My Duck Duck Go reddit ad by the numbers
gabrielweinberg.com
gabrielweinberg.com
I'd be interested in advertising but even at $20 there doesn't seem reason to advertise on the main reddit page when I know my target audience will be on a subreddit and can get much better quality clickthroughs.
So for $20 I got 19,303 unique views, 63,473 total views, 199 unique clicks, 215 total clicks. And a grand total of 1 sales.
The click numbers were different though, the affiliate program I used reported lower click #s.
I'll make a proper blog post about this later today, since I've been waiting for the 24 hour window for reddit to finalize their numbers.
Edit: here is the post with all the numbers/screenshots. Surprisingly I had a lower CPM than Gabriel which is weird since he was spending a lot more money than me.
http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/481918228/tried-out-reddi...
I second this. You always want a way to track your actual clickthroughs so you can compare to your affiliate stats. If you're doing enough volume you can sometimes be credited for leads/sales that your affiliate network missed, but only if you can provide them with your own tracked numbers. And really only if the network values your traffic.
Our traffic numbers come from the same system we use to track our own website traffic, so we work very hard to make sure it is as accurate as possible, since we sell our own advertising based on those numbers, and if they were over-inflated, our other advertisers would complain vociferously.
I suspect the error lies in the affiliate program, who has an incentive to under-report.
However, if you'd like to provide us with the numbers you got from your affiliate program, we would be love to take a look and try to figure out what happened.
Edit: I forgot to mention that AdBlock blocks a lot of affiliate trackers, but a lot of reddit users specifically disable adblock for reddit, so that might also be a source of the discrepancy.
The self-serve advertising system has been a win for me, both as an advertiser and as a reddit reader; so until Coca-Cola and Viagra ads start showing up in the ad boxes, I'm sure that lots of redditors will still keep the AdBlock exception on their machines.
(I guess this is a roundabout way of me saying that I like the way ads work on reddit, so I didn't mind turning AdBlock off personally.)
So a site that made "interesting ads" part of their brand and actively rejected boring and obnoxious ones, could potentially be valuable. Maybe reddit is consciously doing this.
Maybe. :) In fact, we use reddit quite a bit, and the flashy ads annoy us just as much as the rest of you. We do our best to keep the ads relevant and non-annoying.
If we could afford it, we would just turn the ads off, but sadly, we have to pay the bills somehow.
> "If we could afford it, we would just turn the ads off, but sadly, we have to pay the bills somehow."
This comment, however, isn't helpful, and obviously isn't true. Reddit built a really cool, useful site for sharing and discussing interesting things, and nobody begrudges them for trying to turn a profit. Reddit wasn't acquired by Condé Nast because they are interested in having a cool service, it was acquired because they intend to make a lot of money off of it.
The fact that Reddit has found a way to do this while keeping the ads relevant and non-annoying definitely impressive, but we're kidding ourselves if we call these ads a necessary evil instead of the core of the business model.
Sure it is true. We would love to run the site without ads. There are other business models besides straight ads, and we are working on moving towards those.
They just aren't profitable yet.
That's probably why.
Advertising from people and companies you perceive to be your peers or "at your level" are surprisingly tolerable aren't they? (The Deck's inventory is another great example) It's the ads from megacorps and bottom feeders that are annoying.
For example, I'd love to see ads from other HN members (ONLY) here on HN, and I'd even pay to run some myself.
I agree! Maybe make it require a certain karma level to buy an ad. The revenue could help make HN a bit faster.
Yeah that's one of the reasons I didn't go for the Amazon affiliate link, since I figured it'd get overwritten quickly by someone else's code.
Proving you don't know reddit that well. That will appeal to the 13 year old digg converts. The people with money to spend will just see it as immature, and therefore perceive your produce as being unprofessional.
OK. I just found your ad - http://www.reddit.com/comments/bgb99. You might want to consider the fact that A Small Orange were advertising pretty heavily recently. That would have cut down on people looking for entry level hosting. Or, perhaps you are right in saying that redditor's are cheap.
That might have affected the CTR, but shouldn't have affected the conversions.
Branding is a fickle matter.
I've switched to it full-time, and just do !google blah when I need to do an image search. The !bang flexibility makes it fantastic, and !twitter searchterm and !flickr searchterm makes it feel like you have a half dozen search engines at your fingertips. Because you can still execute google searches, it's not really 'switching from Google'- it's just an improvement, plain and simple.
My experiences have not been so great. Sometimes yes, but mostly not.
My main problem came in that the first 48 hours (out of 96) that I ran the ad were great. A ton of impressions, comments and traffic. Yet the last 48 hours or so I got almost no impressions or clicks on it. For anyone at Reddit I can provide my account information (its all under 'tibbon') for you to see what I'm talking about.
What I personally took away from it was that you should run your ad for two days, and then not run similar again for a month or so.
Yeah, we try to tell people that. The problem is that once someone acts on your ad, we don't show it to them again. So your impressions are expected to drop off rapidly.
We need to do a better job of communicating that.
That's less than $0.01 cpc...which, from what I understand, is completely unheard of.
HN
Reddit Ad
Craigslist
Friends & Family
I would still recommend Twitter, Reddit, Delicious, and the like, but would also focus heavily on guest blogging nowadays - its effectiveness has been proven a lot in the last couple of years.
Edit: for something for consumers that is broad-based, like a search engine.
For example if you wanted to launch a site that listed the best places to rock climb, then you'd want to do some guest posts on popular rock climbing blogs.
I have not used them yet but I'm planning on it. I'm not sure I have found the down side at 5 bucks.
That said, several years back I got around these restrictions a few times by putting in my valid address but then selecting, say, NY and zip 10001. Some card validation systems back then obviously just used the first line of the address and ignored the zip if the card wasn't actually a US one. I couldn't believe it worked either and hope payment systems are a bit more robust now ;-)
Interesting info. We sell advertising and based on my experience, the Reddit offerings seem to be well priced and attractive.