How to Validate Your Business Hypothesis Using AdWords.

This article is written by Nardine B. M’barek, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Bernard Huang is a well-known entrepreneur who is also the co-founder of Mushi Labs, founded in 2015. Added to that, he is the co-founder of Clearscope in 2016. He also was on the 500 Startups distro team. They helped 500 Startups' portfolio companies. Previously, he was the co-founder of ‘Food-By-People’ in 2013, as well as other companies. He graduated from The University of Texas at Austin.

Mr. Bernard Huang was present with us during Etohum Kampi 2015 and talked about various things from his personal experience.

As a start, Mr. Huang gave the audience some Growth hacks from his own notes. He then continued talking about SEO, which according to him is very valuable traffic. What you want to do as a validation experiment for SEO, is to use AdWords to research keywords that you believe you want to go after with SEO, and validate the purchase intent.

Mr. Huang was working on a project which basically helped bakers and bakeries manage their baked goods and fulfill orders. They created this website and wanted to figure out what kind of software would bakers want to buy, and whether AdWords was a relevant tool or not.  

In order to verify that hypothesis, they created a landing page which would allow them to make sure, before making an investment and looking for funding, that people actually wanted to buy this kind of software, and that they were really willing to pay $19 per month to purchase this professional cake contract.  

What they asked them for were several pieces of information such as the full name, the email, the phone number, etc, and made it clear to those who answered all those questions that this service would cost $19 a month.

What followed is setting up an AdWords campaign to attract people to that landing page. What they made sure of while setting this AdWords campaign was that all the keywords and the add-groups were mapped one to one; that means that if you are advertising for ‘cake contract’, then the only words you should be bidding are those related to that ‘cake contract’ and nothing else, making you singularly targeting the keyword that you are working after, and design adds that only match that keyword and the ‘cake contract’ that you want to promote.

When the AdWords campaign was finally set up, it was time to direct the traffic towards that landing page that they have created at the beginning, and checked how that page is actually performing in terms of attracting people in comparisons to other types of offers they could have. It was basically trying to figure out if people wanted to buy a cake contract software or cake management software.

These basically are advertised different features, it allows you to see your entire business at a glass. The software deposit also mentioned that you could immediately accept online deposits and payments through your cake contracts.

The conversion rates of each page’s performance proved and actually validated the hypothesis they started with, which is that people really want to buy this ‘Cake Contract’ software and that AdWords was the appropriate tool. That is somehow how you would use AdWords to validate if you want to start tackling search engine optimization as a strategy to get things done.