1. Write an angry blog post insulting New York, New Yorkers, and ibanks.
2. Ride the popularity wave as a heated discussion rages about whether New York is the greatest place on earth or an over-priced, roach infested pit of assholes and prima donnas.
3. Get on Techchrunch.
4. Profit.
As an ex New Yorker, the only thing I can say is "Why didn't I think of this myself!".
True, but as (sometimes) thinking members of the startup community, we blog about things only tangentially connected to our product, but that we think the startup scene as a whole might find of interest.
The amount of press we got on those posts was completely unexpected (cf. my follow-up post about our imploding blog server). A happy bonus maybe, but we'd rather people love us (or hate us) based on the product.
I ask that seriously. Obviously their goal is to build a great product, and to get people to use it.
They posted that article on the AdGrok blog because it drove a shit-ton of traffic and it received a ton of inbound links. Why wouldn't they capitalize on that?
As far as the product is concerned, it's fantastic. I've been using it in private beta for a few weeks. I would bet on these guys in a heartbeat.
Startups drive traffic and signups any way that they can, and their company name was hitting mainstream media before they even launched.
Flamebait isn't a great marketing plan. When someone says adgrok now I think, "hm that's the guy who wrote the rant that New York's tech scene sucks", not "that's the company who built a great product that will be super useful to me and maybe even help me make money". Sure, my perception can be changed - Antonio seems like a decent guy, but why start with a negative perception of the company based on a largely personal rant?
Maybe antonio can give us some signup stats to go with the wave of traffic? I'd certainly be curious about the effect it had, even if it was very general (up 4000%, etc.)
I was going to comment that their name may not be great for non-techies to "grok" what the URL means to type it correctly. Hence it might hurt their adoption rates with mom-and-pop web stores (since I was about to recommend it to one).
But then I noticed they also purchased adgrock.com, too. Good planning there.
One of the key features of AdGrok that makes it contextual is the GrokBar, a plugin that sits on a website, and pops up anytime the user is on a page that is being advertised on Google. Users will see a full breakdown of impressions, clicks, costs, and conversion. If a keyword isn’t performing well for a given page, the software will suggest alternate buys.
That's confusing to me. Who is the user? I'll assume they mean AdGrok users. What websites does it give info for? I'll assume just the ones the user owns, not their competitors who also use AdGrok, right? If so, why does it "sit on a webpage", and "pops up anytime the user is on a page that is being advertised?" Doesn't make any sense to me. [Edit] Isn't this just the functionality you'd expect in the AdGrok interface? [/Edit]
Great idea - I'm running a decent sized campaign for UniversityTutor.com and have found the Adwords tools a bit lacking in terms of generating targeted keywords for the thousands of pages and keywords I have. I ended up having to write some massive scripts by hand and using the Adwords desktop tool to import all the data (maybe 20,000 pages with several ad variations each, and targeting different keywords). The whole process took days and was complicated to the point where it wasn't easy for me to test variations.
The devil is in the details on a tool like this, but it could certainly be useful (and a quick flip to Google) if executed correctly. Wish you guys the best and would love to be an early beta user.
Your experience is pretty typical, except you had the hacker skills to hack around AdWords' crappy UI. Most AdWords users do not, hence AdGrok.
The devil is most certainly in the details in a product like this, which is why we welcome any and all feedback from beta users. You've got first dibs on our product pipeline, so any feature you need we can push out very quickly.
I'm following the call for a clear pricing structure - I manage a lot of Adword accounts as part of my day job, and I'd be keen to look at anything that makes it simpler and easier. But only if it's also cost-effective...
A tiered pricing structure, with a fixed monthly subscription fee. Probably starting somewhere around $20 for the smallest budgets, and going up from there. We'll set the tier price points wherever there seems to be obvious market segmentation.
Really big power users, or agencies who are white-labeling our product, might get a more industry-standard percent-of-spend deal.
Our view is that Mom-and-Pops might be wary of a percent-of-spend pricing model. That said, the small SEM shops of dubious quality, who are our real competition, commonly use a percent-of-spend pricing model. So we might have to go with that just to make it comparable. Even if that were true, we'd charge nowhere near the 15-20% of spend many SEM shops charge.
So, worry not. You're not going to get used to our product, and then get screwed by us on price. We'll leave the first-dose-is-free business model to the enterprising young gentlemen around the 16th Street BART station in the Mission.
Regards,
Antonio.
Btw, feel free to hit me directly with any customer/pricing ideas at antonio@adgrok.com.
Great - signed up for the beta. Let me know when you're ready to test it out. Btw, I'm an employee at another YC company so if you need to get in touch can always do it through my profile here (which links to my blog).
Lesson learned - have an opinion and be controversial
Ive often wondered how I would feel if I wrote a post that p*d the hell out of a lot of people. Looking at the marketing result I'd say I'd be smug happy as hell.
Memo: if i'll ever be in this situation give HN users a pass to skip my web app private beta queue since they're likely to be more useful than random people
I've signed up too. I'm skeptical, but anything that helps with adwords directly increases the amount of money I make so I'm definitely up for giving it a try!
How is this different from the self managed approach taken by eg clickable, or the more full service places like Yodle / ReachLocal / Efficient Frontier / CityVoice / et al?
Edit -- after watching their video, their in-browser funnel visualization is cool as hell. Probably not scalable to larger merchants, but amazing for small sites. Props -- that's a great idea.
Thanks, Earl, for checking out the video. Check back soon...the current tool is really the MVP we wanted to get out the door. The GUI has all sorts of UI prettiness on the way, including arbitrary page aggregation, time-series plots for all that data, and even more visibility into how keywords/ads are doing.
To answer your question: from a business POV, it's no different than Clickable (EfficientFrontier and Co. are way out of most SMBs' price range). We think our approach is a lot better: by putting the tool in the browser, we make campaign management painless. We also have more automation that Clickable, so, through time, the GrokBar becomes a sort of marketing autopilot.
You can use the tool to drive traffic to any page, doesn't have to be a product page. In keeping with our bottoms-up approach (as opposed to the top-down, Google-centric approach of every other SEM tool on the market), we thought looking at individual product pages would be most useful for e-commerce sites, which is why we focus our demo on that.
But again, there's no reason to limit use to there. In fact, in v2.0 (which should ship in the coming days) you can tag arbitrary pages, and look at aggregate stats for that tagged group (e.g., a category of products like 'women's shoes' or the like).
1. Write an angry blog post insulting New York, New Yorkers, and ibanks.
2. Ride the popularity wave as a heated discussion rages about whether New York is the greatest place on earth or an over-priced, roach infested pit of assholes and prima donnas.
3. Get on Techchrunch.
4. Profit.
As an ex New Yorker, the only thing I can say is "Why didn't I think of this myself!".