Now that it’s been a few days since I turned off Google Ads for Dashify, I can see the results.
I started running them about halfway through April, and turned them off at the end of April. During that time, my website traffic rose to around 20 visitors daily, and it seemed like it was going up even more, perhaps after Google’s algorithms figured out when and where to show the ad.
I had a click through rate of 5.91%, and those visitors stayed on the website for just over a minute, on average. Some of these visitors are probably using Dashify, though with WordPress plugins it’s hard to tell.
Here’s my Google Ads graph around the time I turned them off:
Here’s the corresponding graph for website visitors:
Considerations
If you’re a bootstrapped founder, whether Google Ads work for you depends on a few factors.
- It can be expensive depending on what keywords you want the ad to appear under. Keywords like banking or cars are probably out of reach for most bootstrapped founders.
- Very niche keywords, on the other hand, can be very cheap, like it is for Dashify (WooCommerce order dashboard). This is good as usually you want to start in a small niche anyway.
- You need to know what value you’re looking to get from running the ads, and if that value is paying customers, then to calculate whether you’re getting a return on investment or if you’re spending more money to acquire a customer than they pay you.
- It’s faster than the organic SEO approach for getting traffic.
- Though in the long term, organic SEO for niche topics essentially can replace the ads—if you’ve done it right, you’re probably one of the few, if not the only, results showing for those niche searches.
- Google Ads can reach people in more places than the SEO approach. I found it pretty slick that Google could generate ad formats of all types from the assets I provided. It would show those ads on YouTube, in mobile apps, on websites, so many places.
For myself, having spent over $50, it’s not worth it at the moment to continue, though I think that $50 itself was worth it. It likely is the cause of Dashify finding its first 10 free users. If you’re operating in an ecosystem where it’s easier to measure conversions end-to-end, do it. It will give you a clear answer whether the ads are worth it.