﻿We spent over $800,000 on marketing campaigns with zero tracking and zero expectations for ROI.
Was it a waste of money? Let's find out…
Starting with this Google ads campaign where we spent around $16,100 to try and earn backlinks.
Because backlinks help a page rank higher in organic search, we wanted to test if you could
earn these backlinks simply by paying your way to the top of the search results with ads.
To test this, we bid on keywords that were relevant to our content and noindexed these
articles so the only way to find them would be through our ad.
We let the ads run and monitored backlinks to these pages using Ahrefs' Site Explorer.
And in total we got 101 backlinks from unique websites which works out to a cost average of
$159.31 per referring domain.
Not bad.
But only 36 of these backlinks were actually good, bringing our cost average for decent
referring domain to $446.94.
Not great.
This is the short version of the story.
We actually have a video that shows exactly how we ran this campaign and how we got
links for as low as $49.17 per referring domain.
Link in the description.
Now let's rewind back to 2020.
This was our homepage.
It's about as standard as you can get and not much changed on this page for close to 5 years.
It was time to redo it.
Now, there wasn't anything wrong with the page, but we wanted to add some
personality and rethink our messaging.
So we actually hired not one, not two but three different copywriting agencies.
Each agency went through a few weeks of market research, dozens of customer
interviews and several Skype calls.
And after they'd done their copywriting magic, hey sent us mockups of what they thought
would portray Ahrefs in the best way possible.
And in total, we spent around $33,000 for their services.
Now, an interesting thing that happened is that all three home pages were drastically different.
As such, we didn't choose a single agency's work as the so-called "winner" because they
all made great points.
So our team kind of "Frankenstein" our current homepage together which we were
and are still pretty happy with.
Now, if you think 33K for a homepage is a lot, wait until you hear about our
$52,000 podcast experiment.
Now, $52,000 on podcast ads might not sound like a big bet, but in 2018,
podcast advertising wasn't exactly popular – at least in our niche.
Plus, there really wasn't much information around it so we were kind of going in blind.
Here's how our journey began: we started by sponsoring five podcasts, which cost
a total of $14,200.
From these ads, we got a total of just 339 pageviews and 11 trial signups.
That's basically the equivalent of $41.89 per click or $1,290.91 per lead.
[You can't be serious!]
It was then that we discovered how foolish it was to expect a substantial ROI from cold
ads to a complex product like Ahrefs with a 30-second pre-roll ad in a 30 minute podcast.
In fact, the results were so bad that we almost pulled the plug on the campaign.
But something that Tim, CMO at Ahrefs discovered was that people would frequently
tell him at conferences and meet-ups that they heard about Ahrefs… yeah, you guessed it,
on a podcast.
It was then that we realized that podcast ads were more a tool for gaining exposure
and brand awareness rather than lead generation.
So we spent another $37,775 on round two of our podcast ads.
And in total, we sponsored six more podcasts.
And we didn't even bother tracking clicks or sign-ups because what's another 40 grand?
Now, podcast ads are just one way that we've sponsored creators.
In December 2021, we moved our Google and Facebook ads budget of around $200,000
to support and sponsor creators in our space.
Now, before I tell you the details about our ad spend, some context is due.
We've all gotten used to a model where search engines and other ad platforms
earn more revenue from content than the creators themselves, which is arguably unfair.
And if you know anything about Ahrefs, then you know that we've created our own search engine,
yep.com, from the ground up so than we can give 90% of ad revenue to content creators.
So reallocating our ads budget to sponsor creators made a ton of sense.
So what does 200k buy you?
Well, we sponsored 72 videos, 108 podcast episodes, 138 newsletter issues, 11 standalone
projects and events, 9 sponsored blog posts, and 7 social media campaigns.
Now, something that I thought was super cool about this project is that for 11 of these creators,
Ahrefs was their very first sponsor.
Again, we didn't try and measure ROI or clicks for these campaigns so I can't share
that information with you.
But to give you an idea of the amount of work that's involved to run these, I can tell you that
our partnership manager, Igor, sent around 2,000 emails and had around 20 hours of
Zoom calls to make this all happen.
And he's continued this effort throughout 2022 where we spent an additional $400,000 or so on
creator sponsorships.
Now, in addition to individual creator sponsorships, we also spent around
$100,000 in conference sponsorships in 2022.
And this only accounts for the actual sponsorship fees to organizers.
So no airline tickets, hotels, or swag were accounted for in this number.
So based on these marketing activities alone, we spent roughly $838,875, which excludes
salaries and other expenses.
Now, old Sam would look at these campaigns, roll his eyes a few times and ask… where's the ROI?
But new Sam, who's now worked at Ahrefs for over five years has three takeaways.
#1. When possible, make your marketing campaigns multi-purpose.
So as a company that sells software to marketers, pretty much all of our marketing experiments and
campaigns can be turned into case studies.
This is a type of content that's harder to replicate and our customers love hearing about them.
Let's take our podcast ads experiment for example:
If we expected to get at least $52,000 back from our 52K in ad spend on podcasts,
it would have been a great failure.
But we wrote a case study on this project which got hundreds of backlinks.
It was shared by influential people in our industry.
And it also led to Rebekah getting some of her own airtime on industry podcasts.
Plus you just heard about the experiment if you didn't already know!
This kind of secondary brand exposure makes a lot of our marketing ideas actually worth
trying because if the results are sub optimal, at least we still get content from it.
PS. We're hiring.
Takeaway #2 is to accept that ROI is not always trackable.
Take our conference sponsorships for example.
Let's say we created a special landing page and used campaign parameters to track the so-called
‘effectiveness' of our presence at a conference.
Now, if someone signs up from that special link, can we really say that they signed up
because we sponsored the conference?
Maybe they had a conversation with another attendee who had been a lifelong customer.
Now, what if three months passed by and then they signed up through that link?
Do we know any other interactions that they had with our blog posts, with our videos,
social content or organic mentions from others in the industry?
What about our backlinks experiment?
What is the ROI of a backlink?
The bottom line is that attribution is kind of a nightmare.
And if we're just counting touchpoints, we're at best guesstimating the value of an activity.
I love data just as much as any other marketer but making assumptions based on bad data
will most likely lead to bad decisions.
So I guess lesson 2b is that common sense can sometimes be the better bet.
Alright, the next lesson I learned is to spend on things you believe in.
As cheesy as this may sound, spending on things you believe in just as we had done for
creator sponsorships and events, gives more meaning to a campaign.
In fact, it almost feels weird to call it a "campaign" because things like ROI are no longer the focus.
Now, the marketing dollars that went into these campaigns pales in comparison to
what we put into our product-led content marketing efforts which we've been pursuing
heavily for over 5 years.
If you want to see how we use product-led content marketing to grow our business and
how you can do it too, then watch our tutorial on product-led content which will walk you through
our process step-by-step.
I'll see you there.