. I wanted to try this MVP thing everyone speaks about and really see if I’ll get some interest for the product before I really throw myself into it and build it. It was the first time I had to deal with AdWords. Knowing nothing about it I thought it would be enough doing my usual: scan the software, try out a few commands and usually getting the hang of it (or a general idea how to operate it) quite soon. Ad Words is a different beast, though. It is quite complex and it has a whole lot of terms that one needs to learn. It is not an afternoon job – it is more like a week (or two) project by itself. Not to mention the whole SEO thing (if you really want to do a good job). Here was my plan of action:
- get a nice template for the landing page from Themeforest
- modify it so that it suits Booking Bee better
- create adwords campaign
- profit!
The first two bullet points were no brainer for me. Third and fourth are turning out to be a bit harder than originaly planned.
I got a really nice template and tweaking it was not really a problem. Even completely changing the icons for features list was easy. Writing the copy, on the other hand, turned out to be harder. Specialy if you want to say something meaningful and would like to avoid the usual selling buzzwords. I am not very well versed in that, unfortunatelly, thus i spent a great deal just staring at the screen with a blank head.
On to setting up AdWords.
I found a great blog by Octoclick helping me to understand what all the major options meant. Still the biggest problem I had was to find the right keywords.
What do people search for when they want to find a software helping them manage bookings and expenses for their vacation rentals? No idea. I set up some basic words and phrases that i thought would bring users to my site and make then sign up: vacation lettings, landlord, booking calendar, vacation expenses … How wrong I was! Yes, majority of them did bring traffic to my site, but they weren’t relevant enough! All they did was eating up money from my day limit so the add stopped showing after few clicks! And I only realized that three days into the campaing. As soon as I removed them and added more relevant set to the campaing i was paying much less for a bigger click through rate (but still very low). No sign ups, yet, though.
Another mistake was to set only one version of the text ad. No! You want to have different variations of it so that different sets of keywords trigger the display of the most appropriate add. Again, it took me 6 days to finaly correct this.
Third mistake: The title of the add. Initially it was the name of the web app – The Booking Bee. This meant nothing to anybody. When I changed it to something more relevant to the search (Vacation Rental Software) my keywords started to have much bigger quality score, meaning that i could also drop the bid price. Too bad it already cost me more than a half of my budget for this experiment and one week was wasted.
Sumary so far:
- initial budget: £35
- impressions: 20,592
- clicks: 43
- CTR: 0.21%
- money spent: £24.31
- time running: 1 week
- beta sign ups: 2