Reddit Advertising: Results of a 1-Week Campaign | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Advertising: Results of a 1-Week Campaign

blogwriterswanted.com

47 pointstyler-b26 comments

Not sure if this problem is fixed, but Reddit requires each day of the campaign to have the same numbner of impressions.

So if monday has 100 impressions available, tuesday has 100 impressions available, but wednesday has only 1 impression available... then a Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday campaign can only be for 3 impressions. A shorter campaign (Monday-Tuesday) will give you access to 200 impressions.

The "0 impression" number in your post might be because one day out of that huge timeframe is completely bought out.

Yup, I had this same issue before. Changing my campaign dates around would allow me to do a campaign. Sometimes I would have to start the campaign a couple weeks out.

Thanks for explaining this! I'm definitely going to check some shorter timeframes and see if I can find any open slots.

At least he was doing the smart thing and not trying to directly sell to reddit users. Not that reddit users don't buy stuff, but they're no on reddit looking to do so. It takes much less effort (and no going to find your wallet) to sign up for an email list. I always find it amazing that people are shocked and annoyed at the advertising platform when they didn't direct sell 1,000 copies of their software on their twitter advertising campaign.

With sites like this and twitter, etc, don't direct sell - sign them up for lists and do the occasional sales pitch in your emails.

That CTR is still ridiculously small. I feel like ads on Reddit are beyond useless due to the cynicism of the user base + the high prevalence of adblock.

"the high prevalence of adblock"

I didn't know reddit had ads until this HN story. Interesting.

The only ads I see on reddit (outside of AMA and some fairly suspiciously-timed posts about a certain brand that happens to be releasing a new product) are either at the top of the page as a sponsored post, or ones at the side about some ridiculous Lambeosaurus or "instead of an ad, here's a penguin".

Seriously, what's the deal with how much advertising they do for /r/dinosaurs? Am I the only one seeing this?

Have you seen better results from AdWords, Facebook or another source? Any tips you want to pass along will be appreciated ;)

I've had okayluck with ultra well targeted Adwords ads, better than reddit. I've done site takeover style ads with buysellads.com which has worked out pretty well but it's expensive and hard to do when you're just starting out.

But the price seems OK.

I've been advertising my League of Legends convention on reddit for a few weeks using the League related subreddits (leagueoflegends, leagueofmemes, loleventvods, leagueoflegendsmeta)

The result? The CPM is low and the CPC has hovered between $0.09 and $0.20, but so far reddit ads have accounted for 0 of our sales (out of a few hundred tickets so far). Location targeting would be amazing, but you can't target a subreddit and a location at the same time.

Our ads will steadily change to increase the sense of urgency as the date approaches (X days left, Y tickets left), it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Target a location subreddit? For example /r/chicago. Or are you looking to target redditors that are subscribed to overlapping subreddits? So /r/technology + /r/chicago?

Yeah, targeting the cross-section would be ideal. I will try Los Angeles and surrounding subreddits as well (the event is in Burbank).

Organic search has made up about 50% of our sales, direct and social 40%, with Facebook ads making up the remaining 10% and all of our paid conversions.

Most of our campaigns have been short and cheap ($10), check out some screens in one of my other replies.

Do you have any links/screenshots you could share?

Sure! With these three I went a few different routes, they are all in the main leagueoflegends subreddit (which is one of the most active on the entire site, it's unreal).

First is fairly basic and talks about our host, the price and the fact that early bird tickets are on sale. The second focuses on some of the LCS teams that will be there doing meet & greets. The third is about activities like cosplay, live music.

http://i.imgur.com/6l0focB.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/CLDa84O.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/sBvwU2N.jpg

advertise through streamers!

Definitely! Some have already talked about the event a few times while they were live.

I find that any useful subreddit always its inventory bought out - and its a pretty small amount of inventory available in the first place.

Someone on Twitter made a similar comment and asked the reddit ads team if they would ever consider implementing any type of bidding system (I don't think they've responded).

Yeah, I asked personally and they told me the same thing. I also subscribe to the subreddits I would advertise on, and see any ads related to the category maybe 1/500th of the time (I don't use adblock). I've never seen it on the subreddit itself, which has over 20,000 subscribers.

As someone who has no knowledge of this space - what does it mean inventory being bought out? You can no longer place your ad on that subreddit anymore? Why would this happen?

Say the subreddit generally only get 5,000 page views a month, with one ad space per page. Once someone purchases those 5,000, it's gone -- they can't sell the inventory to someone else because it's all bough. Often too traffic will fluxate; so, for example, they may have estimated 5,000, but only 2,000 page views (and thus ad impressions, since one for one in this example) come in that month -- if someone bought 5,000, they'll have to stick around for 2 1/2 months, blocking other advertisers for that time. And I suspect that on many of these subreddits having even 500 impressions available is overreaching. That's a bit simplified but hope it helps.

Thanks!

Does anyone have insight whether creating Reddit ads can hurt your chances of trending as an organic post?

They have no relation to each other.

The "insufficient inventory" issue is one I see a lot in Google's DFP as well. Not a large enough `n` for inventory prediction, I suppose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com