As we believe in product-led growth, paid ads are not at the heart of our marketing strategy in the long term. Instead, we see them as an important way to kick start and then amplify the work we are doing in other areas of marketing and product.
We work with an agency, Hey Digital to manage paid ads. Specifically, they help us with:
- Paid ad tactics and monthly media plan
- Creating paid ad assets for each channel
- Manage paid channels on our behalf
We communicate with them via a shared internal Slack channel, and have 2 check-in calls with them each month. We have a very light approvals process for creative:
- Hey Digital team share asset(s) for feedback in Slack
- PostHog team approve - usually Charles or Andy, but anyone can jump in and give feedback
- If approval is not given within 48 hours, Hey Digital will process regardless
Specific details of our media plan are shared internally only, as they contain commercially sensitive information that could be beneficial to our competitors.
Brand guidelines
Hey Digital create our ad assets for most of our main channels. These guidelines may be useful to you however if you are doing one-off assets for things like paid newsletter sponsorships or one off campaigns on more niche paid channels.
- For specific messaging to use in copy, you can use our copy bank, or our value propositions if you need to create something from scratch.
- We have a handy set of assets that you can use. Please make sure you follow these so our brand and design language remain consistent across all our various platforms.
Channels
We currently run ads on:
- Google Search - conversion
- Twitter - awareness
- LinkedIn - awareness
- Reddit - awareness
- Quora - awareness
We may consider other paid platforms such as Facebook and Stack Overflow in the future as we learn more, though they are not currently a priority. We have previous tried and no longer use Bing, Product Hunt, Carbon Ads, and Google Display, as they did not drive high quality user signups.
We usually focus campaigns on users in the US, Canada, UK, Germany and France, as these tend to lead to the most high quality signups. For any GDPR-specific campaigns, we target all EU countries.
Tracking conversion
We track conversion in the PostHog app, as using 3rd party trackers like Google Tag Manager is against our brand and values.
For Google Ads specifically, we have an app which syncs PostHog signups to Zapier, which connects to a Google Sheet that is than synced automatically to our Google Ads account once a day.