….FE International! We are proud to announce CEO Ismael Wrixen as the recipient of four IBBA awards. During the Annual IBBA Member Excellence Awards Gala of the IBBA Conference, on behalf of FE International, Ismael was awarded with the IBBA Chairman’s Circle, IBBA Deal Maker, IBBA Deal Maker of the Year and IBBA Top Global Producer awards. To learn more about these awards, you can read our latest blog post or check out the full press release on Yahoo! Finance. We want to take a moment to thank you, our readers, friends, partners and advocates for working with us.
Business wise, featured in Deal Highlights this week is a SaaS business that offers permit management software in the NYC construction and real estate management space. The business has low customer churn and has been established since 1995. Looking for something else? Browse all of our listings here.
Looking ahead, FE will be sponsoring Midwest E-Commerce Conference in Minneapolis in mid-July. If you’re attending this event, look out for Founder Thomas Smale, as he would be happy to answer any questions you have about our services and would also love to hear about your business. If you’re in Minneapolis, feel free to let us know as well and we can set up a meeting with Thomas.
Read on for more on the growth of a SaaS business, Amazon character indexing limit and an update to AdWords Quality Score.
Deal Highlights
SaaS – B2B Real Estate Permitting Automation – $8K gross/mo
- Low customer churn at 0.1% and high CLV
- Long and established business history
- 36% year over year growth since 2014
- Leadership position in the NYC real estate market
- Low owner involvement
Yearly net profit: $91,000
Asking price: $295,000
Sold:
Digital Products – Self-Help & Improvement – $21K gross/mo
In the News…
Amazon 250 Character Indexing Max
Amazon has recently changed the maximum number of characters it will index for product descriptions to 250 characters (approximately 40 words). Formerly, merchants believed that Amazon was indexing 5,000 characters in a product detail pages’ backend keywords. Since last year, there has been some speculation from merchants about a limit to descriptions.
In an email to a seller inquiring about the maximum amount of keywords, Amazon stated, “…sellers can put 1000 characters but our system can index only 250 characters at maximum. Please know that we currently do not have an option of indexing the keywords to more than 250 characters. I apologize if this policy doesn’t meet your business needs.”
In an article by SellerLabs, it pointed out that this means a couple of things. One, generic keywords will be normalized so upper/ lower case keywords, singular/plural forms of the same keyword should not be added. Two, sellers will not need to add keywords that already appear in the title, description and subject keywords. Three, Amazon will ignore any generic keywords beyond their 250 limit. Four, Amazon will also discontinue partial matching of generic keywords. It believes that it is unlikely for people to search for paragraphs of keywords. The article also dives into how to check to see what keyword(s) your product is indexed for, so definitely worth a read.
Moving forward, Amazon sellers should be more strategic with the keywords used in their product detail pages. Amazon believes this will eventually help Amazon searches provide more relevant results for its customers.
AdWords Quality Score
Third-party marketing platforms have figured out a way to breakdown Quality Score analytics. Previously, users were not able to view the individual components (Expected Click Through Rate, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience Scores) that comprise Quality Score. Marketers were itching for this data and now AdWords is finally serving it as a new reporting feature.
If you sign in to your AdWords account, you will find that there are seven new added columns to the Quality Score menu. These include: Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, Landing Page Experience, Quality Score (history), Landing Page Experience (history), Ad Relevance (history) and Expected Click Through Rate (history). This information has always technically been available, but Google just made it more accessible.
There are a couple of ways you can take advantage of all this new data. You can now see how changes to your landing page are influencing Quality Score, identify which keywords are benefiting from landing page changes and see how relevant your ad is to the content on your landing page.
To learn more about how to best utilize this new update, check out this Unbounce article.
ConvertKit Grows to $8M ARR in 4 Years
Nathan Barry, Founder of ConvertKit, an email marketing automation platform for professional bloggers, tells his founder growth story to Groove in an interview. Nathan’s company currently generates $700,000 per month. In 2011, he started blogging because he wanted to make money from the Internet, quit his job, be known and form relationships with people. In 2012 he wrote an e-book, The App Design Handbook, on how to design iPhone apps.
In the interview, Nathan talks about all the things he learned along the way once he started building his own email list and gaining traction. He shared everything he knew, made sure he was creating content every day and eventually discovered the value of email marketing, kickstarting ConvertKit. Once he decided he wanted to start a SaaS company, he told everyone about it and received strong support from well-known SaaS industry experts. For a moment, ConvertKit hit a decline, but quickly turned around when Nathan started to put his efforts into sales and customer support.
If you’re interested in learning more about Nathan’s story, you can read the complete interview on the Groove blog.