My First Ad Campaign
Mistakes were made. Money was lost. Today I am going to tell you about my first attempt at launching ads where I spent $84, acquired no new users, and got rejected from placing an ad eight times.
When you don't know what you're doing, things can be hard. I came to this realization when I tried to launch my first ad campaign over the weekend. I had never tried this before, but naively thought it couldn’t be that hard. In my mind, I would wake up, log onto a few sites, pay some money, and disburse some wonderfully cleaver ads. After eight rejections from reddit and being stuck on pending mode with twitter for twelve hours, my naivety was brought to light.
Each rejection from Reddit was unique as I kept tweaking my ad to try and make it past the ad gatekeepers. To be fair to Reddit, look at my first one – not the most elegant of ads.
I can see the argument that it gives off ponzi vibes. I am not even sure why I decided this was a good ad in the first place. I love emojis, but I would've never clicked on this ad. I built the app, and my first ad doesn't even entice me. That's probably a red flag. But even with the ponzi / MLM vibes, the goal really was to attract users by giving money away if they played.
Here is list of some of the reasons
Crypto
Gambling related
Email gated login
And the rejection emails.
Eventually, I did get a twitter campaign launched and I wish that I could tell you that was smooth sailing. I stared endlessly as impressions rarely turned to clicks and clicks never turned into a signed-up user. 😂. By the end of it all, I spent $84 for 93 clicks and no new users. Hell of a campaign.
After acquiring zero new users, I still don’t even have a sense of my user acquisition costs…just that it is greater than $84. Let’s hope for network effects once we acquire users… I am starting to see why startups want to raise money!
During all this, I also put up a link the site on Hackernews, a popular hacker site that is useful for getting new things out there. That went a little better, ten minutes in and I had four points (not great, but not terrible). Except for the fact that two minutes later it got flagged for violation of policy. Gah!
What a first ad campaign! All I can say is that I’ve acquired no new users, but I’ve learned a lot! I have some tweaks that I am going to try for this next round. We will see how that works. Although, like I said previously, knowing nothing is a hard place to start, and I doubt knowing a tiny bit more makes it much easier. Anyway, take my money ad industry, you beautiful black hole.