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How much do YOU spend on PPC before your Idea is Valid?

Idea threads

Mark Anthony Le

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Just curious about how much some people spend on PPC for their ideas and landing pages before they deem it valid...

$1000? $2000?

$100?
 
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theag

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What? Landing page or idea?

Never validated my idea, just knew it would work.

LP I gradually improve and constantly spend money on. No real A/B testing right now.

On ads, I spend 500-1000€ per ad copy/placement/targeting to really see if it performs better/worse than the others, then decide. Guess thats on the higher end.

Good rule is to spend 10x your CPA.
 

Jake

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Depends what it is. If you're the only person throwing traffic at it then when you believe that it's an acceptable ROI for you traffic. Then build out ways to make more $ per customer to increase margins. Then throw more traffic at it.

If you can get affiliates involved then tweak until they stick around and make a lot of sales. Then build out ways to make it more profitable for them / you. More affiliates should come at that point making it more profitable. Then you can figure out traffic sources and blast away.
 

MoneyDoc

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I spent about $50 dollars on adwords and $100 on facebook before I built a 300 person email list...
 

contract

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You don't.

You might sell nothing on search, but sell out entirely somewhere else.

Every market is different, niches are all spending their time all over the place.

To run $50, $1,000, or even $5,000 in ads to determine your product's success isn't a great idea.

Then you get into how well you ran your campaigns. You'll spend $1-5K getting real data.

Then factor in how well you optimized and made judgments based on that data.

Too many factors to just call it a day based on search alone.

Maybe your landing page was awful, maybe your targeting the wrong demographics, keywords, etc.

Too many marketers these days want quick success, instant validation, etc.

Does anyone believe in what their selling anymore?

Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal.

It's not throwing shit up on the wall and seeing what sticks.

Understand that's not aimed at you at all, just posting my thoughts on instant validation.
 

eliquid

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I've done PPC since the days of GoTo.

Your question is wayyyy to broad to answer.

If I were you:

1. I'd come up with 3 angles on how you can sell the product. Example, whats 3 different ways you can pitch this product?

2. For each angle, come up with 3 different ads and 3 different LPs. If you have 3 angles, thats 9 LPs and 9 ads.

Until you have came this far, nothing else matters. If you havent done this and ran $1000 into a campaign and got 0 leads, how do you know it wasnt the right ads or LPs or the right angle?

Only until you get to this point can you start to worry about keywords and geolocations, etc....

Do some people get it right without this? YES.

However those that don't hit a homerun off their first try are always left wondering if they covered all the bases.
 
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Gale4rc

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Unless you plan on selling a physical product that people can pre-order, validation is bullshit.
 

eliquid

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^^ not sure I agree.

I've validated book titles, digital product names, and digital products themselves this way. I could have lost a lot of money NOT validating before hand with PPC.
 

tafy

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Adwords is super expensive, and I also think the whole validation thing is a bit out of date now.

If you trully want to validate on adwords you have to do I properly, put the price in and a buy it button or contact us for a demo.

Conversions might be 2% and your clicks cost you $5 each, so that's $250 a lead. How many till its validated?

You may think shit $250 a lead is pricy and quit right there after spending a few k. Bit little did you know that your competitors don't mind spending 250 a lead as they are making 1k ltv on each customer.
 
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DennisD

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Might be labeled bad practice by other people here....
but it's rare that I ever really test demand.

If you're ingrained in a market, many ideas are so obvious in their money-making ability that they don't NEED external validation to move forward.
That being said, if we're talking hypotheticals and I was developing a product in an area I didn't know very well I would dedicated $250 for validation purposes.

If the funnel's built and ready to go, I wouldn't start doing PPC unless I had $1000 ready/willing to lose figuring it out.
 

Andy Black

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Just curious about how much some people spend on PPC for their ideas and landing pages before they deem it valid...

What does "valid" mean? Worth investing more resources into?

Personally, I've spent £10 in paid search ads to find out if there's enough search volumes. This justified spending £400 in paid search ads to find out if I could buy decent quality leads, and for what CPL.

If the first £10 spend had shown there weren't enough searches that I could tap into, I'd have moved on. Doesn't mean it will always be as low an initial investment as £10 of course.

I won't build a funnel unless I know I can get people into it.
 

Andy Black

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There are always alternate ways of funneling that don't involve PPC.
Lol... I know Dennis. But I am that man with a hammer. :)


EDIT: ... and that's why paid search is my hammer of choice. It's up and running within minutes of having the idea, your ad is in front of the purest form of cold traffic (the "intent" is there), and it "fails safe" (if there's no demand, then you have no cost).

Do paid search correctly, and you only incur ad costs if people are searching for what you're selling.
 
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tafy

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Personally, I've spent £10 in paid search ads to find out if there's enough search volumes

This is a much better idea, You see if there's enough volume for a keyword. I think Andy has an article somewhere about this?
 

Andy Black

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This is a much better idea, You see if there's enough volume for a keyword. I think Andy has an article somewhere about this?

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/newbie-mistake-1-limited-by-budget.52616/

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/launch-learn.52526/

Plus some notes in the "brain dump" thread linked to in my signature...
 
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eliquid

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What I find rather odd is people stating that Adwords is expensive. It's not.

It's only expensive if you don't know what you're doing, which happens.

However, I'd much rather spend $250 "learning" about my market and collecting data, then to spend several weeks/month or even more money in other areas like production, fees, shipping, etc and spending more than $250 for that to find out I am working on the wrong idea/angle/market.

$250 "buying data" doesn't hurt anything and costs waaayyy less than the alternatives.

And besides, once you have done this and proved it works, you have at least 1 part of your marketing done and ready to go.
 

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