Writing Your First 100 Jokes is a digital exercise book about writing jokes, written by me. I've run a Google Ads campaign for a week for two reasons: to earn money by selling, but also, to learn about Google Ads.

Here's how it went down.

My input

• Wrote a 81-page PDF using Google Docs (free)
• Put it behind a paywall to sell it for $9.99 via Gumroad (free)
• Built a landing page with plain HTML using AI (bolt.new) (free)
• Uploaded to Firebase Hosting (free)
• Bought the first100jokes.com domain ($20), connected it to my website
• Launched a Google Ads campaign with daily budget set to $5 for a week

The outcome

Google Ads

• Impressions (no. times my ad was seen): 9,942
• Clicks (on the Google Ad ad): 163
• Conversions (clicks on the Buy button): 11
• Cost: $43.55

Gumroad

• Gumroad sales: 2
• Gumroad Revenue: $19.98
• Gumroad Earning (after Gumroad tax): $15.80

Summary

The total profit of the campaign is [Gumroad earnings] - [Google Ads costs]:
[$15.8] - [$43.55] = [-$27.75]

Learnings

Optimising the funnel

If I wanted to advance this project I'd consider optimising the following funnel levels:

• From 9k impressions to 163 clicks
  • Not sure, what to take from these numbers. Seems low. To improve this I'd probably had to learn more about how to create effective Google Ad campaigns.
• From 163 clicks to 11 conversions
  • This is 6% conversion rate, which is fantastic. The landing page seems to be convincing enough to make people press the "Buy now" button.
• From 11 Gumroad checkouts to 2 Gumroad sales
  • Gumroad seems to turn people away. Why? Is it not professional enough? Maybe it's not clearly communicated that this is a digital product?

Use Broad Keyword Search Carefully

Google Ads has something called Broad Keyword Search, which you can select during the campaign creation. This will try to use keywords that you have not set initially in your campaign creation.

This can go very broad resulting in unrelated visitors coming to your site (for which you pay). You actively need to monitor your campaign and throw away these keywords.

It can also find keywords that you did not think about resulting in bringing in even more related visitors.

That's what happened to me, because I have not added stand-up comedy classes, how to do stand-up comedy or stand-up comedy course to my campaign, but Broad Search did. These keywords account for 6 conversions out of 11.

People search for what they think they need

People don't search for exact solutions. They search for what they think the solution is to their problems.

In this case: people want to learn stand-up comedy, so they search for stand-up comedy courses because that's the solution they think they need.

However, when they see a book represented as a solution instead of a course, they are interested in that too. They just didn't think about searching for a book.

So, try to think with the head of your customers. You might want to use keywords for other product types as well, if they are trying to solve the very same problem.

Update: Search Terms Report

As a fellow marketer pointed out on Reddit, it's worth checking out the Search Terms Report after you campaign.

You can find this in Campaigns , Insights and reports, and then Search terms. Create a filter for seeing terms with at least one clicks at Broad match type. Hit Download, and voilá! You can see all the search term clicks you have paid for.

This is how I found out that I paid for the following, unrelated search term clicks too: improv leadership training, how to create funny content, how to act comedy video. Maybe next time I'll leave broad search off altogether.

Summary

• You can write a book, upload it to Gumroad and create a sales page for free
• You can run Google Ads to see what keywords people are searching for
• Use Broad Search, but actively monitor your new keywords
• Try using keywords for other product types solving the same problem
• Improve your funnel levels by evaluating your campaign
• Check your Search Terms Report after your campaign