Results from my Reddit advertising attempt | Hacker News Reader

Results from my Reddit advertising attempt

blog.ezliu.com

36 pointsezl37 comments

Also I don't think it's necessarily a fail.

You got 6 invitations to your service for a $150 spend. So that's a $25 cost per invite. What's the total lifetime value of a landlord to you? If it's more than $25, that's a win right? You have to discuss these results using math in order to say win/fail.

Also you're right that spending more and playing with the headlines day to day is a good idea. (I hear @patio11 in my head shouting "A/B testing!") The $25 acquisition cost could drop to $10 or $5 with the right message wording and trying different subreddits.

Lastly, I always shudder to hear about $100 FB ad campaigns people run and declare them to be a waste of time. As someone else said, it is a bit like golf. You have to play it a few times to get a sense of if you're good at it. The first time out is not a sufficient test.

Agree. I don't actually consider it a fail. I generally treat forays like this as exploratory research, and like many other situations, you have to pay for information.

6 invitations != 6 conversions, but yes, I'd agree that 25/conversion would be pretty reasonable. I haven't done recent metrics on what my customer LTV is, but its at least in the ballpark of 25.

I entirely agree that this needs some split testing -- I didn't explore the reddit advertising tools enough to see if there's an easy way to split test, but it didn't jump out at me.

I think your big problem was the headline. If I'm on Reddit and I see that headline, I have no idea why you want to talk to my landlord and have no idea how much time it's going to take for me to connect you with them.

Exactly this. If you want me to give you someone else's contact info you better make the value proposition to me crystal clear.

The headline as written sounds somewhat spammy and confusing, and not many users are going to click thru to learn more and alleviate their confusion.

Was your campaign asking users to do something for you? Whats in it for them?

I visited your page, but the call to action was weak for me. I don't have a landlord now, but doesn't make sense to me to talk to my landlord about some new service out there. BTW, like the tl;dr version

This is probably the most important part of a headline. Answering the question: What's in it for me? People don't care what you need or want, they only care about their needs and wants.

Underrated thread.

I read the landing page waiting for a "you get a $25 Starbucks card for each landlord signed up" or something, but there was nothing. Just "help me grow my business (that won't benefit you in the near term) for free please?"

I think this is the real crux of the problem. It's a very weak call to action - you answer the question of what you want people to do, but not why or how.

Helping your business grow might be a strong why for you, but the promise of why to the people you actually need to act is very nebulous.

You spent $150 to learn the most valuable copywriting lesson to be learned. That the headline is the most important part of an advertisement. The job of the headline is to get people to keep reading. Your headline proved to be bad. Its ok, now go back, redo it and test the results.

Advertising on reddit is a bit of a puzzle. The community does not respond to very informercial sounding messages. They do respond to personal, first person point of view stuff.

You should try a variation of the following.

Reddit: Help me get in touch with your landlords. I want to talk to them about something that might benefit you.

Help! I might have a way to help your landlord (and thus, you) but I have no way of getting in touch with him/her.

Guys, this is my startup. It aims to help your landlord do some things better, and thus make your life easier. Help me spread the word.

And so on.

A lot of people don't have great relationships with their landlords. In most cases it seems to be somewhere between neutral and active dislike.

In other words people contact them as little as possible unless there is something really wrong.

One minor note: If you're using Google Analytics for your web analytics data, your time on site metric is somewhat meaningless. Bounces get counted as time on site = 0. That means that 37 seconds metric is weighted down by 89% of visits having a time on site of 0. Your non-bounces time on site number is probably more like 5:37.

Thanks. I wasn't aware of this.

I generally just look at changes in my google analytics numbers rather than absolute values to see if I'm doing better or worse.

Admittedly not the most sophisticated GA approach.

That's probably the right way to think about GA data in general; the only reason I highlighted it is because the bounce rate so heavily skewed the metric that it made it almost meaningless.

We've had nothing but great results from Reddit advertising. We average 0.18 CTR and 2.6 pages per visit with <70% bounce. The actual ad makes a huge difference, you really need to connect with the Reddit audience. We tried a couple of different ads before finding one that worked well for us.

Can you elaborate?

Redditors generally click on things that look more like content then an ad and stand out enough to catch their eye. If you try to just sell them something, they tune it out. But solve a problem for them in a relatable way and they will click. We paired an awkward penguin meme with a problem/solution statement to get our best results.

> We paired an awkward penguin meme...

Is this the post-internet equivalent of when your favorite bands from highschool and college start selling their popular songs for car and financial service ads for the middle aged? Of course today's redditors all think it will never happen to their generation.

Sorry this didn't work out for you. I make an effort to actually look at the ads on Reddit because I think those are some of the smarter advertisers. Ignoring that you actively advertised on r/realestate, here are some issues you probably ran into on the main page push (please correct me if I overlooked any of these):

Taking into account the median age range of the average Redditor, do they even have landlords or do they live in dorms or with their parents? Then if they do have a landlord, what's their relationship like?

Even as someone in my mid-20's, my relationship with my landlord isn't buddy-buddy because I have no intention of staying at this location and can't guarantee that she'll have a property in an area I look into in the future. We get along fine and she wants to be a connection on LinkedIn, but that doesn't make the scenario you're proposing anything more than an awkward, incentive-less sales pitch about a product I know nothing about. Additionally, another reason I went with my particularly property manager (and possibly why others have too) was because she is already using Appfolio (so everything is done online), which I'm going to assume has a somewhat similar feature to your product.

You also don't cite any trial time or discounts to property managers who want to compare and contrast before taking the plunge, which would at least give me an easier way to make the pitch. The sample is expecting me to fill out the form to see the rest of the experience, if there's even anything else there, whereas as a landlord I would be just as interested (possibly even moreso) in the admin interface and my customization options.

I'm also less likely to click on an ad with some random person's face. I don't know what it is, maybe the Jimmy Wales (et al) Wikipedia fundraiser effect, but I just ignore it because it's weird.

Lastly, does suggesting this service to her imply that I am unhappy with the one she currently uses or - worse - that I'm making a commission off of this sale unbeknownst to her? I just don't want that kind of baggage tied to the person who determines whether or not there's a roof over my head.

I recently screwed up with Reddit advertising, but I think the mistake was the decision to do it, not how I did it - note that I'm talking about my particular case, not saying Reddit advertising is bad in general.

Promoting an event in Paris I targeted /r/Paris and /r/France, and achieved underwhelming $60 CPM and $10 CPC rates.

I sort of expected it and didn't spend too much money to mind, only really tried it because at the time I was pretty desperate to try any option possible (side note, a week later and all my marketing issues with this event are solved, hooray).

Really my issue was lack of targeting options, the only way I could limit the advert to relevant people was through subreddits, and as they were relatively small ones, it was never going to achieve great results. Hopefully some time in the future they'll offer better options, for example I would have loved to target French (or better Paris+10miles) readers of big subreddits like /r/gaming.

(I didn't actually bother with any AB testing for this as it didn't seem worth it, but hey, we got a pretty awesome CTR on the tiny number of impressions!)

edit: This is the only time I've ever used Reddit advertising, is it normal that total uniques aren't shown? I can see unique impressions and total impressions for each hour, but there's no total uniques over the entire campaign, which would annoy me if I'd spent more money and wanted to track roi.

Really interesting stuff. Since you were trying to market an event did you try using Facebook ads ? I read a post on HN a few weeks ago about how Facebook ads for a garage sale event were super successful!

Would love to know if you tried them and if you have any positive/negative experiences to share. Can never learn enough about marketing effectively!

Also, congrats on managing to market your event =)

I did, yes, and was pleased to get basically the results (in terms of CPM and CPC) that the Facebook platform had me expert before starting the campaign.

Again I didn't spend much (~$500) but got roughly $0.08 CPC (a little higher on CPM bidding) and overall I enjoyed both the flexibility of the platform in terms of demographic targeting, and the stats breakdown which let me compare how different adverts performed within the campaign.

(I don't have figures to hand for conversion from clicks to event registrations, they weren't fantastic, but that's largely because our landing page is much more targeted towards a specific audience who will go there not from adverts, and it's not great at converting people who clicked an advert and don't know much about what they are looking at.)

As a bit of context: I have no experience with advertising on Facebook, Reddit or similar platforms. I have a lot of experience in other digital advertising (on the selling end rather than buying - though not working in sales), but it's a very different game to social network advertising..

Im not sure why a redditor would bother helping you out, you need to appeal to them with something, karma, fame, an iPad giveaway or something.

Thanks for sharing your results. Advertising effectively is enormously difficult.

I've had results similar to yours in all areas of advertising. Someone asked me once, "So how has the ad we run on our blog for you been doing?" My reply, "Well, I think it's the least poorly performing ad we run, so maybe that's a win?"

Yes, me too. I've used google adwords quite a few times, and I always end up spending more than I make back from it. The problem is that it just costs too much to grab each new customer that it usually isn't worthwhile. Facebook is the only one that is actually useful, but it only works for certain types of campaigns.

It's all about having the right campaigns and optimizing for conversion. It isn't easy, but it is certainly doable for most people. Adwords is like golf - it's a simple game to play but the being good requires a mastery of nuance and fine details that takes lots of experience.

It's all about the headline. I think it has to sound authentic and not like an advertisement at all. More like the start of a discussion.

And don't use memes. I've noticed that the advertisers that screwed up the meme, even it's a slight mistake, get roasted for it.

Need better A/B testing of titles. Not a lot of data either.

Also as others have pointed out already, your incentives (get landlord leads) are not aligned with your viewers (uhm... feel good helping another Redditor?).

I think your biggest problem was, you weren't offering anything to the user. Helping you is not an incentive for me or most other people. What can you do for me? You weren't doing anything for me.

I loved 500px's terms and conditions page, but it's designed as a terms and conditions page. It's still enormously wordy. Additionally, all I saw in the ad or landing page were pleas for help - I was never sold the benefits.

I'm no copywriter/designer, but prehaps try rerunning the ad and A/B test some designs/headlines that sell the benefits ("no more real estate agents" or w/e the benefit is to redditors).

I like where I live and I don't want my landlord to be thinking about how easy it is to replace me.

Still better than Fb ads right now.

Great post Ezl. Thanks for sharing

I think your ad was a win, simply because you're learning by doing. This is very valuable.

There's nothing in it for the viewer of this ad.

Almost nobody knows who their landlords are -- almost all rentals are handled through agencies.

Plus: who wants to remind their landlords to come and do an inspection?

You and I live in very different markets. I have always known who my landlord was, and have asked my landlord to perform inspections.

Even if you only rent from property management companies, they are still the target demographic for the advertised SaaS.

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