CustomKnoppix.com Post Mortem
Duncan and I ran a market test for a customised Knoppix CD service recently. We’ve decided to take the site down as we didn’t find paying customers. I’ve learned something about marketing and Google Ads and I figure this write-up might be of benefit to others. Originally this article was introduced by this blog entry.
We uploaded the first page March 22nd 2005 and I activated Google Ads shortly after. I turned off Google Ads at the start of June 2005, and finished the hosting a few weeks later. There’s now an archive of the CustomKnoppix website.
During the lifetime of the site we’ve had 3,177 page requests. April had 1,661 pages requests - this is when I first started using Google Ads and Google allowed the ‘Knoppix’ keyword. After a month or so Google stopped the ‘Knoppix’ keyword (as a customised Knoppix distribution wasn’t so relevant to most users who searched for ‘knoppix’). In May there were 988 requests, and in June (when I had stopped the Google Ads) there were only 117 requests.
The search-engine referral report shows that ‘knoppix’ and ‘knopix’ were the queries that generated the most traffic, presumably from Google (I didn’t submit the site to other engines). I hadn’t bought the ‘log everything’ option for my hosting so I can’t tell a lot more from the meagre reports that are left.
The top four browser stats are interesting:
- MSIE 6,108
- Mozilla 5,860
- Konqueror 639
- Opera 371
Normally Internet Explorer dominates the ranking, here instead we have an audience that is roughly evenly split between IE and Firefox. Presumably this reflects the geeky nature of the subject.
I spent £108 over 4 months for 9 keywords (Knoppix, Custom Knoppix, Customised Knoppix and mis-spellings). I had just under half a million impressions (ads on pages), 2,800 click-throughs (costing 4 to 20 pence each, but the average cost was close to 4p a click). This was the only advertising for CustomKnoppix, we didn’t add ourselves to the Knoppix wiki or mention ourselves anyplace else.
Duncan added a php-based contact form a few weeks in to the trial as we weren’t getting many emails. Almost immediately we started to receive new requests for contact. Normally people correctly put in their name and email address, sometimes people just hit the ‘contact me’ button without first having added their details (we had no validation on the form).
27 people used the php form to request contact, about 50% of them didn’t reply to my follow-up mails. I had conversations with 15 people (most of them had used the php form). Few people used the sales@ email address during the lifetime of the site.
The Google Adwords program is a very nice way to experiment with pay-per-click advertising. Setting up the system is easy - I had my first Adwords activated within 30 minutes. Pausing, editing and stopping the Adwords is also trivial. You can set a limit on how much is spent each month and Google provide a reasonable amount of reporting on how many people see/click the ads. I’ll be using Adwords again on future projects.
In total we had two ‘proper’ sales leads: 1 US guy wanted paid expert help with developing a minimal-install set, though we didn’t know enough to help him. Another US guy wanted a customised repair CD, but only wanted to pay $50 for it. There were no other good leads. This led us to close the site down - whilst we might have found better ways of offering the service, we didn’t have the time to commit to making it work. All in all it was a good education.
Essentially 1% of the 2,800 people who clicked on the advert showed enough interest to use the contact form, and 7% of those showed serious interest in the product. Techniques for increasing the response rate from click-throughs is discussed in Knock Knock and if we had continued with the idea we would have applied these principles.
Lessons learned:
- Google Ads are a cheap, easy to use and effective way of reaching a lot of people.
- Going from the initial concept of “lets offer a customised Knoppix CD service” to a well presented, working site with advertising and contact from potential customers us took the two of us about 10 man hours. This is very impressive.
- Whilst many people used the php contact form, many didn’t really have a problem - they just wanted to chat - this was a pain as it takes time to discover this.
- The market probably isn’t ready for a customised Knoppix service. At least - not as we presented it.