My Client wasted thousand of dollars in PPC with 0 Sales

Hi

My Client wasted thousand of Dollars in past 12 months on saas project hoping that ppc would work. He is advised by team of performance marketers with years of experience.

I have seen their tracking set up and its more or less good. They did not advised for Google ecommerce tracking which led me to think the guys are naive.

I advised them to test with lower budgets like 100 USD a day instead of 1.5k a day but they wont listen and the project owner also not listening.

Myself have very good experience in tracking and analytics. I have done it for very big projects but I cannot run adwords campaign.

Organically our application get like 1% conversion rate.

What to do in this scenario ?

What products are they selling to waste that amount of budget on ?

&_Money said:

What products are they selling to waste that amount of budget on ?

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They sells saas subscription . The plans are like 9 usd/month , 15 usd/month and 40 usd/month

Why not create a blog providing useful information and DIYs, affiliate marketing or even whitelabeling the SaaS?

In my experience, social media links get more clicks than google ads. The only advantage to ads is you don’t have to manually post to social media lots of times per day. But, if they have such a big budget, why not hire shills to do the social media copywriting and promotion?

If you spend $1,500 per day for 12 months, make 0 sales clearly the campaign is not working. Quite possibly google is the wrong sale channel for the product.

Perhaps suggest a different sales channel, for example linkedin if it is a b2b saas.

krazylearner said:

He is advised by team of performance marketers with years of experience.

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That is the exact mistake that your client made. That is exactly where the problem is.
And moreover, for a new saas brand, what campaign was run ? Search campaign ? That would be a big blunder.
Effectively targeted display campaigns would be good. Companies like Zoho were once unknown and they initially grew by leverage of Google Ads display campaigns (ofcourse now they barely need to do any advertising).

Looks client got unlimited money , 1.5 k dollars per month is hefty mate !

This is really shocking. Like they want to fail or they are crazy. What do you want to do in this scenario? Are they paying you? Are you concerned about your reputation or about them running out of money? If the owner wont listen then he wont listen and you just need to make sure you get paid fast before the money is gone.

I have a family member who worked for an technology and hardware company. They are pretty big size mid market company, so they have huge spending budget. They spent over $40,000 in google PPC ads without generating a single conversion. Now, that little division of the company has written off paid advertising completely which I beleive is absolutely ridiculous considering that they were able to spend mutiple 5 figures and not see any success

No amount of money spent on PPC can sell software that is shit, with that being said, what kind of software are they selling that they can even make one conversion?

People like your client give me hope that not all of my competition is as capable or competent as I think them to be.

I might not have $1.5k to spend on wasted advertising but atleast I know how to not waste resources.

As for what you can do. Just move to a different channel and don't do the same mistake. Your campaigns clearly don't work. And your client should have tested them with "test funds" before dumping all the budget.

JibberJabber69 said:

No amount of money spent on PPC can sell software that is shit, with that being said, what kind of software are they selling that they can even make one conversion?

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You need to use the software to know that it's shit tho. And to use, means conversion. Literally no conversion for OP's client means they are doing something terribly wrong.

Stuff like showing ppc ads on the wrong niche of sites. If you show software ads on a site about hairstyling , it definitely will not work.

Ashk881 said:

You need to use the software to know that it's shit tho. And to use, means conversion. Literally no conversion for OP's client means they are doing something terribly wrong.

Stuff like showing ppc ads on the wrong niche of sites. If you show software ads on a site about hairstyling , it definitely will not work.

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Agreed. You can have software that does nothing and still convert with a nice landing page. There has to be some underlying issue for thousands of dollars not to convert a sale to a $9 service. One of the first things I would like them to try is offer a free trial or SOMETHING free that can sign up users to see if anyone is interested but just not willing to spend money.

These people are advice-resistant.. i learned many of them. its useless to intervene. Let them burn the money.

SocialManager said:

Agreed. You can have software that does nothing and still convert with a nice landing page. There has to be some underlying issue for thousands of dollars not to convert a sale to a $9 service. One of the first things I would like them to try is offer a free trial or SOMETHING free that can sign up users to see if anyone is interested but just not willing to spend money.

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Come on now "you can have software that does nothing and still converts"? Seriously lol. I've been in the SaaS software and marketing space for over 2 decades, I can tell you that people are not going to pay for software that does nothing. While I agree with parts of your statement about having a landing page that convinces and converts, it still needs to have a selling point, and "Does nothing" isn't a selling point lol.

Clearly, there is more to this than what is told, I'm sorry if you spend 15k a month and can't get one conversion with your software, it's got to be pretty bad software, I know people that know zero about marketing and landing pages that have developed software and sold it with much success without even using PPC. There must be more to the story in terms of this software and the company behind it, seems a little too hasty to point the finger at the marketing people. 15k a month and not one conversion.. yikes.

duran1 said:

These people are advice-resistant.. i learned many of them. its useless to intervene. Let them burn the money.

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I actually find it funny that people are directly blaming the people and not the software itself, it's almost as if there is a crab mentality in the marketing space. Why don't we understand their brand and the product first before we flame the marketers?

JibberJabber69 said:

Come on now "you can have software that does nothing and still converts"? Seriously lol. I've been in the SaaS software and marketing space for over 2 decades, I can tell you that people are not going to pay for software that does nothing. While I agree with parts of your statement about having a landing page that convinces and converts, it still needs to have a selling point, and "Does nothing" isn't a selling point lol.

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You are simply wrong. SaaS software and marketing space isn't a thing. Those are 2 different spaces. Software as a service is one space, and marketing is another space. If you have experience in marketing, you should be aware that when we are writing copy or producing other content for sales, we don't just say "this software does nothing" and hope for conversions. We know that people will take what's in the box if you get them curious enough and give them enough hope that the value of the box is more than they are spending.

JibberJabber69 said:

I'm sorry if you spend 15k a month and can't get one conversion with your software, it's got to be pretty bad software,

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That's the thing tho. You can't know a software is bad until you have tried it/ hear from other people that have tried it.

I guess you didn't get what SocialManager was trying to say. For a $10 subscription, you'd sell a non-functional buggy crud app provided it was packaged and sold the right way. Someone would buy it given $10 ain't that much, and then ask for a refund or cancel their subscription if the software was bad.

There could be some activity. There would be conversions. And given the ad spent, their would be alot of eyeballs and likely a lot of conversion.

It's one thing if users don't stay, then you can blame the software being bad. But, if no one even tries the SaaS out? Well then it's a more fundamental problem.

That means either the SaaS doesn't solve a problem, or they are marketing it to completely wrong people.

SocialManager said:

You are simply wrong. SaaS software and marketing space isn't a thing. Those are 2 different spaces. Software as a service is one space, and marketing is another space. If you have experience in marketing, you should be aware that when we are writing copy or producing other content for sales, we don't just say "this software does nothing" and hope for conversions. We know that people will take what's in the box if you get them curious enough and give them enough hope that the value of the box is more than they are spending.

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My man, did you really just try to point out that Marketing and SAAS are different? lol... Of course, they're different, who suggested otherwise? I said I worked with SAAS and Marketing for 2 decades, but I didn't say they have anything in common with each other, I'm extremely well versed in both of them as I have experience in both fields as I have worked as a marketer for a SAAS based company.

1. You don't know the software, company, or business model
2. You don't know the marketers dealing with PPC
3. For all we know this 550k for a year and zero leads could just be a great story that's not even real. According to you, if you throw enough shit at the wall some of it is bound to stick, even if the software had no purpose, if it has no purpose what market would you target? The Infomercial crowd?

Basically from what the op says is that these guys are spending 550k a year on marketing with PPC and returning not one lead.. this sounds like someone is not telling the full story.

No one and I mean no one is going to spend 1.5k a day over a year without some form of result, I would have stopped the first week, and reevaluated the situation not only if I was an owner but also if I was the marketer, to say no one has any oversite over this kind of Ad spend is nonsense.

JibberJabber69 said:

My man, did you really just try to point out that Marketing and SAAS are different? lol... Of course, they're different, who suggested otherwise? I said I worked with SAAS and Marketing for 2 decades, but I didn't say they have anything in common with each other, I'm extremely well versed in both of them as I have experience in both fields as I have worked as a marketer for a SAAS based company.

1. You don't know the software, company, or business model
2. You don't know the marketers dealing with PPC
3. For all we know this 550k for a year and zero leads could just be a great story that's not even real. According to you, if you throw enough shit at the wall some of it is bound to stick, even if the software had no purpose, if it has no purpose what market would you target? The Infomercial crowd?

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It was you who suggested otherwise, perhaps inadvertently. You stated that you have been in "the SaaS software and marketing space," which implies a single space.

We don't need to know the software, company, or business model. We don't need to know the marketers. We don't need to know if it is real. It being a completely made-up story doesn't change the opportunity for discussion on the topic. We can assume since this user brought it up as a concern, that they know the software, company, and business model, and that this money is being wasted and the marketers are not performing as well as they should. The market I target depends on what the client wants.

If the client gives me full control and only cares about conversions, then I would target multiple markets, with multiple landing pages. Software that does nothing is likely to disappoint a consumer regardless of what market I target, but there are hundreds of industries that have problems that can be solved by software, and if I can imply that their problem will be solved by my software, I can target them and I can convert them. Until they have the software, they wont know if it solves their problem or makes their life easier in any way.

Have you ever heard of an Easy Button? You push it, and it easily solves problems. The description is literally "Staples Easy button in red colour helps to make office work simpler. Button is a perfect addition to office and classroom decor." But the button doesn't actually do anything (useful). It doesn't actually make office work simpler. Yet they have sold thousands of these easy buttons and the reviews on them are pretty amazing. This piece of junk costs less than $1.00 to make in China. Staples spent millions on television ads featuring this button. Not to advertise the button as a product, but to advertise their company. But people demanded the button. Because the fact is that people will buy anything if it is marketed in the right way, including SaaS products.

Roblox hacks generate millions of dollars in revenue every day for thousands of marketers. But there is no Roblox hack. A marketer will find a way to make a sale. The software itself is the smallest part of the equation here. Sell me this pen.