How can I advertise on different forums where users are talking about my competitors?

I've done a lot of complex analytics installations, usually cross-domain and including AdWords and manual tagging with conversion tracking of ecommerce transactions. The gclid by default will override the manual UTM values in Analytics so that is what you are looking for. If you are just grabbing the manual tags from the URL for your own purpose, this should be OK. However, if you at some point want to import conversions (say) connected to your manual tag, then you would want to enable UTM overriding the gclid: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033981?hl=en. Do you have AdWords and Analytics accounts linked? Where and how are you tracking commerce conversions, if you are? Do you feel you are getting the insights you need from your current custom reporting? Let me know if I can help with a call about those or further optimization of your analytics capture. Best - Michael

Advertising is one of the ways to get traction, but for most brands it takes over 6 months (or a year) to build any income at all. It's a good way to promote local stores or coffee shops, and cheaper products, but the cost per click is high for online products and the initial investment is significant, and often acquiring a customer costs more than profit. For some brands getting a large number of initial users is essential to get the business profitable at a later point. Many startups invest in different forms of inbound or content marketing and build their steady traffic from freebies, tutorials and other relevant resources for their users, referral programs, freemium models and other tactics to bring users without investing in standard advertising. Advertising is a helpful addition when you implement retargeting pixels and promote to the right channels.

In my experience, starting out testing one against the other is ideal (i.e. running campaigns on each and seeing which performs better). It's also important to look at what your immediate and long term goals are for the spend. Are you trying to sell them something now, keep them engaged for a later release of a product, or some other action? The key thing to note is that depending on what you're selling and what your keywords are, the bar can be a lot lower in terms of your bid per click if you go with Facebook Ads. Additionally: you can hyper target your audience with Facebook Ads like whoa (Google Ads are more limiting). Ex: I ran both sets of ads for a new line of ballet inspired barre-wear (targetting both ballet dancers and barre students). Both Facebook and Google Ads were linked to the sales page. For Google Ads: I used keywords like "barre-wear" (low search volume) "ballet attire" "activewear" (limited relevance) and about 20 other related terms. The spend to results ratio here was underwhelming. Keep in mind: I've only been working with Google Ads for a couple of years now. Better results are possible if you've got someone with 5+ years of experience who knows the system backwards and forwards, but for the most part, Google Ads are not DIY friendly if you want serious results. For Facebook Ads, I did 2 campaigns: 1. Ballet Dancers: I targetted women in major cities (NY, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles), who were under 26 and fans of ballet companies and schools in their city, and also those who were fans of major dance supply companies. 2. Barre Students: I targetted women nationwide who were between 26 and 52, married, above average household income, fans of barre studios in their area, fans of Lululemon Athletica (high end activewear brand), and did a couple of variations on different hobbies and activities to target specifically stay at home moms or wives who were active. The results: $100 in ad spend // over 150 clicks to the product page // 20 new email newsletter signups // 3 immediate sales // 2 follow up sales within that week (so for a $100 product the ad yielded about $500 in sales that week from individuals who could be potential customers again (and 20 new people to market to for future sales).

I've been using perfectaudience.com and found great success. It's very easy to use and the results have consistently been above average. It's Facebook specific but where are most people spending their time? Facebook.

The answer depends on your situation: You could be a start-up that is more concerned with not blowing tons of money, or you could be in a rush to be done. In both situations, your objective is to find inventory sources that work quickly and then massively scale into those inventory sources. I am going to assume that the goal is to be efficient. In this case, I would start with relatively few inventory pieces and a pretty low bid. The goal of your experiment is to determine what inventory DOESN'T work while spending as little money as possible. By concentrating your spend on a few pubs, you can get to significant results quickly. If you spread out your spend, you won't generate enough clicks or backend actions per inventory source quickly enough to determine if one is actually working. (In my latter user persona, you can simply spend gobs of money to get significant results on lots of inventory quickly.) So the moral of the story is that you want to get to results, you have to scale the number of pubs you work with to align with the amount of money you are planning to spend. You would like to, within a day or two, rule out bad inventory and focus on new inventory, or alternately, make massive investments in working inventory to print money for yourself. I would be happy to do a call to further discuss.