Don't Use This Ad Tactic

Experiment #3: Want to get more impressions and eyeballs on your project? Ads can help - but not in this format.

Hi, it’s Andreas, and I’m back with Growth—my newsletter featuring weekly growth experiments, proven strategies, and case studies to help grow your business.

I’ve experimented a lot with ads over the years and recently came across one that looked promising, but it wasn’t worth the time.

Let’s dive in.

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So, when you want to generate the first dollar with your project, you’ve probably thought about marketing. With that, you’ve also probably considered ads.

The holy grail when it comes to finding users: throw money at it, and everything will work out.

Wrong. Don’t do it.

Even worse - don’t do LinkedIn ads. You’ll burn a ton of money, especially if you haven’t reached product-market fit and you’re an indie maker.

But you might think LinkedIn is where you’ll reach your target audience, and you’ll want to take a look anyway… even if I warned you.

Okay. Rebel.

Then here’s the mistake we did what you still shouldn’t do.

Hypothesis

So, we thought we’d take one of our well-performing posts and simply “boost” it. LinkedIn offers this feature to get more eyeballs on your content.

And as every expert tells you to take a well-performing organic post and turn it into an ad, what could possibly go wrong?

I jumped into the feed, picked a post that aligned with our current effortst… hoping the included landing page link would drive more clicks and ultimately increase conversions.

Our hypothesis was:

If we boost a well-performing organic post, then we will see significantly more impressions and higher conversions in the end.

Experiment Design

So, we picked the post, hit "Boost," set up our target group, and thought we could get started.

Not with LinkedIn. The post included a couple of emojis too many for LinkedIn’s taste.

So, we removed them and hit "Boost" again. I allocated $500 to see how it would perform.

Source: LinkedIn

Results

This experiment ran from April 4 to April 16 (about 2 weeks).

We spent $482.71.

The ad generated 31,509 impressions and 230 clicks—resulting in a CTR of 0.73%.

We generated 0 leads from it.

Okay, maybe the landing page was bad. Fair.

But even the click-through rate was low for a tactic where every “expert” says to just take an organic post that performs well and turn it into an ad.

Takeaways

While we saw zero results from it, I wouldn’t completely say that it couldn’t work.

But boosting a post should be part of a larger campaign. And since you want to see fast results when building your own (side) projects, don’t use this tactic.

It’s not worth it for this purpose and costs too much. That $500 is better invested if you want to experiment with ads.

See you next time! 👋🏼

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PS: If you enjoyed this experiment, please tap the like button and let me know in the comments below. Thank you! 💛

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