Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#31

Post by JayNeely » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 1:35 PM UTC

Gabriel Weinberg (Duck Duck Go founder) wrote a summary of his experience using Reddit Ads, which he found to be effective: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/my-duck-duck-go-...

A couple of key points from the post:

"My ad ran for 13 days, from 3/7 to 3/20. It cost $650, and I spent $50 per day. In total it had 1,288,378 impressions (282,732 uniques) and yielded 20,700 clicks (18,420 uniques)."

"Redditors actually try out your site. 3c per unique visitor is pretty good in and of itself, but it's all worthless unless they actually try out your site. For example, you can get 5c unique visitors from StumbleUpon (presumably in a similar demographic), but StumbleUpon visitors never would try out my sites. Reddit visitors did try out Duck Duck Go."

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#32

Post by jasonlotito » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 1:58 PM UTC

My company was B2B, so it might be different for us then you. However, I'll still spell out what worked for us.

1. Tradeshows. We went to industry tradeshows, and our sales guys really worked the shows. We didn't know anyone in the industry, either. They worked the shows, really got out there to know the people, and worked the people covering the shows (magazines, photographers, etc). Basically, it was all about networking.

2. Advertising in print got us coverage. We bought ad space which came with a write up in the mag and online. Is good because it gave us presence.

3. Presence is important. We'd go to trade shows all over the place, and really mingle. Tradeshows seemed to do well, and was the place for face to face meetings.

4. Incentives to get word of mouth advertising. We would pay commissions to clients who would bring in other people. It wasn't merely a link to click on. Rather, it was direct referrals. "Hey, here's a guy who could use your services..." and we'd give him a fair cut.

But really, presence was the big thing. Being out there, being seen, being apart of the environment was big, and really allowed us to get out there. If you present yourself as a successful company, people assume you are. Obviously you need to back it up when they sign on, but it's getting them to call you back that is important.

Should also stress that most of this was between 2003 and 2006 when we started this and really pushed.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#33

Post by patio11 » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 2:22 PM UTC

barmstrong wrote: post #13

Is anyone making Adwords convert these days? I haven't.

I still can't get AdWords on the search network to work in a scalable fashion, but the content network continues its years-long tradition of making my business viable.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#34

Post by damoncali » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 2:45 PM UTC

barmstrong wrote: post #13

Is anyone making Adwords convert these days? I haven't.

I've only tried seriously twice, but both efforts were expensive failures.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#35

Post by guiseppecalzone » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 3:10 PM UTC

1. Avoid copywriters. I know I'm contradicting someone else's comment, but copywriters don't help. What does help? Tracking software, split testing, and data. The copy writer could give you some copy that any logical person thinks would work, not knowing that statistically, it's not something people would ever click on. So, use the money you would spend on a copywriter and put it into more split testing.

So: -Split text your ads. -Use tracking software to do it. -Don't assume you know what will work. Let the data decide (not a copywriter).

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#36

Post by vrikhter » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 5:20 PM UTC

guiseppecalzone wrote: post #35

1. Avoid copywriters. I know I'm contradicting someone else's comment, but copywriters don't help. What does help? Tracking software, split testing, and data. The copy writer could give you some copy that any logical person thinks would work, not knowing that statistically, it's not something people would ever click on. So, use the money you would spend on a copywriter and put it into more split testing. So: -Split t…

Are there any tips for word or character count for a banner ad that we should keep in mind?

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#37

Post by vrikhter » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 5:34 PM UTC

alttab wrote: post #30

Everyone here has been given some fantastic advice so I'll just add one little piece. What I've seen from my own personal experience, is sites that sell advertising space have been tracking their advertising since they started because they need to know the value of their real estate. Over time, this transfers to a fact that where ever you are doing your ad banners (a web site, a blog, a search engine), the people you…

Are there particular advertising firms that you would suggest to work with? Do you have an opinion on a firm such as Adroll?

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#38

Post by vrikhter » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 5:35 PM UTC

leftnode wrote: post #25

Advertising on forums that are specific to what you're selling. I sell firearms, firearm accessories, and ammunition, so I spend a great deal of time on forums. One of the best is SomethingAwful. They have a sub-forum dedicated to firearms, and a very close knit community. An ad on SA costs $30 for a month (which is insanely cheap) and I started a thread advertising my company. We've done incredibly well that way, ha…

You're absolutely right. Those just take a significant more time to do, which we will focus on as well, but would like to test out advertising waters first.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#39

Post by vrikhter » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 5:39 PM UTC

jellisnyc wrote: post #8

We just ran a few campaigns. Here's what we found. The Deck - http://decknetwork.net/ We received roughly 4300 uniques across 2 weeks. We got about 9x the clicks from daringfireball than any of the other sites in the network (37signals, A List Apart, Kottke, FFFFound, etc.) If you email them they are open to negotiating. Fusion Ads - http://fusionads.net/ Very similar model as The Deck. We ran one of the $400 one-wee…

Did you run it for Actual Objects? We have a B2B product, wondering if this will have a similar return for us.

Re: Ask HN: What kind of advertising have you tried that worked?

#40

Post by mkramlich » Mon, Jun 28, 2010, 8:48 PM UTC

ewjordan wrote: post #21

JeffL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are astroturf forum comments?

Astroturfing == posting fake "grassroots" testimonials about the product/idea/company in question to make it seem like a lot of people care about it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing I'm sure it's pretty effective, especially if you only need to get a handful of people to notice your product. But it just feels so dirty...

Exactly. I think there's a lot of astroturf/fake reviews on Amazon for example.

It's soooooooo easy to create fake/throwaway identities on the Internet I think you often have to be very very skeptical about the value of any gushingly positive or gushingly negative "reviews" of a commercial product or service written by a stranger, especially if it's a sort of mainstream category like books or music albums where there might me a traditional PR/advertising company involved that's now doing "social media" promotion. Giveaways: same writing tone/voice/pov used in each review; use of industry-specific insider/professional lingo that the average Joe wouldn't know; reviews that are just too complete/thorough, etc.

Which then leads back to what I think is going to be a service category in increasing demand in the future (and thus an opportunity for more startups): trusted curators and aggregators. Entities that don't just include everything. Entities that discriminate with an eye for quality, and try hard to be independent from vendor influence. For example, for me it once got to the point where the only movie reviewer I would trust was Roger Ebert. With other reviewers I couldn't tell if they were paid shills, or they were naive/ignorant, or too much a slave to their own personal genre tastes, or they just weren't going about doing the review in an intelligent and balanced manner. Ebert I could generally trust. I want a web-based Roger Ebert for doctors, for auto repair shops, for schools. Seems like there are some guys doing quite well doing it for wines, for example.

This is actually one area where I think crowdsourcing is horrible, by the way. Crowdsourcing when applied to reviews is almost the total opposite of trusted curation. What if the crowd in question is full of fools or paid shills? Garbage in, garbage out. The Idiocracy effect where quantity drowns out quality.