Paid Acquisition

Think of paid acquisition as a way to talk to strangers at scale. It is an amazing way to step on the gas once we've determined who our users are. There are a lot of places to spend our money to acquire traffic. We'll focus on the two we think are the most effective when getting started - Google Adwords and Facebook.

There are many differences between these platforms - but a critical difference that becomes important in choosing where to start is that Adwords is "search based" and Facebook is "targeting based".

Do we know enough about our audience to know what they are looking for? Are enough of them actively searching for it using consistent language? If the answer is yes, we've got a strong case for starting with Adwords. We can step right up and introduce ourselves right when they are most interested.

If, on the other hand, we know a lot about our audience based on their age, their location, their interests, AND they may not be actively seeking our product or service - then using Facebook to target our audience and expose them to our offering is a great option.

It's safe to assume that everyone is very familiar with the ads that pop up when we search something on Google - those are driven by Google's ad serving platform Adwords. Adwords is to marketing what coffee is to our morning routine. It's going to allow us to step on the gas and accelerate our rate of customer acquisition.

While Adwords is awesome for a wide variety of things - its core super power is putting us in front of people in the moment they are looking for something.

To get started with Google Adwords, visit their website at https://ads.google.com/home/ and click “Start Now.”

From here, you’ll need to have an email address and business website. If you don’t have a website yet, that’s okay. You can still use AdWords Express — Google’s “light” version.

If you already have a Google account (like Gmail, for example), you can go ahead and use that. If not, or if you want to use a different sign-in email address, click “Create an account” at the bottom of the screen and go through the steps to create and confirm your new Google account.

Now that we’ve setup Adwords, let’s talk about how to create your first campaign.

Since our goal is to acquire our first 100 customers, we need to make sure we’re targeting the exact key phrases and words these customers would use to find us on Google. To do that, we’ll use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. You will need to have set up an Adwords account already.

Think of the Keyword Planner like a beefed-up thesaurus: We’ll enter phrases we think our prospects are searching for — and Google shares any similar phrases, how often people search for these phrases, how competitive the keywords are in AdWords and — last, but definitely not least — how much paper we’ll have to spend to advertise on each of these keywords.

• If we’re hanging out in Oregon — we’ll set the “Location” to United States
• and the “Language” to English.
• The “Device” option should automatically select desktops and mobile devices — which is what we’ll want — unless we decide to only target mobile devices.

After that’s all squared away — we’ll click on the “Columns” drop down and take a peek at our: Competition, Local Monthly Searches and the Approximate Cost-Per-Click (CPC).

Because we’re in Oregon, Local Monthly Searches will show us the searches happening throughout the United States. We’ll also get a first look at the AdWords competition and the CPC for each keyword.

Then we’ll type in the phrases that we think our First 100 customers are typing into Google right into the “Word or Phrase” box — and then hit “Search”.

The Keyword Planner will then spit out a nice little list of keyword ideas that are similar to the phrase we just searched. In addition, our little beefcake thesaurus will spill the beans on AdWords Competition, Local Monthly Searches and will give us a ballpark estimate for the CPC for each keyword.

• Do we know if the person searching for this particular keyword a good fit to buy what we’re selling? If they aren’t, then we’re just flushing money down the drain.
• If the search volume is majorly lacking — that means no one is searching. So, why bother advertising with this keyword?
• Do we know if we can afford to advertise on this particular keyword?

That last question is tricky, though. Is it true that we should spend money to make money? Sometimes. But, not always.

To figure out if we can afford to advertise on any one keyword, we’ll need to calculate our Maximum Cost-Per-Click (Max CPC) and then compare this to the estimated keyword CPC from the Keyword Planner.

Since we’re working on getting our very first customer we’ll have to take some educated guesses to figure this out.

Next, we’ll take a ride on our own time-travelling Tardis to learn more about the keywords, landing pages and ads that have worked in our market — and the ones that totally bombed, so we can avoid them.

To get historical advertising data on our competitors — we won’t need to talk to some dude in a Guy Fawkes mask. Instead, we’ll use our competitor research tool du jour to get an inside look at our competitors — without hatching some illegal hacking plan.

Top competitor research tools:

• SEMRush
• SpyFu
• KeywordSpy
• iSpionage
• HitTail

When analyzing our competitors, we’ll be sure to pay close attention to the date that they started to advertise on each keyword. If they’ve been using any one keyword for an extended length of time, there’s a good chance that it’s a money-maker — so, we’ll add it to our list of keywords.  

Now, it’s time to dangle a carrot in front of our audience.

What could we offer in our AdWords campaign that our target customer would be unable to resist? Also — what can we do to stand out from all the other ads?

We need to make that what we offer in our campaign is:

1. Valuable
2. Believable
3. Safe
4. A Killer Call to Action

Here’s a good example of an ad -

We’re going to want to point all of this traffic to a specific “Landing Page” which we will discuss later. For now we’ll just need to have at least one destination to point this traffic to.

We want to make the entire sales process totally seamless and reassuring. We’ll need to have a snappy headline that will reconfirm our amazing offer from our ad — and keep our soon-to-be-customer wanting more.

Alright — our ads are live! Hallelujah!

Once our traffic is up and running, let’s now look at how we setup our landing page, track our activity and analyze the results.

Facebook tries to get us setup and spending quickly (no surprise!). The onboarding process with Facebook advertising is pretty slick. Once we sign up — we’ll be prompted to create our very first campaign.

The first thing we’ll do is decide what our target outcome should be. Do we want to get more “likes”? Drive traffic to a certain webpage? Get people to download our app? Or are we trying to convert prospects into bona-fide customers?

Next, we’ll decide what kind of ad we want to run, and who that target audience is.

Then, we’ll have to actually create the ad part of our Facebook Ad. We’ll need to decide on images, the copy we’re going to use and which CTA button to add — if any!

The good news is that we can have several ads targeted towards the same audience, and kill the underperformers.

Feeling deja vu-ish?

No worries. This is basically the same exact structure we just covered earlier for Google AdWords. Lookalike Audiences take some of the guesswork out of ad targeting, and gives our click-through rate (CTR) a boost since buyers usually express similar behaviors.

Retargeting ads are one of the easiest ways to attract the right customers — and capture some sweet, sweet revenue.

With Facebook, we can set up retargeting ads to reach an audience of people who have previously visited our website. Heck, we can even target the people who took a specific action on our website.

For example: When a user signs up for our newsletter, we can use an opt-in plugin to fire a Facebook tracking pixel once they’ve successfully subscribed.

This gives us the opportunity to target our subscribed users on Facebook and showcase any additional products or services we offer.

1. Step 1: Setting up Facebook Pixel
   Before kicking off our retargeting campaign on Facebook, we need to install the Facebook pixel on our website. The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that we’ll place on our website to track conversions and create audience segments within Facebook.
2. Step 2: Login to Facebook Ads Manager
   Once we’re logged into the Ads Manager, we’ll click on the drop down in the top left of the navigation menu and select “Audiences”. This is where we specify exactly WHO we want to target.
3. Step 3: Creating our Custom AudienceOnce we’re in the “Audiences” tab, we’ll click on “Create Audiences” and then on “Custom Audience”. Facebook will then presents us with 4 different options for creating our audience.
   If we want to create a list-based retargeting campaign, we’d click on the Customer File option — but, let’s go ahead and use the “Website Traffic” option in our hypothetical example.
   Once we’re on the next screen, we’ll see 5 options for creating our audience:
   • Anyone who visits our website
   • People who visit specific pages
   • People visiting specific web pages but not others
   • People who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time
   • Custom combination
     After we’ve made our decision, we’ll click “Create Audience”.
4. Step 4: Making it all “Ad” upSee that big green “CREATE ADVERTISEMENT” button in the top right hand corner of Facebook Ads Manager? That’s what we want to click on.
5. Step 5: What’s our goal?
   Now, we’ll need to decide which of Facebook’s 15 marketing objectives for ads lines up with our end goal. This all really depends on the type of retargeting ad we’re looking to run, like:
   • Awareness → Content
   • Consideration → Lead generation
   • Direct Sales → Conversion
   If we’re trying to get people to read our most recent blog post, we’ll select “awareness”. If we want folks to subscribe to our newsletter, we’ll choose “consideration”. And, if we want to sell more gadgets and gizmos — we’ll pick “conversions”.
   Now, we’ll need to name our campaign and finalize creating our ad.
6. Step 6: Dude. Where’s our audience?
   With our phasers set to stun — we just need to select our target audience that we set up in Step 3 by clicking on “Use Saved Audience” and then choose the right one.
7. Step 7: Time to rock!
   Alright — once we have our audience setup — we are ready to rock and roll. To start, let’s budget spending $100 on this campaign. We’ll split this amount up to cover more of our bases: $75 on Facebook Sidebar retargeting ads and $25 on one News Feed ad.
   We want to spend more of our budget on the sidebar ad because this will be shown more often than a News Feed ad. With retargeting, frequency is our friend. Usually, a user will have to see an ad 8 or more times before they finally click.
   In order to fully measure the results of our retargeting campaign, we need to commit to at least 30 days. This is a good time frame because people who come to us via retargeting usually don’t buy right away. (Otherwise they would have sealed the deal when they were on our site the very first time.)
   Regardless of our marketing goals, retargeting is one of the very best channels we can use to capture our customers attention — and payment information.
   Once our traffic is up and running, let’s now look at how we setup our landing page, track our activity and analyze the results.

A landing page is a website page that allows us to capture a visitor's information through a lead form. This could be a dedicated page or it could just be our homepage. But, a great landing page should be directed towards a certain stream of traffic — like from an email campaign advertising a certain product.

And — because our landing page is extremely targeted and because we have an interesting offer behind the lead capture form — we will most likely convert a higher percentage of folks who visit that landing page.

But, do we really need to use dedicated landing pages?

Oftentimes, people send their advertising, email, or social media traffic directly to their homepage. Doing this is actually a huge missed opportunity.

When we’re sending a targeted audience to our website, we can do things to increase the chances of them converting with a targeted landing page. Makes sense, right?

So, we’re ready to create our first landing page — but, we aren’t sure how to ensure that it runs smoother than a fresh jar of Skippy. To ensure that our landing page is doing all the heavy lifting — we need to pay attention to these elements:

• Limit Navigation. Limit the number of exits from your landing page so that your visitors are focused on filling out your form. A key part of this is to hide your website navigation elements on landing pages.
• Deliver Value. Is our offer compelling to our audience? Does our landing page demonstrate that value?
• Keep it Short. The longer our landing page and form is, the more friction you add to the lead conversion process. Keeping our lead form short and straightforward will increase our conversion rate.

Think of our website as the “hub” for all of our digital traffic. If we’re running any search ads or social media ads — our users are (hopefully!) going to visit our website somewhere along the customer journey.

To get a holistic view of the effectiveness of all the online campaigns we’re running to promote our product/services, we’ll need to use one of the most powerful analytic tools out there:
Google Analytics.
Google Analytics offers some of the most advanced tracking and reporting features — and it is totally free to use. You can find the official guide of setting up Google Analytics here.

Basically, Google Analytics puts several lines of tracking code into the code of our website that records the various activities of our users — along with a few attributes — like age, gender, interests, etc.

Google Analytics aggregates the data collected from our website and separates it into these four levels:

1. User level (related to actions by each user)
2. Session level (each individual visit)
3. Pageview level (each individual page visited)
4. Event level (button clicks, video views, etc)

There are two types of data that we can collect in Google Analytics:

1. User Acquisition Data: Data about our users before they visit our websiteWe can access data about your user demographics before they ever visit our website (e.g. their age, gender, and interests). We can also get data about where they are coming from — whether from Facebook, other websites, or Google search.
   Think of this data as “user acquisition data” because it can help us figure out which user groups and channels to target.
2. User Behavior Data: data about your users when they visit our websiteThe second group of data is “user behavior” data — which is collected during a user’s session on our website. “User behavior” data include:
   • How long a user stayed on our website
   • The first and last page visited on our website
   • The most common “pathway” through which they go through our website

Unlike “user acquisition” data, “user behavior” data can be manipulated by any tweaks we make to our website. We do this by identifying where our users get “stuck”. We’ll then want to make any changes to ensure that the user experience is smoother than a jar of Jiffy.

Congratulations, you now have 100 Customers... and counting!

We now have the foundations not only for our First 100 customers, but the basis for how we will expand our marketing long term. Any one of these channels can scale damn near infinitely so a lot of the heavy lifting we just did will pay off for a long time to come.

We're also going to learn what channels perform best for us. For example, we may find that no one really engages us on our social media channels but our Google Adwords goes nuts. That's fine. We're not going to know where to invest more time in customer acquisition until we go through the motions and this is the most efficient way to learn quickly.

"Great, when do I hit 1 million customers?!"

We'll work on that. Most of the time spent right now is simply going to be learning what we even want to say to our customers, how they respond, and how to continually shape our messaging.
Remember, we don't know how to address a million customers until we've figured out how to talk to 100.
As we mentioned, though, most of what we've just done will apply to all of our marketing, so if we find that we're getting good response rates on our newsletter, our social following is growing, and our paid acquisition is leading to some early customer gains, we can continue to grow with most of the same tactics.

Next Up: It Gets More Complicated

As we start to reach more customers, however, things do get a bit more complicated. We can spend money like drunken sailors if we're throwing a few hundred dollars at paid spend, but when that money runs into thousands, we have to really pay attention and optimize.
Our single landing page will work wonderfully for the time being, but with more traffic we're going to start focusing heavily on how to optimize it for maximum effect. And our creative and messaging is fine for now, but if we're going to go big time, we're going to have to spend some serious time on it.
We can cross that bridge later, so for now let's just stay heads down on engaging our initial audience and learning all that we can about our First 100. We'll be relying on them heavily for years to come!