paid ads are hard (sometimes)

a little hack to see if they're working

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half. ~ John Wanamaker

Same goes for paid ads. There are plenty of people who will tell you with absolute conviction that they can set up and monitor your paid ads spend and see exactly who clicks.

They’re full of it.

There is always uncertainty in any growth activity. There are always external forces at play. There has to be a degree of risk, because no matter which channel you choose, it will change eventually.

We’re running paids ads on Google and LinkedIn. Both platforms offer analytics and tracking. Despite that, adding UTM parameters, and other ways of measuring attribution, we haven’t seen the amount of conversions we want.

“Who’s clicking these ads,” I wondered. The copy is targeted. The audience is supposedly targeted. The ads should attract the right people—or people who are lot like the right people.

Then we installed RB2B, a little tool that promises to “identify your anonymous website visitors.”

And poof! Website visitors go from anonymous numbers to names and LinkedIn profiles.

And wow were we seeing the wrong people visit our site.

Accoil is a B2B SaaS customer health scoring tool. It’s for customer success teams and Saas companies who get surprised by churn. Churn being customers closing accounts and stopping payments without any warning (except there are warnings if you know where to look).

Who’s coming to our website? Owners of health clinics, hospitals, doctors offices, physiotherapists, and other human health-related. 🤦‍♂️

There are some good leads showing up. It’s not all bad news. But it’s most bad fit than good fit and it’s been very eye-opening to see exactly who shows up when we run these ads that we thought were highly targeted.

If you’re running ads, watch closely who they bring to you. Use a tool like RB2B.com to see who is really showing up.

Maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Maybe you’ll be happy with the ratio. Maybe you’ll see what we did and want to run quickly to Google Ads and hit the pause button.

To finding the better half of our ad spend,

Peter

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