Gambling on Google

That’s how I felt at least when I “launched” Familiarize and I spun the wheel on Google Adwords.?I had a pretty good idea of who I thought my customer was (I was wrong), I wrote some beautiful ad copy and, although thoroughly baffled by all the tag managers, conversion tracking and analytics, I clicked Enable Campaign and held my breath.

I then watched my daily budget deplete, fighting valiantly to resist Google’s pusher tactics to get me to spend more – “Up your daily limit.?Up it you fool – you’re missing out on millions of customers”.

After a week and ￡400 later, I went cold turkey – switched to Pause “Are you sure? Are you really sure?” Google asked.?But I’d had enough.?A bunch of clickthrough but no conversions.

As the blog title says it’s gambling.?Spray and pray. Crossing fingers. And pretty addictive. Especially with all that data to dazzle.

If you want to go down this route, you have to become a pro.?Like a professional gambler you have to know what you’re doing, how things work, when to stick and when to twist.

OK that’s about the limit of my gambling gen, so I’ll revert to what I do know about which is customers.?Because the best way to get good at Google Ads or (Facebook or LinkedIn Ads) is to know your customer, what job they’re struggling with and how you can help them make progress.?You’ll still need deep pockets and have to be prepared to put a lot of money down to learning, but at least you’ll start with good foundations.

Tip 1: Start with your target customer – a real person

I’ve said often enough I am not a big fan of personas – they’re often done very poorly, and can be shallow, snapshot and leave you missing out on other ‘personas’ with the same job to be done, looking for a solution like yours to hire.?

BUT I like personas because they humanise your customer, so you don’t think about them as a user or bot.

Build a bit of a profile of a couple of personas who have the job to be done you’ve observed (and get this validated in lots of no/low cost experiments)…Google uses pretty basic and often useless demographics to segment us all – and other than the search terms (which are actually a pretty powerful segmentation tool, but aren’t always easy to use) – demographics is all we have – gender, age, location.

You might as well use them as your starting point to narrow down who your ads will target.?Just be prepared to be wrong – and adjust systematically, one variable at a time.?

Tip 2: You need to get into their heads, because chances are how you’re describing their problem isn’t quite how they do.

For instance my friend Tom wisely said to me once “You shouldn’t call what you’re doing 'customer discovery', because that’s your name for the solution – my problem is finding customers”.?It was a good observation.

Just because I’m good at helping other founders and business owners with their customer discovery doesn’t mean I’m good at my own.?It’s a huge blind spot.

Because I am not my customer.?Rule number one of building a business.?Even if you were your customer, now you’re on the other side you’re no longer your customer.

It’s great to hear directly from customers how they refer to the problem and what language they’re using to find solutions.?But you can also validate this in online discussion groups (Reddit, Quora, Facebook groups etc), review sites (Trust Pilot, Feefo) and other social media (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) – anywhere people are moaning really.

So, tip 2 is use their language in your Ads to narrow your target audience even further.

Tip 3: Put your dollars into multiple, well-defined baskets

Start really broad and try multiple options – different configurations of ad copy speaking to different pain point descriptions and offers (using your personas and the language they use). Ideally link these to different landing pages, so you can measure effectiveness in terms of action.

To be fair Google does counsel you to work this way – even though, like any gambling organisation, it would prefer you to go big.

Optimisation is key. Even Google needs a lot of data to do this well, so try lots of things but in a structured way, one variable at a time, so you can see what’s working and what’s not.

This is Growth Hacking and it's a specialist skill. Although there’s lots of advice on this online for free, you might be better off finding someone on Fiverr who has more experience and can get you started, even if you pick up where they leave off.

A final word

You need to be really honest with yourself about your budget when it comes to Google ads.?There are many people who caution against them until much later stages – until you’re much more confident you know your customer.?And I tend to agree.

If like me you only have a few hundred pounds for each campaign (and it's really an experiment), you have to ask yourself if this is really a go-to-market strategy or just a hopeful one.?Because to build confidence you need lots of data over multiple experiments over a decent period of time – before you can start to see where you need to optimise.?And that takes deep pockets.

If you can’t afford this, try a different marketing strategy – social media, SEO, word of mouth; even PR could work out cheaper…

Whatever you do, it all starts with customer and solving a problem.?Get that right, and then use Google to scale.

Until then, betting on Google to find your customer feels like a pretty poor excuse for a business strategy to me.