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Comment by DLarsen | Hacker News Reader

With such a small sample size, I generally tend to shy away from speaking of results in percentages. Stating the results as "5 conversions from 26 visits" keeps things in perspective. I appreciate the insight into your experience, but the sample size is way too low to draw meaningful general conclusions.

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The individual sample sizes are small, yes. The variance between the paid vs organic conversions was still stark to me, e.g. 54 paid visitors had a 0% conversion rate to trial vs ~20% with 5 of 26 organic users converting to trial.

FWIW, the reddit ad campaign is at nearly a hundred views now, and still no trials.

My experience in ads is that most digital display ads for technical people are a waste of money. You will have zero conversions, period. Our demographic does not click and convert. My data include million-impression campaigns for other salesforce products on channels like Reddit, AOL, Yahoo, and Google...

For perspective, 100 views is extremely small in advertising. Hobby-small. You'll need a sample size of a few thousand views before you'll get even 100 interactions to compare. The sample sizes of conversion for this experiment are too small to make any conclusions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685928

I suspect you will see better conversions from this content ad (i.e. blog post) posted to HN. Which, coincidentally, I fear blog ads are a large percentage of the content posted to HN today.... still nice to see others' findings, so thank you for posting.

Anyway, good luck with the product, but I can't emphasize enough that you should be skeptical with any of the results you have. You simply have too few data points to deduce any trends.

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