[ibrow]

You can learn a lot from this.

Firstly you can learn how other people describe the type of product you are offering - not necessarily how you describe it. With Adwords you'll see the types of keywords that people are typing to have your adverts displayed, some of these keyword phrases may include words you haven't considered. You then add these new words to your list and see the results. Rinse and repeat.

Now people are coming to your site you can track what they do. What price point has the most clicks, what wording bounces the least, etc.

I have done exactly what erikpukinskis described and it serves to not only validate (or not) your idea, but the great thing about this is I learned far more what real people are actually wanting, not what I thought they wanted.

A couple of weeks investing in a quick wordpress site and some adwords to validate and modify an idea before building is so much better then building it then seeing if they will come.

[Felix21]

Seems like you only read my first line

[ibrow]

I am probably not making myself clear

> Is it because i drew the wrong crowd? Is it because they don't know me? is it because adwords conversions are usually very low so do i need to pay for more traffic?

You don't just put up one ad using some keywords and be done with it. You constantly tweak, seeing what keywords people are using to find your ads, which keywords have the highest click through rate.

When I did this for a little idea I was thinking of doing, this was incredibly helpfu

The product I was think about doing was related to niche websites. I thought most people would use the word "niche" to describe them, it quickly became apparent that the real word people used was "affiliate" I saw "affiliate" appear a lot with related keywords and in the stats on the site, so I added an adword targeting that and related keywords, CTR doubled.

Using adwords helps you define and recognise the crowd you draw so you can best cater to them.

> If it actually is because my product sucks, then cool.. But what do i change?

Again, don't keep it static. In my experiment above, the first 100 clicks saw no interest. I changed some wording, a tiny improvement (less bounces etc). I changed the price, less bounces. I added FAQs, less bounces, I tweaked the available functions - possibly people would want feature X. Bang! people clicking on the "order now" button. Feature X is what people want

> There is no way to know this; which is why i believe the buy button is not the way to go.... at the beginning.

Seems like you haven't tried it, ;)

[Felix21]

iBrow i get your point

All im saying is - as i summed it up in the last line - you need to talk to customers before wasting adwords dollars.

What you describe is using adwors to find your audience. I guess there might be situations where that would be useful

[ibrow]

But talking to customers is exactly what these guys did:

> So we talked to a few artists who said they thought it was a cool idea. BOOM! Our idea had been validated!

The idea had not been validated at all, just been told it was "cool". What they should have done next (or possibly at the same time) is spend a couple of hundred dollars on adwords to see if a cool idea converted into something people would actually want to buy.

What they should not have done is

> stopped talking to artists for a year and built (and rebuilt) the software until we thought it was acceptable

My point is that I would far rather spend $200-$500 on adwords and not on 1 year development of a product that is thought to be cool, but no one has actually had the opportunity to come to it fresh and click on an "order now" button.