We Spent $5000 on a Product Hunt Ad. Here Are the Numbers.

My brain sent me an error each time I tried to I understand this $5000 ads spending for 0 customers.sorry for you man 😔

Oh wow, what a beautiful looking product. Your landing page looks amazing. The product is really neat too. Tried it and the whole experience was high class.

I'm honestly shocked. I mean look at that CPC. $8 a click?! Seems like producthunt ads can only make sense for products with LTV of hundreds of dollars. Might as well run LinkedIn ads. Won't cost less but might get you in front of the right people.

Anyway, that $300 I blew on Google Ads for zero sales doesn't look too bad now. Thanks for the cautionary tale 🙏

Ouch! Sorry to hear you didn't get any revenue. Are all product hunt ads fixed at $5k?

Fixed advertising is very unappealing for me, especially in the early stages of a product, it's too much of a risk when you can throw as little as a $5 at other platforms with a much bigger audience and presumably better targetting.

I think the paid advertising space is a volumes game, if your cost per click is that high - then you need to spend a whole lot of money to get enough traffic to start making money.

I do think PH ads are very expensive, compared to other options out there. I was looking to try them out, but your post has convinced me that my initial calculations were correct.

Every-time I read about product hunt, my conclusion is the same. Product Hunt is good to get eyeballs on-your product but it doesn't mean it coverts well, in some cases not at all. It's plays off a false positive in a sense.

In this particular case I don't think it's a demographic issue. It's the issue of how many products does PH think its users will actually commit to purchasing. I'd be curious to see the numbers of actual conversions per featured product.

Ouch - thanks. In general, paid ads on general non targeted platforms is not a great idea haha.

PH is a great example for this. Even launching in PH is general not very successful because people are not necessarily searching for your product, just browsing.

SEO is harder but much more rewarding long term.

Your product is great and I think your landing page does the job.

The ad campaign is awful. Perhaps the audience on PH are not within your radar.

What would be your next move? @rileyt

Very interesting. Product Hunt ads were the worst marketing investment we made last year as well (by far).

This was quite helpful.

The first thing that jumped out at me is the CPC, which is very high. Secondly no conversions. I wish the best for you on your next campaigns and thanks for posting this it’s super helpful. We’re all trying to optimize spend, looking for new channels, but without this kinda feedback we’re throwing darts in the dark. Another thought is, I don’t know your product, but product hunt is for entrepreneurs looking for new productivity tools, so why would this group want a next gen resume tool? Forgive me if I’m mischaracterizing your product

Ouch that final statement in bold hurts. What are you going to do next?

Did I read that correctly? $5000 and 0 customers = $0 back? 😬 Sorry to see that :(
If I were you I'd try newsletters where Junior Developers hang out. They need an outstanding resume IMO. Did you try that?

Damn... What a crash landing.

Did you analyse or speculate the cause? Perhaps just the wrong demographic?

Appreciate you sharing this info! Super helpful. Makes me curious about what other campaigns' performance is like.

I was just thinking about doing a PH launch and this post was super helpful. I will seriously reconsider sinking my time into it. Is there anyone else open to sharing their experience? Would love to compare the outcomes.
Thanks in advance

It is at least interesting the conclusions.

I think is worth analysing the reasons for that performance. Is it the product-channel fit? Is it the message? Is it the settings? Is it the tracking? Is it the product? Is it the attribution? Did they convert 30 days later?

ouch, sorry to hear. I'm curious if anybody else has had similar experiences though. I imagine it could be a demographic thing- everyone on the website is probably an entrepreneur or in marketing and may simply be not in the market for resume help. Either way, I was considering PH ads and stumbled across this, so knowing that the minimum spend is so high and that there are clearly risks involved is kind of a turn off. Also, I don't get why newer platforms are charging so high for their CPMs. Their eyeballs are generally less valuable than Google or Facebook, not more.

Wow. Do you think FB advertising would have had a higher conversion rate?

Hey Riley, thanks for sharing your experience with us.
I'm not an expert in marketing, but here is my take on it:

• Your landing page is wonderful. I really like the design, it's super lean. However, I don't see any specific landing page dedicated to the people that would like to work in startups (re the positioning)

• Remember why people are coming on ProductHunt. They are entrepreneurs that want to create their own product / discover new product for their projects. Their main fear is coming back to their old life where they were working for someone else.

As such, seeing an ad to reminds them "see you soon in the corporate world" can appear frustrating for them. That's IMO the reason why people didn't click on your ad.

For the rest, your product looks amazing, and I'm sure you will find your audience. Best luck to your project.

Thanks for sharing these results! What targeting options do you have with PH? If none, any idea how they determine who to show the ads to?

There's a few resume builder apps out there, and this seems to be one of the better ones.

Even so, I have no idea why anybody would want this, or pay for it. I got all the jobs I ever had with a shitty Times New Roman resume I made in MS Word. The last time I used a built in template in Pages on my Mac and it was a step up.

Also, it's priced per month. What is the justification for that? Job hunting is something that people do in brief spurts periodically and they update their resume just beforehand.

I just don't see the value here. If the market really wants your skills, you could smear your faeces on a sheet of A4 paper and still get offers.

I apologise for being harsh. If you are making money from this, fair play to you. I must not be the target market. Apparently people want things like this because I often see resume builders on Show HN posts.

Wow, that's a hard lesson. Paid advertising is not a silver bullet and often is a very harsh lesson particularly in the b2c market. Google PPC would likely perform better as you can engage a heavily targeted approach.

Product Hunt has its place but the paid marketing users would need to be from a very specific b2b and unique perspective.
This is a very valuable lesson. As we say in life, live and learn.

@rileyt did you have a "landing page" set up specifically to capture the incoming traffic from PH?

5k for 0 paying customers. I'm sorry for you :(

Perhaps, the ads gave you some visibility to some website that mention you. Many people are using PH as press release, have you track if some websites linked your website after yours ads compaign ?

Also, how long it takes you to got the 250k impressions ? hours ?days?weeks?

Maybe I don't get it, but PH has never struck me as a good place to spend money or even promote product. It just feels 100% wrong.

Feel for you. When you say “landing page conversion rate: 23%” does that refer to your normal rate?

My condolences. I hope some of the converted visitors will become paying users at some point.

My guess is that the PH crowd is ad-blind, so taking money for impressions is a robbery.

Also, suggesting that a PH visitor might be looking for a job is like showing PornHub ads in a monastery.

😱

Well that clickthrough rate is extremly low. I would kill that ad after probably $50-$100.

Did you re-iterate your ads or did you just create one and let it spend $5,000?

Did you consider pulling the plug before you hit the $5k, or were you tied in to a minimum spend?

Driving traffic to https://nocodechart.xyz/ was a waste of time, reaching out to customers turned out to be the best thing. I'd suggest you to do the same.

Have you tried to do ABM, is quite more helpful when started. You can get partnerships with job boards, they boost their experience and you win new posible customers

Ouch! For this type of product I think it would be better to spend money on content instead of ads (unless you can afford search ads but I suppose CPCs in this space are quite high).

Feels like the best place to advertise this kind of products is LinkedIn followed by Google AdWords.

Wow! That is beyond expensive!
I think you could achieve something similar with less than $100 on twitter.

Example: https://twitter.com/CinematicStApp/status/1354103856817438724

I payed 29 euros so far. It's targeted for engagement, but even targeting it for clicks, I'm sure I could get it at roughly $0.25/click.

I'm far from an expert, I still have a LOT to learn, but with $5000 on twitter, you could do some serious damage 😁You can do a LOT of A/B testing, and spend only $5-$10 for a campaign, until you optimize it properly

Sorry to hear about the unfavourable results :(

Does PH do any kind of targeting for the ads? $20 CPM seems high for an untargeted campaign.

The unfortunate reality of this type of display campaign is that you’re paying to advertise to people who may not be interested or may not be interested right now. Eg. For resumes, I guess you need to also reach people who are actively job seeking - not so easy.

Have you been running ads on LinkedIn? If so, curious how the performance compares.

Thank you so much for sharing, we were considering doing the same but were unsure about the results.

Question? did you test out the message before? was this an ad that was successful in other places?

What's the normal rate of paying customer conversions per sign-up? Were you expecting the same from the PH audience?

Landing page conversion rate is the % of email signups on landing page?

@rileyt Hi Riley, are you looking to hire experts. Thank you.

Honestly? Good.

I pretty much never even see ads anymore. I’m running every anti-obnoxiousness device I can get my hands on: no ads, no popovers, stuff to kill fixed-position crap, etc.

Advertisers, and the people who use them, need to understand that most folks don’t appreciate pushy, disrespectful tactics. When ads gets more respectful, people like me might look at them. Until then, I’d say you are, unfortunately, a victim of the ill will towards advertisers.

That’s not a problem. That’s an incentive to find a less obnoxious way of doing things