What we learned after spending 5,000 EUR on developer marketing

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For Space Blocks, a Developer Platform for Permission Management, we decided to spread the word through online ads in various channels like Social Media, Google Ads, Newsletters, and YouTube Video Ads. Here is our wrap-up.

The campaigns

We are targeting Software Developers with our product, and our main goal for the campaign was raising awareness of our existence. We wanted to let developers know that we offer an easy-to-use solution for all kinds of permission related features. We gave ourselves a budget of €5,000 and a time-span of one month to evaluate what I am now sharing here.

Google Ads 👍

We didn't hear many success stories about Google Ads so far, and so we have been careful with our spendings there, but still wanted to give it a try. Navigating through the Google Ads Console is a pain and although you can probably configure everything, it is very overwhelming and contains a lot of new ad-specific vocabulary, which made it challenging to understand for beginners like us. Google lets you target specific locations (countries) and keyword "themes", from which they derive the actual keywords they are showing your ad on. You can edit those keywords later throughout the running campaign. If your ad will be shown, when a user searches for one of these keywords, depends on how much money you are willing to spend.

We used the following configuration for the campaign.

• Countries: Latvia, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Armenia, Lithuania, Austria, Luxembourg, Azerbaijan, Malta, Moldova, Belgium, Monaco, Bulgaria, Netherlands, Croatia, Norway, Cyprus, Poland, Czech Republic, Portugal, Denmark, Romania, Estonia, Finland, San Marino, France, Slovakia, Georgia, Slovenia, Germany, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Sweden, Iceland, Switzerland, Ireland, Turkey, Italy, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, United States
• Keyword themes: app development, Access Control, software development, permissions, RBAC, access rights, permission checks, permissions for apps, permissions for developers
• Max daily budget: $20

With these values, we were able to achieve 360,000 impressions and 10,900 clicks over a total cost of €448. Not a crazy good result, but spending less than $500 to make 360,000 people aware of our product and have more than 10,000 people actually visiting the website is not too bad.

Non-skippable YouTube Video Ads 👎

As at Space Blocks we are all big fans of watching YouTube videos on Technology and Programming content, we thought running video ads before those video was a good idea. When you create a Video Spot that is less than 15s, YouTube even lets you create it as a non-skippable(!) ad out of it, which sounded very appealing to us.

YouTube Ads are scheduled through the same Google Ads Console as Google Ads and basically work the same in terms of targeting.

• Countries: Latvia, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Armenia, Lithuania, Austria, Luxembourg, Azerbaijan, Malta, Moldova, Belgium, Monaco, Bulgaria, Netherlands, Croatia, Norway, Cyprus, Poland, Czech Republic, Portugal, Denmark, Romania, Estonia, Finland, San Marino, France, Slovakia, Georgia, Slovenia, Germany, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Sweden, Iceland, Switzerland, Ireland, Turkey, Italy, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, United States
• Audiences: Technology Industry, Business Professionals, Technology, Cloud Services Power Users, Business Technology, Hosted Data & Cloud, Enterprise Software, Web Services, Web Design & Development, Business Creation, Recently started a Business, Starting a Business soon, All Users of Space Blocks Website

The results were disappointing. Although spending much more money on YouTube than on Google Ads, only one third of impressions (105,000) were generated. With not even 500 clicks for more than €1,200, YouTube Ads had the worst performance of the entire campaign, in contrast to the highest production cost and time of the video spot. (It turns out, that fitting content into 15s is much harder than expected, as every single frame counts).

Reddit Ads 👍

As Reddit is popular among developers, we also wanted to run ads there. The experience of creating ads on Reddit, as well as their performance, was surprisingly pleasant in contrast to Google.

Reddit lets you target precisely in which Subreddits you want to display your ad and offers to extend this selection dynamically using their algorithm, which we accepted.

• Countries: Latvia, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Armenia, Lithuania, Austria, Luxembourg, Azerbaijan, Malta, Moldova, Belgium, Monaco, Bulgaria, Netherlands, Croatia, Norway, Cyprus, Poland, Czech Republic, Portugal, Denmark, Romania, Estonia, Finland, San Marino, France, Slovakia, Georgia, Slovenia, Germany, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Sweden, Iceland, Switzerland, Ireland, Turkey, Italy, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, United States
• Subreddits: r/javascript, r/aws, r/developer, r/googlecloud, r/node, r/dotnet, r/reactjs, r/SaaS, r/devops, r/softwaredevelopment, r/ChatGPTCoding, r/cloudcomputing, r/programming, r/webdev, r/AZURE, r/csharp, r/LangChain, r/Cloud, r/micro_saas, r/AppDevelopers, r/AskProgramming, r/WebDeveloper (dynamic extension activated)
• Cost-cap: €2.00 per click

With a budget of €700, we were able to reach nearly 1.5 Million developers, from which approx. 3,000 clicked the ad and visited our website. This is many more impressions than on Google, but also fewer clicks for a comparable budget. For impressions, I would always choose Reddit, although the idea, what many of them might have been bots scraping Reddit leaves a bitter taste and might explain, why we were seeing fewer clicks. Bots usually don't click on ads.

DEV.to Ads 👎

As regular readers of DEV.to, we also wanted to advertise there. We chose the smallest available campaign size, which runs for 7 days for $1,000.

This pricing tier does not allow to segment the target audience (the larger ones do) but as on DEV.to, there are only developers anyway, this didn't bother us too much.

Over the 7 days that the campaign was running, we were able to generate 101,075 impressions and only 112 clicks. So either our banner ad was not very appealing (maybe we used too many emojis?) or DEV.to users just don't click on Banner Ads.

Hacker Newsletter Sponsoring 👎

One last channel, we tried was newsletter sponsoring. I don't have the feeling, developers are overly into E-Mail newsletters, but we wanted to give it a try. The Hacker Newsletter has 60,000 subscribers and collects trending discussions on Y Combinator's popular Hacker News website.

For $200, you can buy a "classified" (promoted) link for one issue of the newsletter. We gave it a try and did not register a single page visit from there.

A word on costs and offers

If you sum up all the spendings in this article, you will come to the conclusion, that in total we spent more than €5,000. In reality though, both, Google and Reddit had special offerings at the time when we were running the campaigns, that we used.

Google offered an additional credit of €800, when spending more than €1,200 on their ad platform. Reddit had a similar deal and offered $200 credits, after spending at least $100. Look out for these kinds of deals, when running your own campaign.

What about Ad Blockers?

Nearly all developers are very tech-savvy users and, I would guess, the vast majority of them use ad blockers (I do so myself). So it's a valid question, if banner ads are the right medium to reach them in the first place. I don't have a finite answer on that.

Ad Blockers are the main reason why we chose YouTube Video Ads, as YouTube makes it increasingly hard to use Ad Blockers since they try to sell their Premium plan. The same goes for other media formats like Newsletters and Podcasts. Maybe a Banner Ad is not the right format anymore and our brains are so used to filtering them out? 🤔

Hint: If you plan to run ads for any kind yourself, make sure to disable your own ad-blocker. Otherwise, most ad platforms won't work properly. Don't ask me, how long it took me to find out...

Measure your success

If you are really just after brand awareness, tracking impressions and clicks might be enough, but in most cases, you will want to know, how users interact with your website or product after clicking on an ad (e.g. pricing page visited, signed-up or booked-demo). For this, nearly all ad platforms let you define campaign goals in the form of events.

You should absolutely track these events by embedding the according reporting scripts, which are often called pixels (Facebook Pixel, Reddit Pixel) into your website, so that the reporting tools of your ad platform can track them. It is advisable to also track the source of the traffic (e.g. Newsletter X, banner ad on website Y) with tools like the Google Analytics URL Builder, in case an ad platform does not support event tracking. This gives each ad network a unique campaign link, and you can also validate their reports on your end.

Summary

In total, we reached approx. 2,000,000 users (impressions) and could show them the existence of our product, from which we could convince 14,000 users to click on one of our ads and visit our website. With a budget of only €5,000, I call this a mild success, but not a huge one. It is worth to mention that Google Analytics tracked much fewer sessions than the ad networks reported clicks, which led us to the conclusion, that some clickers closed the website immediately.

In summary, banner and video ads targeted towards developers seem to work much better for awareness than for clicks - meaning if you want to let developers know, that your product exists, it might be a useful tool, but if your goal is engagement, I wouldn't count our campaigns as a success.

☝️ Advertisement Block: I will buy myself a pizza every time I make enough money with these ads to do so. So please feed a hungry developer and consider disabling your Ad Blocker.