Acquire Customers with Capterra with Eran Galperin

0:00we found that even with a very small budget I was getting maybe four or five leads a month with basically no spend this is when we were just getting started over time we kind of learned the ins and outs of how to gain that algorithm to a degree and optimize our spend and now we're generating between 40 and 50 leads a month and growing it's a very good channel for us one of our major channels for acquiring users I'm excited to get into this as nerdy as this topic is it is um I think a really intriguing one and one that a lot of people most people

0:38don't know much about like we hear this term captera but it's like what is that site and why should I care and that's why you're here today right so let me start with a little bit of an introduction I'm around I'm the founder of gym desk we provide online management software for gems and other Fitness and Wellness businesses um I got to know captera a little bit um as I was starting out um my initial inclination is to start with SEO and try to get some organic traffic I didn't have a lot of money to spend um bootstrap no no funding and captera always uh showed up in the

1:21top results for many of our best queries um so I created a listing and um once you create a listing and you're ready to publish it's when you realize that captera though appearing to be a comparison website on the outside is actually a pay per click ad Network um you pay to you bid to appear in the results for a specific category you can show up on multiple categories but you're competing against other brands that are bidding against you to show up in the results um their whole presentation is that of a software comparison website where users your users review you and other users can use that as information to pick a

2:13tool um but in reality while the reviews do play a small part what they do is they capture your reviews and then they make you pay to show them to potential customers um captera is actually a network of free websites um and something that's also not obvious when you first run into it uh captera get app and software advice so um on the surface it looks like separate websites but once you sign up for captera and you set up your profile you see that you can actually set up your profile on free websites from the same interface um all free websites are owned by Gartner I believe they also do a lot of

2:59analytics and Reporting and uh you basically manage it like you with Google ads you have listings you have bids categories um different Target URLs to landing pages uh they have a lot of resources to help you set up landing pages they have a lot of data on converting landing pages and it's basically an ad Network that in my opinion is preferable to Google ads for most SAS products the best way to see if captera might be a good fit for your business just to go and search for best XYZ category that your business is in software most of the times you'll find one of those free websites ranking in the top

3:49three search results and in that case you should definitely be creating a listing and bidding on some level when when I just started I did not have any budget for AdWords um but the bids that you can put on captera in many of the I'm sure there's some categories that are extremely competitive but even in our category where there's some very major players Even If you bid a small amount you're able to get some clicks and those are going to be high quality Clips way higher quality than AdWords in general because they're coming through a compressing website and we're gonna get into this a little bit further down uh this talk but

4:36um they have a ranking algorithm that is a bit wonky its influenced by your bid it's influenced by your ratings and then it's influenced by a bunch of unknown factors a little bit like search result results um but it means that even with a low bid you're able to get traffic that you would not normally think so they would tell you uh with your bed you might be shown in the 25th spot um but in reality you look at your analytics and you're you're getting an average position of 11. nobody knows their algorithm can predict where you're going to show up um and we found that even with a very small

5:18budget I was getting maybe four or five leads a month uh with basically no spend this is when we were just getting started um over time we kind of learned the ins and outs of how to gain that algorithm to a degree and optimize our spend and now we're generating between 40 and 50 leads a month and growing um it's a very good channel for us one of our major channels for acquiring users um ideally we would love to beat them in the search results but uh a lot of big players have tried and it's very difficult they're very entrenched they have a lot of SEO going on and

6:03sometimes you have to take the necessary evil and just you know pay for that traffic um but I believe that once you get over that hurdle it's an excellent channel for most SAS companies that's great so you touched on several things there um I think one we should Circle back on now is budget talked about having a relatively small budget and you know you said relatively inexpensive clicks what put some numbers to those and you don't necessarily have to talk about exactly what you did but like give folks an idea of what what type of budget they should think about right so I'm going to compare it a

6:38little bit to AdWords um with AdWords especially for SAS related keywords the main problem that you're going to run into initially is volume the really targeted keywords very low volume and then when you start to expand your keywords to less targeted stuff you get very low quality clicks now with captera the clicks are usually very high quality they're already filtered through search results because they made it to captera through some kind of intent related keyword and then they already did some comparison shopping so by the time they reach you unless you're like number one or number two on the list they already evaluated multiple Solutions and

7:23probably did not make up their mind yet so you're in a really good position you don't have to introduce what you do um you just have to have a product that is better than what they've seen so far that's also difficult but much less difficult than starting the whole process from scratch um so we were spending I think 50 to 100 a month geez and getting four five six qual Super qualified leads um and that that's basically was our main acquisition channel for years um when we were very small almost no SEO traffic is coming in but captera even before you have any SEO any sales channels any referrals

8:08Partnerships all that stuff captured will send you leads it's very simple you pay even very little amounts and you get leads you need validation for your new product uh you have a very early stage uh product right now you can get those leads and they're looking for your uh a product like yours if you pick the right categories um you you get very relevant needs and when I think of Google pay-per-click obviously cost really depends but I've heard folks saying someone was within the help desk space I don't know it was some SAS that most of us would use and they were saying clicks were like it's like 25 a click or thirty

8:49dollars a click um yeah and and Google is like you and I both know the the quality is fine but like you're not going to convert that many of those so and and other other spaces you know I don't know if gym software is what five bucks a click ten bucks you know whatever it is like compare that to yeah you can get up there for sure uh Even in our space uh bidding on Google and even on captera the top places on captera there are 30 plus dollars a click um but I found from my experience it's actually not beneficial to be in the top

9:22spots on a comparison website um when we tried to increase the bids as we add more budget to spend our position increased but our conversion rate decreased so in the end we were paying more and getting less from it so there's a very fine balance to strike there that's interesting I'm pulling up the slide so people can see kind of what it looks like this is what a result it was like a serp page right a search engine result page but here's for help desk software when we just started out we were paying really ridiculous amounts like two dollars a click maybe even less sometimes our average was around two

9:58dollars a click um we would get maybe 50 clicks a month and convert about 10 percent of it geez yeah this is one of the greatest factors here because the quality of the leads is so high and they're providing support we didn't have an amazing landing page we just followed their best practices um we were getting around 10 conversion rate on our landing page from capture leads that that's what makes it so budget efficient so Iran we've already touched on a few things you've talked about captera and the sister sites I think you've done a pretty good job talking about why you know why cap Terrace so beneficial

10:37um and a bit about budget although I think I want to revisit that I'm going to head back to that slide and we can talk a little more uh and then we'll talk about I think listing optimization and probably getting reviews actually which I'd obviously before but we can still talk through I think that's going to be um really interesting we can talk a little bit about our current budget obviously that says increased significantly over the years let's talk a little bit about that about you know because you were talking two-ish bucks a click 50 clicks 50 to 100 a month you were spending but like

11:06how have you ramped that up yeah so at this point we're spending on most categories between six and seven dollars a click um some categories that are less competitive maybe five dollars a click and it gives us an average position about seven 6.5 to 7 on the results page um which I believe is maybe the ideal position to be um first of all they have several features that um you only show up for if you're in the top 10 for a specific category so that's already it puts you on additional landing pages that they generate aside from the main category pages um at position position six seven they

11:52already gone through the major players that are willing to pay the thirty dollars per click that we're not yet willing to compete with um and they're pretty well educated at that point you can still get quality clicks at position 14 15 but you're basically left with the people that limit eliminated 15 other companies right which can be good and or bad but you're living a lot of your audience off six seven a lot of people are still there they get to the search results and they scroll a little bit they don't just click the first one and that's it right that the structure of the website

12:31kind of encourages you to look at more than one solution um so yeah right now we're paying between six and seven dollars a click depending on the category um we have been doing a lot of work on the optimization of the landing page and the listing page there's a lot of interconnected factors there the way that you present yourself and the category could influence the the quality of the lead um when you add more and more categories we initially started and just one category at that time we were servicing only martial arts schools so we were on the martial arts category um but as we rebranded to gym desk and

13:15now serving all kinds of Fitness and Wellness businesses that opened up a bunch of new categories for us so that's one way to scale just adding additional categories but eventually run into the problem that some of those categories might be relevant for you but they're also relevant for products that are not exactly what you're doing and then you might be paying for clicks um and people that were looking for something else so there's another kind of balancing act and that can be influenced by the copy you put on the listing page there's a bunch of different things you can do there right now we actually have

13:56um a contractor that specializes in dealing with capital listings um and that's been extremely beneficial every week um she reviews our performance she creates action plans um writes copy for landing pages updates the listings updates the bids um and for that kind of iterative process we've been able to optimize the budget and spend to the point where everything is now very cost efficient yeah that's really interesting I didn't realize that there were of course there are captera Consultants but I was actually pretty hard to find but I bet yeah I don't think there are that many yeah but that's that's good and you're you're at the space now you know when

14:38you're first starting out you kind of got to figure it out yourself because you wouldn't have budget for that but now that you're at this point and it's such a big Channel yep makes sense and so is there anything you know before we move off of this this listing page you've talked about listing page and landing page and this is the listing page we'll look at your landing page in a minute and you can give some thoughts about how you've optimized it but on this listing page um what are some things you you mess with like what what do you have control over that makes any type of difference

15:05so obviously the title in the description here very important uh it's basically the same as uh search result Pages serps um you have to optimize the description there it's the first thing people look at your logo obviously needs to be eye-catching and then does the element that's the most difficult to achieve and that's the rating that you see there um the rating and number of reviews extremely important factors in people deciding to check you out and this is one of the struggles you'll run into as you're starting out and you have no reviews um you'll struggle to get clicks but uh with the we focus a lot on

15:47encouraging reviews on captera we have a an email funnel that starts reaching out uh now a couple months after the user has upgraded to a paid plan we assume by that point if they didn't turn out they like our product we ask them for their opinion and if they're willing to leave a review it's completely automated and we get a steady stream of reviews as a result uh right now we have the highest average rating on captera um even without personally asking for reviews recently we started doing that as well another tactic I learned from one of the tiny seat Founders whenever we have a really

16:30good customer service experience I asked my customers service people to ask nicely for a review on captera and people oblige so this is one of the main areas that you'll struggle with initially but very important to start getting those reviews once you have a 10 or so reviews it starts looking pretty good hopefully you got mostly five star reviews and you can start competing on the results page um aside from that the assets that you add obviously very important we recently redesigned all of our assets for captera we used to have just regular screenshots of our product but now it's laid out in a very specific

17:15way we saw some of our competitors competitors listing so we we looked at some of our company this is what my Capital um uh contractor is doing she saw a few that had really good layouts it's organized in a way that is not only showcasing the product but also the brand um and in a very uh professional looking way um there's when you have a good looking product the initial inclination just showed the product but also adding some wrapping to it um really makes it stand out yeah so if you click on any of those slides you see what I mean we add some copy on the

17:54screenshot we do some layouting with the Mac with the iPhone and there's different approaches to do that so that that's the kind of stuff you can really optimize if you have a good designer or access to good designers um then if you have good performance so your conversion rate on the landing page is good and capture knows because you install their tracking pixel uh you'll start getting those badges that you also see on our listing here emerging favorite uh category winner there's a bunch of different badges that you can acquire and they have landing pages where they show all the emerging favorites and they have landing pages

18:35where they show upcoming companies you know they see the velocity of the reviews there you're getting and all five star reviews they start picturing you there so stuff like that can really help you get additional traffic in addition to what's showing on the main listing page got it so there's several ways so it's reviews it's your assets how did you say you get the badges again it's when you is it when you have good conversions do they add them automatically uh it's multiple factors so yeah if you have good conversion rate um nobody really knows this is kind of what we ciphered over time uh you have

19:18good conversion rates uh they put you as emergent favorite you have a good velocity of reviews they put you as category favorite you have the top rating at the end of the year they do like yearly winners and stuff like that they have a bunch of different badges um and some of their competitors that we'll get to in a little bit they do the same thing it's a very common thing now I think most of them are copying the model that capital is using um but yeah this is the the badges is is a thing we use those on our landing pages as well we have

19:51badges from each one of their website so it looks like we're like the top favorite at three different websites when it's all basically the same review Network um but it helps it's like social proof on your landing page um of that stuff helps that makes a lot of sense you mentioned their competitors to captera and the captera network I guess we call it and I think G2 and Source Forge talk to us yeah yeah talk to us about them like how do they compare do you also use them is the traffic the same are they you know is the cost per click the same or is it kind of like there are

20:27also Rands and just you know kind of ignore them if you're starting out well I think it really depends on your category um you really have to look at the search results and see which website shows up uh at the top for us it's the capital net Network um sourceforge well search for it used to be it still advertises itself as an open source repository kind of like the GitHub before GitHub was a thing um and most of their traffic is very uh developer tool oriented so if you have a company in that space there's a good chance that sourceforge is at the top of the search results and then I

21:09would definitely invest in it we did um make a small effort to get some reviews our category because Source Forge is not at the top of the search results there's not a lot of competition there so just by adding five or six reviews on sourceforge we were able to get to the very top of the listing very easily um and we're not paying for clicks so really interesting yeah we do have listings on both G2 and sourceforge um but we're not bidding there they keep reaching out to us to open up a paid account and start bidding start search Forge always pushes their oh we have

21:50millions of visitors a month but I know most of them are just there to download free open source software they're not there um for the same purpose um G2 is a different story so G2 is actually doing okay in our vertical just slightly below captera but I found that dealing with them is extremely painful their interface is I don't know exactly how to put it but things just don't work they're just broken all the time links don't go anywhere you try to log in like five times and on the sixth attempt it does log you in and you get some broken page and then you try to reach out to their

22:35support all you want to do is to publish your listing very hard to get somebody to respond I don't know I've had a pretty bad time dealing with G2 and the thing is they keep reaching out to me and I'm like I every now and then I try restarting the efforts and I run into the same issues so I kind of gave up on G2 but I know some companies especially if they rank uh at the top spots for search results in your category some companies are doing very well with G2 so we're looking into if they're the Top Dog in your search category yeah that makes sense that's a good way

23:11to think about it last question for me and then I'll ask if you have any closing thoughts is you mentioned that captera and get app and software advice are all under this umbrella they're owned by Gartner I think you mentioned um and so in order to have a listing in all three and to do pay-per-click and all three do I need to sign up to three sites or if you go to captera does it manage all of that for you in one place so it's interesting I'm not completely sure if they didn't start out as separate websites I think they actually did but when I joined and this

23:45is seven years ago 2016. um they were already being managed from the same umbrella it wasn't seamless sometimes I would have to reach out to our um account manager and tell them push the changes to the other websites because it wasn't updating by now it's pretty seamless you manage everything from captera and everything updates pretty much in real time and all the other websites as well yeah that sounds good do you have any closing thoughts for folks who are getting started with captera yeah my main advice is go to Google and put best XYZ software in your category and see which websites come up the ones that

24:30come up on top definitely worth investing in creating a listing start playing around with the bids and see if it's worth your time because I think most sales companies can acquire very cost efficient needs for this channel Hey Ron thanks so much for joining me and taking the time to Enlighten the microconf remote audience thanks for hosting me Ron looking forward to the next awesome folks want to check out what you're doing they can head to gymdesk.com all right thanks again to Iran for sharing his knowledge on captera it's honestly the first talk I've ever seen on it I was learning you the oftentimes when I'm interviewing someone I'm asking

25:10questions I know the answer to in that one I genuinely I just I never did kept her advertising so um we do have some really good questions that have come in and I'll answer them for the next five six seven minutes and then we will dive into our founder by founder will you get to meet other Founders one on one so first question from Anonymous was asked before his talk um uh but the question is captura didn't have enough traffic in my space and so their costs were exorbitant for the value I stepped back from them should I reevaluate now that I have more customers and could probably get reviews

25:43do reviews change the cost so reviews do and in the in you know the conversation you heard that there's a bunch of factors that um cause you to rank and reviews are one of them and so the typical advice that I've seen in like the in the slacks where I see people discussing this is there's a thing you can kick off in captera where you can email people for reviews from captera so you can either do it that way or as Iran said when people have a good experience like a good support experience or they write it and say I love this software you say that's

26:23so amazing thanks for being a customer you know what would really help us out if you could take two minutes and write this review and um that's how people do it so the I I do think reviews will help you rank higher for lower cost but the other part of the question was they didn't have enough traffic in my space if they don't have enough traffic in your space then that's probably not worth doing so I would take Iran's advice you go into a um uh what do you call it an incognito window in your browser and then you search for best XYZ software whatever XYZ is for you and

26:58you see who ranks so maybe captera doesn't have enough traffic because they just don't rank high enough but if G2 or you know the other tools we talked about during the talk rank higher than those are the ones to think about targeting answer that question the next one is from water Von Lent he asks would captura make sense for a product without a dedicated category my product for woocommerce monitoring would fit in the website monitoring category but it is not relevant for a lot of the viewers there I would say no I think if if you don't have a if it doesn't have a dedicated category that's going to be

27:33highly um relevant and is really specific I wouldn't I wouldn't spend the time this would be a lot lower on my my list of experiments to run and frankly with woocommerce the advantage you have is of course anywhere every woocommerce podcast YouTube channel every um you know obviously the woocommerce App Store I'd be trying to do crazy App Store optimization there to rank you know there's a lot of places that you can go Focus but in my opinion personally I wouldn't be looking at um at captera next question from will Johnson is there a search volume on Google that is too small or too big for captera to

28:12be a good option basically the size of the niche that it works for how many reviews do you need to start with all right so a couple questions there um I first of all you know as Iran said at the very end is like figure out where you know captera may not be the Silver Bullet right because G2 or Source Forge or one of these others might outrank them or frankly maybe none of them Rank and it's just a completely different you know it's not this is not an approach you can take I mean I do want to call out this has worked really well for Iran

28:41I've seen it work really well for a handful of other Founders who have tried it but like any marketing approach it only works in certain spaces and it only works for certain products and so I like to say like my rule of thumb these days is for example is like cold email cold LinkedIn Outreach seems to be working for about one out of four one out of five companies that I see try it I don't know what that number is for keptera because I don't have a big enough sample size but realize that this is amazing if it works and it just may not work in

29:07your space so to me it's it's worth an experiment if you can find a category you know um but with that said is there search volume that is too big for captura to be a good option no not if Captain ranks high right that's great is a search form that is too small for cafeteria to be a good option I would say yes if they don't rank high and also if it's literally you know a trickle of searches then obviously that's that's not going to be great what I have found though is a lot of the the tough thing with search volume is we go to these tools that try to estimate

29:37it because Google doesn't really tell us and I've seen some search volume tools and Google's keyword what is it AdWords tool say oh it's like less than 100 per month and then I've seen those searches have three four five hundred searches a month and so it's not that it it's not that it's wrong all the time but I do I'm a little wary of that um and then Will's last question was how many reviews do you need to start with um and I so I don't know a definitive answer to that I have definitely seen folks um get in the three to five review range and then start putting making small bets

30:12and that's what I liked about whatever hunt said is he's like 100 bucks a month they started with yeah they were getting two dollar clicks and they were down at 13 15 and they would get a trickle of people you know and so even at that budget it's pretty pretty interesting um Ivan asked what's the cost per click on captera and can you scale it and you heard at least in Iran so it depends on the space right like Google AdWords it just depends on who's bidding but you heard he early on he was paying two and now he's paying uh what did he say five

30:38to seven depending on he's in multiple categories and so that's his range I you know I don't know the for the range for every uh every piece of software obviously and then can you scale it and it sounds like you can scale it to a certain point even captura only gets so much volume for these right and so you can scale it until it until it runs out of leads right until it runs out of monthly leads um and as he said you know I think the big thing to think about is if you're going to do this like try to rank but you know rank where your

31:08budget allows you but he's found six and a half or seven is the ideal which is not something I would have guessed to be honest so I think that was a really nice um nice question and then the last question from gupreet uh there's two questions but actually yeah Brian you asked Iran um about how he markets through trade associations and since he's not here since that was was pre-recorded due to his time zone uh I I'm not you know I'm not able to uh to uh answer that because I don't know how he does that um but last question from Capri before we dive into founder by founder is are you

31:44incentivizing customers to review on captera free months or any rewards and I'm pretty sure he is not and in fact I don't know the founders I've seen do this and I've probably seen let's say in the last year maybe half a dozen to a dozen in that range no one so it's not it's not like I've seen thousands doing it right none of them have incentivized they have said they've either sent out an email saying hey if you love you know if you love my tool because I did this for like savvical did it right so that's what I was about to say but like you

32:17just sent out an email and said if you love The Tool be really great if you could help us out and he got enough people doing it and then the other one is in your support queue if someone says this is such a great tool I love it you say you know what be amazing is if you could help us out do this and there's there's no incentive um needed as far as I have seen it's a good question though thanks for asking

32:45foreign

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