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- 🍐#132: Google Search ads and dev tool documentaries
Hey,
Ever told you about my favorite psychotherapist? You guessed it, it’s Esther Pearel 🍐.
This week on the agenda:
Deep dive into Google Search Ads with Matt Nguyen
Examples of great Dev tool / infra documentaries
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 5min
Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:
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Questions around program allocation, channel ROI, budget changes, plans.
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Developer marketing insights
1. Deep dive into Google Search Ads with Matt Nguyen
This time I had a pleasure of speaking to Matt Nguyen. When people ask about “who do you recommend for Google search ads” in our marketingto.dev community Matt’s name is always there with a bunch of +1. So I wanted to learn and go deep into search ads. And deep we went.
Some things we talked about:
Fix your foundations first: Don’t use ads pre PMF. Have clear positioning, some brand recognition, and (ideally) an end-to-end tracking that survives login. Define the next action after signup you actually care about.
Optimize to that next action (activation), not signups: Create staged conversions with values (signup = $1, activation = $20, paid = $100) and feed them back to Google. Add micro-conversions (pricing/docs visits) with tiny values. Smart bidding needs this data.
Intent-matched structure of campaigns: Build 2–3 core use-case campaigns. Use ad groups by subtopic (features, competitors). Map query → ad → landing page 1:1 (vs dumping all to the homepage). It matters for ad quality and conversions.
Scope your spend: Start with focused geos (US if you can afford it; otherwise developer hubs where CPCs are sane). Begin a bit broad, add negatives keywords fast (search terms report is key here), and let data guide you.
Write like a developer, not “an ad”: Drop the fluff (“best,” “by devs for devs,”). Lead with what it does for their stack/use case. CTAs like “Next.js quick start” or even npm install in the headline copy beat “Start your free trial.” Use sitelinks to surface docs, pricing, integrations.
As always way more stuff (almost 2hours) + examples in the pod.
Listen/watch to this or previous episode on:
2. Examples of great Dev tool / infra documentaries
Couple years back I saw this dev documentary on Vue.js from Honeypot (now Cult.Repo) and loved it so much.
Something about the technicalities wrapped in a story with challenges, digressions, and behind the scenes from people you only know by GitHub names just gets me going.
And I know I am not the only dev/ex-dev who loves this stuff. It is such an insider thing, celebration of you and your craft that it gets devs to feel something. And binge.
This type of content is obviously far from your core product marketing stuff. But it can get a ton of awareness from your dev audience/community. Connecting it back to the product is the tricky bit. But if RedBull pulled a flavor of this strategy with a sugar water some dev tool should be able to do that as well.
So recently, there seems to be more of dev documentaries popping up so wanted to share a few good ones.
They also have Lovable, Bolt, and Nuxt. Fun to watch for sure.
Cult.Repo is the OG and some of the classics I couldn’t stop watching are:
And now they have a bunch of new ones I really want to see:
While doing research for this I found a few other good ones from other places:
And of course the classic, especially for an ML person like me.
Need more developer marketing insights?
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If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.
2. Bonus links to check out
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