Over the past few years I have invested a lot of time in the development of Digital-Ink and the focus of my work should now shift to reaching out to my target audience: convincing creative writers to take a trial subscription. Although I have the marketing theory in my luggage, I have little experience applying it. Where do I start, my target audience seems so fragmented? Exactly, ask ChatGPT. The options that my artificial advisor listed were legion, but each also quite labor-intensive, such as blogging, social media marketing, partnerships with writing coaches and publishers, joining writing communities and more. The last point mentioned was Google Ads.
Thàt sounded like a quick win.

The following month was November, and I thought it would be nice to get an ad campaign up before the popular NaNoWriMo^[1] started, since that’s when a lot of writers might be looking for writing software to participate with. Plus, I had just gotten spam from Google Ads offering me 400 euro credit for my first campaign. All signs that this was the way to go. (Plus, I was curious to see how well Google Ads would work for Digital-Ink.)

The Google Ads site, where you create your campaign, is quite complex, at least that’s what I thought. I quickly got the impression that it is aimed at large companies that employ specialists who focus on creating Google Ads campaigns. So I searched on YouTube for videos about how it works. Eventually it dawned on me that there are different types of campaigns. Because I always chose a campaign goal that I wanted to achieve, it remained hidden from me what type of campaign was used for that. Usually it was the 'Performance Max' campaign, where your ads were shown via different channels. Only later did I notice that you don’t have to choose a goal, but you can also choose a campaign type directly. After a few tries I chose the campaign type 'search engine'.

You can configure a lot. For example, in which countries your ads should be shown. Digital-Ink is intended for all creative writers worldwide, so I set it so that the (English) ad would be shown in any country. Another important question: what do you want to pay for? For clicking on your ad or for something more specific, such as starting a trial subscription. I chose the latter. That did mean that I had to place code from Google Ads on my website, so that Google Ads could determine that the 'start your free trial' button was ultimately clicked via the ad, to determine that a successful conversion had taken place. And what is that click from the customer worth to you? You can set a limit per click, but you can also let Google determine this during the automated bidding process that takes place behind the scenes, for example when a user enters a search query. That seemed the easiest to me, although I also felt a bit at the mercy of Google.

In addition to the cost per click, you can also set a daily limit, so how much you want to spend on advertisements per day. Google Ads promises that the costs in a month will not be higher than your daily limit times the number of days in that month. I had chosen my daily limit so that my costs in a month would not be higher than just over 400 euros. Then I could nicely cash the 400 euros credit that Google had promised me, to let the campaign run for two months. However, when entering my voucher I saw that only after I had paid 400 euros, Google would check whether I was entitled to 400 euros credit and that could take some time. Hmmm.

I started my campaign on October 15th and gave the end date November 15th, then it will have run for a month and I will have spent about 400 euros, the maximum I wanted to spend at that time. The first two days no new accounts were created, but on day three it started to run. There were almost eleven new registrations, hurray! Some had not confirmed their email address, others had not logged in after confirmation. A few had logged in, but had not typed or tried anything else, and I found that strange. And they were mostly from countries where I did not expect them to be willing to pay for online writing software, such as Vietnam, Nigeria, India, Cameroon, Brazil etc. Not a single registration from rich western countries. Fake accounts? I don’t know, but they were not accounts that would become active users. The next day the same thing. In the meantime I received a message from Google that they were going to collect the first advance and then I very quickly limited the countries in which the advertisement could be shown to only rich western countries. And then the increase in the number of new accounts dropped. At the end of October the bill had risen to just over 400 euros. I realized that Google does not calculate with the number of days that your campaign runs in a calendar month, but with the number of days in a calendar month. So I paused my campaign. At that point I had paid 460 euros and I had not had a single meaningful registration (i.e. registrations that actually typed text after logging in).
That was a valuable lesson.