Lean Advertising 101 Paid Acquisition for Startups

@clementdelangue from @Curioos

Why entrepreneurs don’t try it (and why they’re wrong)?

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Paid  acquisi*on  will  allow  you  to  test  and  get  to  product  market  fit  much  faster.  

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“We focus on product development to reach the Product Market Fit”

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How   much   of   the   founders   *me   (aka   big  money)   is   spent   on   growth?   With   paid  acquisi*on,  you  can  start  at  $5  a  day.  

“We don’t have a marketing budget”

!It  took  us  6  days  from  start  to  scaling  to  $10k/month  budget  with  a  posi3ve  ROI  for  Curioos.  !

“We don’t have either the expertise or time.”

Ready to try?

3 steps to scale in a week

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!#1 Get your Analytics right!

Ad#impression#

Website#visit#

Sign#up#

Conversion#

Reten5on##

C over the user funnel as much as you can…At Curioos, we’ve added to our

Google Analytics setup: !

* The e-commerce module to track conversions.

!* A spreadsheet to track all our

campaigns with url builder (courtesy of @Jolg42 from 20 degrés à l’ombre.

!PS. make sure it’s accurate by excluding

internal traffic.

…as largely as you can.

We’ve added the Demographics and Interest Reports.

Focus on a few main metrics and proxy metrics

At Curioos, our main metric is

revenue. !!

Use proxy metrics if you need. !

Ex: we’re also using bounce rate + time on site + pages / visits as a proxy for

conversion to let us experiment with low volumes (not perfect but better than

nothing).

Good metric

Relevant for your long-term success

Easy to measure & follow on a day-to-day basis

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+ !!

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#2 Experiment, experiment, experiment

Choose your experiment channels

We’ve tried: !

Adwords (mainstream) Facebook (mainstream) Twitter (mainstream)

Fancy (vertical) Amazon Art (vertical) Adroll (retargeting)

Good Paid Acquisition Mix

A mainstream channel (Adwords/Facebook/Twitter/…)

A vertical channel to diversify the risk.

= !

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+ !!

$5 to $15/day per experiment Analyze, compare al l the steps of the funnel, from impression to

conversion, and iterate every 3 days.

Example of our first negative experiment

Example of our first positive experiment

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!#3 Iterate & Scale

M1Main Branch

ExperimentA B

…

M1A M1B

If M2A_ROI > M1 >M2 then M2A => M3

If MIA_ROI and MIB_ROI < M1 then M2 => M1 x 2

M2M2A M2B

M3 M3BM3A

Our scaling process to get to $10k/month

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If A_ROI > 0 then A => M

Don’t make these mistakes (we did )

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If you’re doing CPC, optimize for conversion post-click. If you’re doing CPM, optimize for Click-

through-Rate.

Don’t make these mistakes (1/3)

Optimizing for the wrong goal

<= performs 30% better than ==>

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Don’t make these mistakes (2/3)

Trust esthetics rather than figures

Can you say why? (I can’t)

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If the ROI is good, scale as fast as you can (because it may not last forever)

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Don’t make these mistakes (3/3)

Capping the budget

That’s all (for the moment - stil l learning)

@clementdelangue from @Curioos