PPC seems to be working. What now?

Discussions
#1

As I’ve shared in some other posts, I started using a PPC service about a month ago, and then yesterday I got two new customers from it. The service is called Capterra and right now I’m spending $500/mo, the max I can justify until I get a bigger sample size and know my numbers better.

The question in my mind now is what to do next other than just wait for more results to come in.

There are certain things I know I need to do, including:

  • Browser test my marketing site
  • Improve the copy on my landing pages
  • Add screenshots (or maybe even videos) to my features/pricing page
  • More miscellaneous stuff like that

I certainly plan to do these things but there’s a nagging voice in my head that says these are just drop-in-the-bucket actions and maybe there’s something more impactful I can do.

So is there something more impactful I can do or should I just keep chipping away at the little tasks I know I need to complete?

Sub-question: I’m also having trouble coming up with meaningful goals. To me a goal is result-based as opposed to task-based (e.g. “get 5 new customers” as opposed to “finish website”), although I can’t think of any results in my business I can influence on a time scale that doesn’t seem geological. So any help in the goal-setting area would be very much appreciated too. Thanks in advance.

#2

Have you made a prioritized list of everything you need to do? That might shake loose more important tasks, or help you appreciate the value of known tasks. WRT the list you made, I didn’t see A/B testing. Are you doing anything else besides Capterra to get more potential customers?

[quote=“jasonswett, post:1, topic:3248”]
To me a goal is result-based as opposed to task-based (e.g. “get 5 new customers” as opposed to “finish website”), although I can’t think of any results in my business I can influence on a time scale that doesn’t seem geological.[/quote]One idea I’ve seen is a negative metric, such as “get 100 cold call rejections”. The idea being that by making 100 cold calls, a few of them will result in sales.

#3

Generally before running a full fledged PPC campaign (i.e. not one created only to test the waters) you want to make sure you have two things done.

  1. Have a product-market fit
  2. Have an optimized funnel (high visitor to trial conversion, high trial to paid conversion)
  3. Have low churn rates
  4. A measure of customer lifetime value (this depends on your pricing and churn rate), to know how much you can afford to spend to aquire a single customer.

Without having the above done, you might not get the most bang for your buck. For an idea on what are good conversion rates, I think one of the Ruben Gomez interviews on Startups For the Rest of us podcast had a lot of information on ranges for the churn and conversion numbers. Having an idea of these numbers will help you create meaningful, measurable goals.

Apart from these there are a few other things I would look at

  • Optimize your user on-boarding process
  • Use Re-targeting to bring back the customers you got from PPC(I find facebook retargetting work best for my SaaS business)
  • If you find your visitor to trial conversion rate is very low, you could focus on capturing email leads instead (Maybe have a drip campaign to nurture them into becoming a customer)
#4

@akash Wow, those are great things to think about. Thanks. I feel compelled to share where I’m at with those.

  1. I believe, unless I don’t understand product-market fit, that I’ve already reached product-market fit. My product matches what the market wants. (Although that’s not to say there aren’t features I could add to make the product substantially more appealing.)
  2. I don’t even have enough data to know how effective my funnel is, so I definitely couldn’t say it’s optimized yet.
  3. As far as I can tell, customers tend to stay pretty much forever once they’re fully onboarded. Low sample size, but I have 12 customers now, and I’ve only ever lost one. So 8% churn rate?
  4. This is hard to measure due to the low churn rate. My estimate has been $2000, although I don’t know how I’ll ever really know this without waiting a super long time. At this point in time I don’t mind paying more to acquire a customer than it’s “worth” because I just want to get the ball rolling and get some activity already.

@steve I’m just using Capterra. I’ve listed everything I think I should do now, but not everything I need to do ever. The list is so mundane and low-level that a voice is kicking in telling me I’m thinking at a level too close to the ground. I’m familiar with the negative metric idea, and I do like that. Trouble with the PPC campaign is the only way I can get 100 rejections is to WAIT for each lead to come.

I guess I will in fact continue with the original to-dos since I am 100% certain that those will be worthwhile activities, and in the meantime I’ll follow up with the leads that come through the PPC campaign.