Review HN: RewardLevel - Increase conversion on your forms by offering rewards | Hacker News Reader

Review HN: RewardLevel - Increase conversion on your forms by offering rewards

rewardlevel.com

44 pointsnoahkagan34 comments

Something is fishy on HN. This story was #3 and then immediately jumped to #38 (on the second page). Was it secretly penalized or something?

Equally as fishy: I swear I clicked to upvote your comment, yet somehow it downvoted it.

Maybe a mod flagged or something? I have seen stories dropping off the homepage just like it and have no clue why that happens.

So I tried signing this up and throwing it up on my site, and I got some reward for a free coupon to UserTesting.com. I am mostly confident my customers will have zero interest in this reward. The $5 gift card at Amazon though would be great.

I was wondering if it was possible to configure the rewards offered. I actually tried playing around with the snippet of code you give your publishers:

XXX is an integer, and I was able to get different rewards to show up by changing its value.

I assume this isn't intended and my value for XXX is supposed to be static indicator of my account ID. But how do you plan on configuring the rewards offered by the publisher?

Shoot me an e-mail if you want talk to more. My site gets quite a bit of traffic and I'd love to offer some easy incentives and this is way more streamlined to use than anything I've tried with TrialPay et al.

I'm a little confused now that TechCrunch has a story up. It seemed from the discussion here that you were only making money from your affiliates, but you also charge upon conversion?

"Reward Level charges $5 per conversion, but if the company offering the reward is also a publisher with Reward Level’s widget installed, they only have to pay $2.50 per conversion."

Is this accurate?

If so, I might find it hard to justify paying $5 per conversion, especially for a .2-30% conversion rate increase. This means I'd be paying for every conversion, essentially spending what I'd normally spend and then $5 for each and every signup on top of that? No thanks. While this might make sense for some, it probably wouldn't make sense for those following the freemium model. Sounded great when it was "too good to be true," though.

The conversion rate increase appears to speak to the publisher, ie the company with the landing page being incentivized and not the company offering the reward.

According to the tech crunch article the company offering the reward pays the $5 and the publisher gets the widget and offers the reward to their potential users for free.

It's a little unclear to me. The problem is with "the company offering the reward" language. I took that to mean the company that presents the reward for the signups, but you're saying it's the company actually offering the deal, e.g. Amazon. That makes more sense. So that company not only offers their reward but also pays $5 to Reward Level?

That's the way I interpreted it.

It looks like RewardLevel is set up as a broker. They get publishers to install widgets on the sign up forms, that data is then passed to advertisers (the reward offerer) and RewardLevel makes a commission on the conversions at the advertisers end. I would also guess that while the advertiser may be giving out a reward to each sign up on the publisher site (discount, voucher, coupon, gift etc) they may not be paying $5 to RewardLevel each time. There's probably separate language that defines what a conversion is for the advertiser such as a signup or enrollment in service with the company providing the incentive in addition to the initial sign up on the publishers landing page. We'll have to see if Noah speaks to how advertisers sign up as it's been asked a couple of times.

This looks like a great idea.

I think it would be great to use as an incentive for participating in a site after signing up. For example on my site, Scribophile, I don't consider a user 'converted' until they 1) sign up and 2) post a critique. Just signing up is useless to the site unless the user also participates.

Looking at the way you've implemented the widget, is there a way I can make the above scenario happen? So say there's a message after you sign up for Scribophile that says something like "write a critique within 5 days of signing up and get xxx reward!"

Also, how do you target these rewards? Again, for a site like mine, users wouldn't want a Kissmetrics account. They'd want something writing-related, like an Amazon.com gift certificate, or the like. Is there a way to choose specific rewards?

You'll find that users only looking for a reward are more than happy to jump through one or two hoops to get their reward. An incentivized user is often no better than no user, especially when the reward is tangible like a gift certificate.

The language on the home page around 'too good to be true' made me pause before signing up. It almost sounds like you're saying 'there's a catch!'

I think being a little more clear about your business model will go a long way to allaying concerns among users signing up for RewardLevel.

Aaron.

Awesome feedback. Should we include how we make money in that paragraph?

Ideally, yes. Maybe you could say something like "Sound too good to be true? It isn't: Reward Level is completely free for you and your users. We make money through our partner referrals."

Except that what I wrote is terrible, but hopefully you get the idea :)

Edit: and please put this above the fold.

Yea, pretty terrible :P

Let me think of something. Don't really want to push changes live but tonight or early tomorrow.

Please keep the feedback coming!

Sounds good, I look forward to seeing it! Plus, I did sign up, and I'll let you know offline if I have any more feedback.

This product looks awesome, btw!

And, speaking of "too good to be true", the sudden availability of the "rewardlevel.com" domain name a month ago was definitely too good to be true. It only became available for you to purchase because spammers got tired of spamming people with it. It's always a crying shame to see someone create a cool new web site on a blacklisted domain name.

http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/rewardlevel.com http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/rewardlevel.com/msgpage

It pays to check SiteAdvisor and MyWOT before you purchase a domain name. Better safe than sorry.

Interesting idea, Noah. But there are two questions in my mind:

a) How are you going to monetize this? (You say on website it is free for companies using it, but you must have thought of some monetization strategy)

b) You incentivizing users signup for a service just to get that exclusive offer under the signup box. Aren't those users going to be no better than "no-users"? I mean, if the only (or part-of) reason for a user signing up for a service is because he wanted to get that exclusive offer, chances of him becoming a long term customer are pretty low. Right?

Great questions Paras.

A) We make money on some of the rewards which will be paid. We are seeing good conversions on the "customers" (the people who opt-in to receive the rewards) we send to the companies. For the next few weeks we are giving tons of credit for people to add their companies / products as rewards.

B) Yea, it's hard to say whether the users are "good" customers or not. The data is showing they are.

We look it more as a bonus for the person to try out your service. Think of it as a free bonus that makes you more likely to try a product (ie. free toothpaste w/ toothbrush purchase)

After three years of working with an affiliate marketing, lead generation and advertising company I would say that incentivized traffic is the worst kind of traffic. This is after seeing thousands of offers and processing millions of leads.

The problem with any type of incentive on a signup form (not checkout, that's different) is that it changes intent. You end up with two groups of people: those interested in your product and those looking for a reward. Differentiating those two groups can be very expensive. If you are sending out a news letter or other marketing material you also should expect to see higher unsubscribe rates and spam complaints from incentivized sign ups. These people will often not remember where they signed up or what it was for and that leaves you dealing with problems at your ESP or wasting money on increased numbers of mailings. I've seen offers for services where an agent calls the person signing up to complete the process and those are even more fun. Then you have to deal with people that are pissed they are receiving a call from a "telemarketer" even though they signed up to receive a call. There are also other factors working against incentivized forms such as forums set up for the sole purpose of detailing places you can sign up for something for free and receive a tangible reward in return.

Other types of incentives for the check out page of a pay service or store selling goods can work really well. The best example are check out pages that have free shipping thresholds. If you prompt the user "Hey, spend $X more and you get free shipping." You have a great opportunity to upsell or to push smaller items that might have more markup. Additionally a reward like this site seems to be offering might push people to finish the check out process if the reward is good enough.

Having been down this road I would be very skeptical of the quality of the signups as a publisher in this system and as an advertiser I'd want good terms on what qualifies as a conversion as well as well defined return policies on leads. It doesn't look like advertiser information is available yet (did I miss it?) so hard to say what terms they are getting.

Love the idea! Just some design suggestions/thoughts from my first look around. Because of the heavy contrast between the white in the upper portion and the blue on the bottom, I get the impression that the bluk of your relevant content is in the lower section.. when in reality of ease of adding the 'Reward' feature to the form seems like it should be your focus.

When looking at your signup form, it's not really obvious what I'm supposed to do, because the reward button, question button, and submission button are grouped so closely and look so similar. I would tone down the yellow of the input boxes a bit and change the colors for the reward info buttons - example: http://i53.tinypic.com/29mt4l5.jpg

Also, I think if they click in the reward box it should only check the box, not check/uncheck like a label.

Great idea though! I Apologize if you don't like my thoughts, just some quick first impressions!

So any raw figures on conversion rate changes?

We've seen .2% up to 30% increase. Varies by website and still a bit early as we are adding more rewards to the system.

Really like the idea. At first, I thought you were building a funnel for your other venture, but this application has much bigger vision. My one primary turn-off here is relevance of the reward to what I'm signing up for. I'm sure this is what you're going after and hasn't materialized yet due to lack of offers to pass around. But I'm curious how you're planning on solving this in a way that scales well.

PS: Tidy up those "Reward Detail" popups! Keep it up!

PPS: The email link on the about page is "protected" (hi [at] rewardlevel [dot] com) whereas the email link at the top is not.

Mike,

Appreciate the feedback.

We will solve it with inventory and the algorithm, just takes some time get it all right.

Redesign for pop-up and hopefully js version with roll-over coming shortly.

Yea, hopefully google apps can do its job at protecting spam.

What I was trying to point out about the email link is if you're going to share it as a link in the top nav, you should do the same in the about page. (At least for consistency/convenience.)

Is there any way to stop the service offering competitors products?

Great question. Yea, go to profile > block rewards

I see it's easy to sign up to put the rewardLevel code on one's website but nowhere to sign up to become a reward offerer? I assume it's only for a handful of known clients for now, will this change and eventually allow any business to offer it's products/services to be shown in the rewards network?

Can I select the type of offers that can appear on my site? for example, financial products/services

We tried to enable that and saw worse results than just letting the algorithm decide. We'll test more of this in the future.

For now you can block sites you don't want showing on your profile link.

In the long term, as a publisher, what is preventing me from getting my own deals from the same vendors?

Are you getting me any exclusive deals with these vendors?

There's probably nothing stopping you from getting these types of deals set up. The problem is that you then go from working on your core business to managing relationships as a lead seller.

The novelty of this approach is that RewardLevel acts as a broker and manages all those relationships and then their algorithm supposedly shows the deals that work best on your site. That leaves you with higher signups and in theory more revenue, and RewardLevel's advertisers with more leads. RewardLevel makes money by sitting in the middle and managing that pool of advertisers. You would have to weigh the cost of having someone manage those relationships for you versus the supposedly free increase in conversions on your landing page by having RewardLevel do it for you.

I would caution anyone planning on implementing this that while it is "free" to place the RewardLevel widget into your sign up forms there will be costs associated with those people that sign up for nothing more than the reward. The balancing act is to find offers that only really appeal to your core market to begin with and that is in the hands of the RewardLevel algorithm.

How does this work on non-US websites? Do you geo-locate offers or only offer US-specific offers at this time?

Good call on the geo-location. Coming soon.

Right now the algorithm optimizes to the rewards that work best for your site.

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