I got a $200 noob lesson on google ads

by Tom

TLDR: target specific countries when using google ads, especially during early validation.

I've got a new product (shameless plug: https://artificial.pub) that I'm trying to get traction with. I've sold it to strangers in real life, but no internet strangers yet. I'm using Google ads to start with because they're so easy to get going. I intend to shift to Facebook/Insta ads once I get more shareable visual media in my toolkit.

When I looked at google ads on my phone and saw that my cost-per-click was $0.02 with a 4.5% clickthrough-rate, I was stoked. Amazing!!

When I saw that they weren't converting, I thought "well that's a damn good start. Next, I can improve the on-site conversion rate".

But once I dug a little deeper, the clicks were all coming from places where very few people will be able to afford what I'm selling (I'm not going to name names), and mostly places with a considerable language barrier.

That explained why my analytics was showing landing page load times over 20s on nextjs+vercel with SSG 🤯 and why there were 0 conversions from a couple of thousand visitors.

Google thought I was getting what I wanted, and overshot my "average daily budget" of $20 by 1000%. There goes my slowly-slowly validation budget for a couple of weeks. I wouldn't trust the algo's ideas about which ad assets work now, either.

Moral of the story is this: target specific countries, especially during early validation.

Secondary moral: damn it felt good when I thought two thousand potential customers had just flocked to my site. Bring it on! 🤘