Using Google Ads and a landing page to test the viability of an idea
The views expressed in this article are my own.
I like starting on new projects. But whilst I am able to put a side project together easily, see https://www.buildingphysicsonline.com or https://www.shareml.io, I struggle with traction — I love technology, but do not excel at engagement…
So when I had a new idea, I thought Let’s try something different this time around and test for interest first… This was a new and unfamiliar approach for me but one that is likely popular with start-ups and entrepreneurs.
This story relates my experience with testing an idea’s value with a landing page and Google Ads.
The idea
If you are not interested in the idea, please skip this section. It provides context to the story. If you do read it, feel free to feedback.
I work as an engineering consultant for a UK building service firm. My colleagues and I are affiliated to either CIBSE or the IET. An engineer career starts at graduate level as a member of one of these institution. As he or she progresses from graduate engineer to engineer and senior engineer, a question arises: “have you considered getting chartered?”.
Chartership with CIBSE and the IET is governed by the UK Engineering Council Standard for Professional Engineering Competence (UK-SPEC) with each institution implementing a chartership process based on this standard. Chartership or Chartered Engineer (CEng) status recognises a level of knowledge across technical, managerial and inter-personal areas. The application to become chartered is a reflection of how this knowledge has been acquired and put into practice over projects spanning a number of years.
I have supported young engineers at the start of their career and have noticed constants hurdles to their progress to chartered engineers:
- It’s early in their career. They just finished university. Their focus is, understandably, on enjoying professional and personal achievements rather than focusing on yet another “academic” target.
- The application for chartership is a reflection of a few years of practice and hence requires one to be organised and tenacious by recording competencies and projects as they occur rather than just when preparing the application.
These hurdles can easily be tackled with a bit of organisation or a standardised tool to assist. A number of companies, including where I work, have training programs and/or approved Training & Development schemes that map the way towards chartership and facilitate the process. But, is there a market for a company neutral tool? What would be an acceptable price point? Could it be profitable?
Landing page
My usual mode of operation would have been to make a tool, publish it online, and monitor it for a little while. Then seeing no to little traffic, park it and forget about it… This time around I went with a different approach. I wanted to evaluate whether the idea had any commercial legs.
The number of new engineering graduate in the UK stands at well over tens of thousand per year, which is a sizeable enough market for me. Although the target is significantly smaller as it focuses on building services engineers only.
My online presence is small and have no noticeable marketing skills. So my bet is on online advertising to drive traffic to a landing page to evaluate the effectiveness of online advertising and advertising costs. The landing page, https://www.chartership.io, includes a stab at pricing and a registration form that is used as a proxy to measure possible conversion rates.
Google Ads Campaign
This is my first experience with online advertising and hence it felt quite foreign. On which platform to advertise? Google? LinkedIn? Facebook? Bing? A natural candidate might be LinkedIn, but I decided to go with Google Ads.
I started to look into it at the end of 2020 — after putting a landing page together, registering it with different search engines and see no traffic on it, as expected… My first time looking at the Google Ads platform was eye opening into the targeting of online advertising. I experienced mixed emotions over how one can target specific user groups. But these user groups are crude if your target does not fit into one of the defined category. Google Ads is likely to be very effective for someone experienced — but a first timer like me will need some time.
The following image shows a summary of the Google Ads campaign that was run between the 11th and 22nd January 2021. No maximum Cost Per Click (CPC) was set in the settings initially, but this was then revised with a maximum CPC of £2. Similarly, the keyword CIBSE was removed on Friday 15th January as it seems to generate impressions on non-relevant searches.
Google Ads Campaign Results
The campaign dashboard shows that the ad was printed 563 times during the campaign, resulted in 35 clicks and had a total cost of £55, corresponding to an average cost per click (CPC) of £1.6. The CPC is higher on the 17th January due, from memory, to one click have single cost in excess of £5.
The chart shown below shows the number of impression, number of click and the search impression share. The period during which the CIBSE keyword was included in highlighted in grey. The chart shows clearly that the number of impression is higher with the CIBSE keyword, but the share of impression is lower thus indicating that CIBSE is a more competitive keyword, but may not be as relevant to the idea being tested.
The keywords employed in the campaign are of the type “broad match”. My understanding is that the ad may be printed when the keywords or a variation of the keywords are used. The Google Ads dashboard provides an overview of the search terms that triggered impressions, which includes the not so relevant searches “CIBSE courses”, “CIBSE accredited courses” that I would likely need to explicitly excludes in the future. The Keywords dashboard provided in the overview panel shows a clear view of which keyword are driving impressions and click, but I have failed to get a better picture by diving into the Keywords section — the number of impressions and clicks did not seem to tally with the dashboard for some reason. The current dashboard seems to indicate that the keyword “CIBSE” is very general for my use case, resulting in low search impression share whilst the keywords “CIBSE CEng”, “CIBSE Chartered engineer” and “CIBSE chartership” had search impression share ranging between 38% and 51% and click-through-ratio of circa 8% compared to 4% for the “CIBSE” keyword.
When assessing the effectiveness of the ad, I looked at how many registration occurred on the website. Unfortunately, there was none… since the registration form happened to not work whilst the ad was running. Not great, but I was able to find that two visitors attempted to register. One attempt was made on the 14th January and another on the 18th January.
Take away message
My learning from this exercise falls into two parts. One is associated with using Google Ads and another one is associated with the idea being tested.
- The cost of acquisition of a visitor is circa £1.5, with an estimated cost of customer acquisition of £30 — under the optimistic assumption that the two visitors that tried to register would have subscribed;
- Google Ads is an attractive way to generate traffic, but attention needs to be paid to the keywords, ad text, monitoring to attract the right traffic and maximise the value for money;
- Ideally make use of all features Google Ads has to offer. In my case, this would include setting up a conversion tracker so that Google Ads can monitor conversions, and setting up negative keywords to avoid having the ad printed on search for courses.
My next step will be to revamp the landing page and give another go with Google Ads with a working registration form to see if the number of people registering can be increased for similar advertising costs. And see where it goes from there.
