"Yeah, Google was robbing us blind and kind of scamming us with their geofencing shenanigans, but we were making enough money that it wasn't worth fighting, and eventually we figured out how to stop buying ads from them."
Sounds like a great business opportunity.
Sure, the partner may be hard to work with, but so is almost any big tech platform provider (... Apple ...) and it can be quite profitable to put up with.
If you want to sell everyday consumption or end consumers items, this scheme will eat all your income/benefit.
After reading about all the flaws in automatic online advertising through clicks on this thread, it looks like a big scam prospering more or less in favor of opacity, lack of fine tuning or targeting and fraud.
Referral systems and social influencers seems to be a better option, as long as your product is good and would not shame the ones endorsing it. Betting on viral marketing and endorsement seems to be more natural and a better bet, but require maybe more work and preparation than blind automatic system.
It was a simple PPC campaign that included keywords in google search results and geofenced it to the SFBay. Here are some numbers and findings:
- PPC costs were about $1-2.50/click with a ~$15/day max spend
- Selected cities by hand to fit the service area
- We did in fact get clicks outside of the zones we selected. Many if them were B2B trying to sell their services.
- Customer acquisition costs specifically for the google ads campaign was ~$70 (clicks/conversion)
$70/customer sounds like a lot except these home improvement contracts were typically thousands of dollars, so the campaign was a fantastic ROI. Furthermore, we dialed down ad spend as the reputation was built, and now most leads come via referrals and review sites.
In the end all that mattered was that customers were signing contracts so even if there was some funny business going on it was still worth it for our particular case.