Our Reddit Ad By The Numbers - Whiteyboard | Hacker News Reader

Our Reddit Ad By The Numbers - Whiteyboard

tinycomb.com

59 pointsjasonwilk40 comments

With TechCrunch, LifeHacker, New York Times, etc (and any other blog), we usual generate about $1 per unique visitor

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's conversion rates... but darn.

Darn is right. I'd love to see an article comparing your stats across each channel.

You should remove the option of a 2x3 foot board completely while it's out of stock, instead of disabling it and writing "Out of Stock". Better yet, A/B test it.

My bet is that people are seeing the option they want, saying they'll wait until it's in stock, and then promptly forgetting you ever existed.

If there's no better option to wait for, more people will buy one of the other options.

I agree. I'm going to test this. Thanks for the tip Alex

Better yet, an "Alert me" button instead, collect an email address and notify them later when it's back.

Jason, mind if I ask what's going on with the footer of http://whiteyboard.com?

It looks, uh, a little sloppy.

Ask Alexis Ohanian, he designed it. I like the MS Paint look

It's true, I mocked up basically the site you see there in a few minutes in Photoshop, sent the png to Jason and he asked for the PSD... I didn't know he'd actually use the draft as the final version - hehe. It's got a certain charm to it, I suppose...

even though there is a charm; perhaps it's time to up the ante; looks like part of it is scribbles covering something else up :/

But you're intrigued enough to see what it is... was that my plan all along?! (it wasn't).

I think that the length of the campaign had a lot to do with the substantial difference in numbers.

Even though the actual amount of money spent may be the same, I saw the DuckDuckGo advertisements countless number of times. In addition, it also had strong upvotes and positive feedback in the actual comments of the ads.

On the other hand, despite browsing reddit for likely a few hours over those dates, I never saw the Whiteyboard ad once.

Yes, I was hoping that with a high bid like that, it would have received awesome priority placement. Alternatively, I found out that Reddit accepts whatever bid above $20 per day that you commit and however well the ad does, is up to the readers. At the end of the day, I agree I should have prolonged the campaign, but I wanted to see if a limited deal would have appealed to the readers.

Whiteyboard looks cool. I might have even bought one if it was very apparent that it could stick and re-stick easily. By the time I found that, I was off of the purchase page, and I had decided I didn't actually _need_ it.

Thanks for posting the numbers.

Online commerce is interesting in part because it's so darn fickle. I saw your product awhile ago on HN and shrugged. Then just saw it again today, and bought the largest size. I couldn't really tell you a good reason why.

If I had to guess, I'd say that "Free shipping" is probably part of it, along with "limited time" but just a couple weeks after seeing your original ad, I have different ideas for office layout, and suddenly your product fit that void nicely.

Good luck with it!

I personally had no idea what Whiteyboard was . . .

So from fresh eyes - the landing page doesn't do a good job explaining what it is and why it's awesome before hitting me up for $$$.

I bet your bounce traffic left in a hurry (sub 2 seconds) yah?

I'm sure the reddit ad explained partially, but on that landing page I'd have suggested a really bold headline, summary, picture of use then buy buttons below. . .

Actually, our bounce rate is awesome. I agree though, we don't do a stellar job of explaining the product and we are working on a way better commercial. Should we keep the same girl?

If you do, please have her practice applying it without bubbles. And get rid of the nails. It looked quite amateurish, and her not really being able to hold it didn't help.

Re: the bubbles, that was my first thought too. But actually I liked the way she just threw it on there WITH the bubbles, and how they were easily patted away. Shows how easy perfect installation is - but this should be highlighted as a feature instead of potentially giving viewers a bad perception.

"Got some air bubbles? Not a problem, just quickly wipe your hand over the whiteyboard and push the bubbles out. Easy as that."

It should definitely be shown off as a feature - everyone has had that frustration when trying to put a screen protector on some device.

Also, they say it can be re-applied. So maybe demo putting it on one way and then moving it to another wall or flipping it the other way. And demo on a non-white surface. It looks kinda transparent in the video because it's being stuck on a white background.

The bloody atrocious sound quality is what I noticed. I've had better quality Skype calls than the voice quality in that video.

noted

I think the girl is fine - but she sends mixed messages - she's trying to explain whiteyboard, but she's trying to be a little bit flirty - there's a long awkward pause at the end that needs to be shortened, and the moustache is really gimmicky.

Also, if you stick with the same girl (which I think is totally fine), you should have her wear a more professional outfit (not to sound sexist or anything). What's your biggest potential market? (offices i'm guessing?) You should have her match that - so for offices, maybe business slacks and a professional top. Right now she looks like a college student, which is fine if you're trying to cater for that market.

I can't believe no one has mentioned this, but it seems to me the most important thing is how well you can erase the marker. Assuming it works well you should demonstrate this. I simply will not buy a whiteboard without knowing how well it will work over time. Also, I've used Georgia Pacific Mark-R-Board which costs about 1/3 of your product and it works just fine. That made me chuckle when I read the cost comparison in your FAQ.

That's half the battle - here's my suggestion: before you build a video build out an all-text lander.

Just super simple - 400 pixel high, two column. Left column just bullet points of the benefits of the product, rigth column awesome picture of the product.

Then A/B test that thing 3 - 4 times.

once you've got your messaging confirmed, move to video - video is much more difficult to a/b test IMO due to production

Do you want to take a crack at it? If so, ping me at jason@tinycomb.com

Sure - check your inbox -

This is the first time I've heard about Whiteyboard, and I didn't have any trouble at all figuring out what it was.

From the name "Whiteyboard" and the words "stick-on whiteboards" right at eye level when the page first opened, I immediately knew what it was.

I would put the video above the buy, as well as a static section with an little explanation. As well as something like step 1 - stick, step 2 - write, step 3 remove/restick type thing. Emphasising that it can be easily removed front and centre is a must, that would be my first question once I got what it was.

Also being able to get the product at a glance without a video would help. With the right images and writing I could get what the product does and decide if I would be interested in probably 10 seconds as opposed to having to watch a much longer video.

Hi Jason, quite a few of the comments here are pretty constructive. What struck me about the landing page though is the first things I see on the screen are the logo, then an ordering form. What would probably work better for me at least is some more information and some pictures of different examples where it could be really cool (I can imagine using this on my fridge for example). The video is OK, however youtube is banned at many workplaces as well, just a thought - some images wouldn't go astray!

(unrelated to this discussion) I think if you added some sort of (painted) border around the sticker/whiteboard it would be a better product - people wouldn't have to worry of writing on their walls by accident. You could also have different kind of "borders", resembling a web browser, a computer screen, a notepad or something like that so that its not just a "large overpriced white sticker on the wall".

good writeup.

Concerning Facebook, you just have to be a frequent user of reddit to know about the general dislike of Facebook.

In general I find that redditors are more than willing to open their wallets, examples: recently they asked for donations, reddit soap, divvy, and a game developer ( can't think of it now)... just your product wasn't a right fit for the reddit crowd.

There was a lot of grumbling about the $40 shipping charge to Canada too. I probably would've bought one if the shipping charge didn't more than double my total.

Same here. $40 shipping charge on a $30 purchase really puts me off. Especially on something that is as light as your product.

What shipper are you using? Maybe you should give people an option of choosing a slower delivery time for less cost.

What about conversions that take some time to happen? The post didn't explain their typical/average time between first contact and sale. Assuming it's more than the 48 hours they ran this for, this experiment might still get better ROI numbers.

Are they tracking this metric? It's an important one!

I'm not actually. How do I track this?

A really long-life cookie, say a 6 months or more.

The concept: on the first visit, give the user a long-life cookie that stores the timestamp of the visit. When a sale happens, check the value of this cookie and store in a database.

You can make it more elaborate by storing and analysing referral information, geolocation of the IP address, exact time of day and other things you think might be relevant.

Also, if you're doing an A/B test on new visitors, this cookie should also store which version they were shown. This is a more complicated situation as to how you tie it into the A/B testing framework, but it's not hard with a bit of thought based on how you implement it and how you test.

On your blog post you mention that you are keeping the free shipping option up for another day. Given that you will be getting a lot of traffic traffic from HN, I'm wondering what your conversion is from HN traffic alone?

Did you see an upswing in your invoice requests? I have a e-commerce site and currently do not offer this service. What luck have you found with this?

Wait. What? You thought that based on the ROI on an ad to get traffic to a website you'd get the same for an ad trying to sell a physical product?

I've had an overall positive experience with reddit ads. I'd really recommend trying a campaign that is longer than 2 days - say a week or longer but you don't need to spend as much each day and you'll get a lot more unique visitors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com