Comments on Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online...

Thanks for the post. I've actually made the mi...

2011-04-27T10:43:55.986-07:00

Thanks for the post. I've actually made the mistake you mentioned of investing time/money on building a product that not a lot of people wanted. I have yet to use Google Adwords but we are using Facebook ads and getting a few signups each day on our splash page for a new project. Looking to do Google Adwords next.

Great how to, Eric. In the standard talk I give o...

2011-04-27T08:59:48.302-07:00

Great how to, Eric. In the standard talk I give on go-to-market for startups (http://www.slideshare.net/HBSChris/gotomarket-for-geeks), I always recommend this blog (when I started giving it two years ago, fewer people knew about the Lean Startup!). Now when I recommend using AdWords/Craigslist/eBay to test their market, I'll send them to this post.

I would love to get much greater detail on this ty...

2011-02-01T13:16:34.138-08:00

I would love to get much greater detail on this type of testing. 1. How do you get Google to not think this is a sham since these days the quality score is important when buying Adwords 2. What is a significant amount of testing per keyword (100 page views)? 3. Won't many users try to click around and see that's its not a real site and then not register? 4. With the many permutations of keyword versus testing many site messaging and calls to action how does one really know when sufficient volume of testing has been conducted? I realize no responses is an easy conclusion but what about the mid-case scenarios...5. Also, to get to this level of keyword/messaging optimization, I think the keywords would get expensive and this whole campaign would get expensive.

All of that said, this makes 100% sense, but I'd love you to address these questions :).

I too think this is a very effective way of testin...

2010-02-17T01:09:31.927-08:00

I too think this is a very effective way of testing for actual demand of a product, but I'm worried this trickery (accepting orders for products that are just concepts) would violate AdWords terms and conditions. A customer that actually thinks they are ordering will obviously give the most realistic data, but how far can you push it and not violate terms? Anyone have thoughts on this?

Great idea, which I've tried twice, and I woul...

2009-06-28T14:51:27.439-07:00

Great idea, which I've tried twice, and I would do again.

One thought and one question:

- this also gives you a great idea of the keyword volume and potential cpc for your site
- I imagine google quality scoring would be an issue in some cases, and you may not get volume (especially if your campaign/business is limited to a geography). Any thoughts on how to make sure your setup doesn't have this issue, so that you're not discouraged unnecessarily?

What a great post. We run a web development compan...

2009-06-22T06:30:07.000-07:00

What a great post. We run a web development company and we start by creating a splash page very similar to what is describe here. If we don't get a certain amount of signups on that splash page, we don't develop the rest of the site becuase they will not have any customer.

Great post - I think I'll try this. One concern I ...

2009-05-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

Great post - I think I'll try this. One concern I might have with doing this is that you are competing for ad space with your competitors. By putting yourself directly in their space you are alerting them to your emergence as a threat. Now we're not exactly in stealth-mode - we've pitched at Techcrunch - but I'd rather not go dancing in my competitor's faces.

Do you think, therefore, that you /should/ use a specifically set-up URL, with no connection to your real company, just so that you are not alerting competitors to exactly who you are?

It's my understanding that at one point (if not cu...

2009-02-07T05:40:00.000-08:00

It's my understanding that at one point (if not currently) Time-Life books did essentially this for their book series.

They would make commercials about a new book series, and then run the commercials at times when the TV rates were low (late night, UHF channels, etc)

If they got enough orders, they then decided to print the series. Otherwise they just canceled the orders with some excuse.

2008-12-28T18:28:00.000-08:00

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Eric, Excellent article about an essential techniq...

2008-11-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

Eric, Excellent article about an essential technique for startups.... I respectfully disagree with your recommendation, "don't worry about selecting particularly good keywords" because I've found it's important to test with the full set of keywords that are relevant to the concept or business. To help find the right keywords, I've written an article on my blog Web Startup Help that details How to Do Keyword Research for startups. I've linked to your article from mine.

A very interesting strategy. I too would be concer...

2008-11-08T21:41:00.000-08:00

A very interesting strategy. I too would be concerned about false negatives, but perhaps this strategy could be integrated into a broader market research strategy that included user engagement, viral marketing, etc which would all be quantifiable under the Google analytics.

I'm defiantly going to give it a shot on my next project! Thanks for the insight!

Adword is a PPC method to promote your website. An...

2008-11-08T19:13:00.000-08:00

Adword is a PPC method to promote your website. Another way to promote the website is doing organize search. For example, make sure your website is in the first page of Google search for the given keyword. This is one of the blog we posted about how some company is doing SEO to promote the website.

http://blog.ask2link.com/case-study-advertisers-get-great-results-with-ask2link-text-links

False negatives would be an issue, but combining a...

2008-11-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

False negatives would be an issue, but combining ad words with other forms of advertising, such as guerrilla marketing, might yield a more robust answer.

Depending on the type of product, postings on forums, classifieds and emails could give enough information to help gauge potential response.

your post inspired me - http://bit.ly/LYHl

...

2008-11-07T19:42:00.000-08:00

your post inspired me - http://bit.ly/LYHl

i also bought some adwords but it's not driving a lot of traffic to the landing page. any suggestions on how to increase traffic to the landing page?

2008-11-07T19:41:00.000-08:00

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Eric -- This is a pretty interesting idea. Seems ...

2008-11-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

Eric -- This is a pretty interesting idea. Seems like a fairly low-cost method of gauging customer interest for a would-be product. Have you tried this or is it just a promising theory at this point? It seems like if it worked, you'd have great data at low cost, but that there's a real chance that it would give false negatives. SEM only gets at one segment of users, and for a brand new product, you presumably need some skill at marketing in general and adsense in particular to get any useful info. ... Any specific experiences to share?