A user in the nextNY group brought up a great way to test product demand by using paid search.  I thought this was a brilliant way to see if there was demand from people who are actually searching for your product.  This could potentially save you time building a product which has no market.

Here a couple things that you should probably think about, when using this approach:

1. Aside from click-thrus and, maybe, information/email collection (to simulate purchase demand), what are other important metrics that I may
want to track and evaluate?

2. How should the budget be set? Is it at a dollar amount (roughly $xx per test is sufficient) or a calculation of cost to get a certain number of hits (what’s that number?) or something else?

3. Which keywords do you want to target?

4. Does the UI of the splash page matter at all, if the UI isn’t what is being tested?

exclusively)?

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