Altium: 2,460 Software Trial Leads in Nine Markets, and What Each Market Cost

By Kevin Veitia

Client

Altium, maker of Altium Designer, professional software for designing printed circuit boards (PCBs)

Channels

Facebook and Instagram (Meta Ads). Reddit ran alongside, with Michael Reiss of Advertology. The figures below are Facebook and Instagram only.

Timeframe

2019 to 2020. The figures below cover 30 October 2019 to 22 August 2020.

Markets

The US, Canada, the UK, Europe (in English and in French), Spain, Israel, India, and Australia and New Zealand

Goal

Leads for the 15-day free trial of Altium Designer, plus purchases from two promotions

The challenge

Altium makes Altium Designer, the software electrical engineers use to design printed circuit boards, the boards inside nearly every electronic device. It's professional software at a professional price, sold to a narrow audience of engineers and the companies that employ them. The ads offered a fully functional 15-day free trial.

We started with one market, the US. Once that worked, the brief grew: Europe, including Germany, France, Italy and Spain, then the rest of the English-speaking world, then India. More markets means more ways to waste money, because every combination of country, language and audience is its own small test.

What we did

Built six audiences and tested them everywhere

Following the SUREFIRE method, targeting came first. We built six audiences and ran them in every market: people interested in electrical engineering and PCB design; lookalikes of people who'd started a trial on Altium's website; lookalikes of Altium's customer list and of its newsletter list, both going back to 2014; lookalikes of blog readers; and people interested in engineering professional organizations.

The plain interest audience won. Outside India, people interested in electrical engineering and PCB design came in at about $83 per lead, cheaper than any of the four lookalikes, which landed between about $90 and $98. Professional organizations were the clear loser at about $176, roughly double. The audience that sounded most senior was the least efficient.

Statics against video

We tested static ads against video head to head, and statics won. The budget followed: static carousels carried about two thirds of the lead spend from then on. In 2019, that wasn't the contrarian call it would be today, because statics were still at least half of what people saw in their feeds.

Ten months of data add a nuance. Across the whole period, carousels and videos brought in leads at almost the same cost, about $70 each. The best ad that spent real money was a video: a customer testimonial, at about $50 to $65 per lead depending on the copy. The worst was also a video, an abstract one built to look impressive, at about $112 to $121. The format test told us where to put most of the money. It didn't excuse us from judging every ad on its own numbers.

Questions against statements

Every ad ran with two versions of the copy, one opening with a question and one with a plain statement. A question is our default opener, and it served Slickplan well. Here, the statement usually won. On the carousel and on the testimonial video, the two ads that carried most of the budget, the statement cut the cost per lead by about 15% and 22%. Our read: engineers wanted to be told plainly what the software does. So the statements got the budget.

Took it to Europe, in three languages

After the US, we expanded to Europe. Kevin, our founder, is Latin American and speaks French, so he handled the Spanish and French ads himself. That meant adapting them, not just translating: rewriting the copy so it read as if it had been written in that language first. It's the same work he did for Canva in French-speaking markets.

The numbers taught us something we now tell every client who expands abroad. English-language ads shown to engineers across Europe brought in leads at about $76 each, cheaper than the US at about $90. French-language ads cost about $160 per lead, and Spanish about $171. Many European engineers work in English every day, so the English ads reached a bigger pool of the same people. The native-language ads were worth running, as a test against the English control, not as the default.

India, and what cheap leads mean

India was in a different league: about $12 per lead, against $76 to $206 everywhere else, and the cheapest Indian ads came in around $3 to $6. We also made an ad just for India, built around the festival of colors, and it cost more than the standard ads there, about $25 per lead. Localizing the look isn't automatically better than a clear product message.

Cheap leads aren't the same as customers, though. The export doesn't show which leads went on to buy, and a lead from a student isn't worth the same as one from a professional design team. That's the question we'd want answered before moving budget toward the cheapest market.

Facebook carried it, not Instagram

We ran Facebook and Instagram as separate campaigns, which we rarely do now. Facebook brought in leads at about $60 and Instagram at about $80, and Facebook's click-through rate was about four times Instagram's. In 2019 and 2020, engineers weighing professional software were on Facebook.

From trials to purchases

Late in the engagement we added purchase campaigns: two price promotions, plus retargeting of people who had already started a trial. They were small, about a tenth of the spend, and Facebook recorded 26 purchases from them. Without revenue data we can't give you a ROAS, so we don't.

Results

• About 2,460 free-trial leads from Facebook and Instagram between 30 October 2019 and 22 August 2020, across nine markets and three languages
• About $65 per lead overall, and about $60 on Facebook
• A plain interest audience that beat every lookalike, and copy that got cheaper when it stopped asking questions
• A clear map of what a lead cost in each market, from about $12 in India to about $206 in Israel

What the data can't show is revenue. Facebook's exports record leads and what they cost, not what those trials turned into. A lead generation account is ultimately judged on what happens after the form, and for Altium, that lived in its own systems.

What you can take from this

• Expand one market at a time, and keep a control. Here, English ads in Europe beat the US on cost per lead.
• Treat translation as a test, not a default. Run it against the English version and let the numbers decide.
• Test a plain interest audience against your lookalikes. Here, the plain audience won.
• A format can win the test while one ad in the losing format beats everything. Judge ads, not just formats.
• Cheap leads are only cheap if they become customers. Agree how you'll track that before you scale.

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