A few new things. I’ve gotten some more stuff back from my designer for the marketing site redesign and it’s looking good. I have to wait until I get the final deliverables in order to actually code the new design into the site.

I also got impatient and started an AdWords campaign a few days ago even though the new site isn’t ready yet. Since 5/9 I’ve had 5 clicks. My average CPC is $10.53 and my CTR is 0.44%. I’d like to get the CTR above 1%, and of course I’d like the CPC to be as low as possible. I’m estimating that I’m going to need one new customer for every $2000 I spend. Right now I have AdWords set to a $500/mo budget.

In addition to AdWords I also engaged with this company called Capterra. If you google for “salon software” or “hair salon software”, the first result is this Capterra’s salon software directory. I had long wondered what exactly it would take to get to the top of Capterra’s listings. I assumed it of course involved giving them money. It turns out they offer a PPC thing to their customers. The minimum bid is $2.00/click. I was told I could leap over a number of my competitors by bumping it up to $2.25, so I did that. I’ve had that going for a couple days and I’ve gotten 8 clicks each day. I’ll be curious to see how Capterra performs compared to AdWords. My plan is to run them in parallel for about a month and then see what I think. I’ll probably dial AdWords back to $250/mo and set Capterra to $250 as well because I kind of decided I just wanted to spend $500/mo on marketing at first.