Social ads are ads placed on social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter etc.

Display ads are the banner ads you find across the web.

This is a very large and popular marketing channel.

Why social and display ads?

These ads are mainly used for two purposes:

• To build brand image and increase awareness
• To get a direct response (like signing up or making a purchase)

Social ads can also gain you fans that engage with your brand and eventually turn into customers.

What are social ads?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about improving your ranking on search engines so more people will visit your site.

All SEO tactics start out with content strategy.

SEO basics

The secret to a higher search ranking is getting high-quality links to your page or site.

For more information on improving your rankings, read Moz’s Beginner Guide to SEO, which outlines the basics.

SEO strategies are divided into two categories:

• Fat-head strategies
• Long-tail strategies

Fat-head vs. long-tail strategies

The truest indicator of whether your product is providing real value to the users is retention. Very simply, it's a metric that tells whether your users are coming back to your product regularly or not.

How to measure retention

Here are four steps that you should follow:

1. Pick a leading indicator of revenue and repeat behavior: If you're a marketplace with two sides, you need to have metrics for both the supply and the demand side. For example, for Airbnb: Rebook rate (% of customers that rebook after the first booking) and number of nights booked per user over time are good examples of demand side metrics/actions that truly indicate that the user is using the product. A vanity metric like app downloads or pageviews here doesn't indicate much. On the supply side, metrics like number of bookings per unique active host over time is a good supply side metric.
2. Pick the right time period for your compan...

This course has 25 short, crisp tutorials on how to grow your startup — once done, you should have a good understanding of what the field of Marketing and Sales for startups looks like, have a good understanding of how to think and measure growth, as well as have about 20 "Traction channels" in your toolkit to help you grow your product.

If you like this course and want to dive deeper into...