Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post

My impression is that ranking algorithm, as described in the HN FAQ, is too simplistic, and as a result luck is too important factor in many HN submissions.

The more advanced algorithm would be for example to identify a set of HN users that actively up vote stories, and do not only follow links that already have a lot of votes; each new submission could be then injected to the front page of several random users from such set. With such approach, all new stories would have more or less equal exposure and equal chances of being noticed.

OP - I was aghast at your CTR rates when I first read your post. I don't know your marketing/segment but it's certainly worth questioning whether or not you are getting the right keywords to trigger your ads. Your top three ads have a grand total of 28 clicks over > 21,000 impressions. That is misery. There's just no way you are going to be able to be profitable/break-even with AdWords if you can't improve that CTR.

As such, it leads me to question your keyword selection. You need to know "What were the keywords that actually triggered my ad?" This is possibly VERY different from the keywords you entered (particularly if you are using broad match). My guess is you're wildly off the mark in terms of your keyword selection/filter. Adwords expands broad match keywords to the point of unprofitability IME. You have to find out what people are actually searching for that trigger your ad and "trim the fat" by modifying your keywords so that you don't pay for unrelated things.

For example, let's say you have "payment disputes" as a broad match keyword. That is so general that Google is going to auto-expand your keywords to synonyms and "things that Google thinks are like payments, disputes, and payment disputes". So if you used that as a broad match keyword, you might be surprised to find that your ads were served for the following keyword searches:

* Credit repair atlanta

* bankruptcy dispute

* credit card payment was declined

etc, etc, etc - "similar yet different" is not profitable here. I'd suggest you review the actual keywords and work to get that CTR up.

This is a real problem here, and has been for a while. I think it applies to comments too, quick easy to read and 'obvious' comments earn rapid upvotes, multiparagraph thoughtful pieces get ignored.

Content aggregation sites like HN and reddit often weight upvotes based on time. This makes some sense; an article that gets x upvotes in y minutes is more popular than an article that takes 4*y minutes to get the same number of upvotes!

But on Reddit this has an odd side-effect; as early upvotes are the key to getting to the front page, an article that takes 30 minutes to read doesn't get any upvotes in the first 30 minutes. But a meme or a 10-second gif? Upvoted in seconds, and on its way to the front page.

Of course, Reddit is quite successful; no shame in providing bite-sized posts with quick gratification if that's what the market demands.

I'd recommend Ca$hvertising.