Subreddit advertising: a $30 postmortem • Hacker News Board

Re: Subreddit advertising: a $30 postmortem

#11

Post by ScottWhigham » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 10:47 AM UTC

pkamb wrote: post #8

corin_ wrote: post #6

I think an awful lot of people who advertise on Reddit just don't know much about advertising, but often think they do. For example, I followed the link to /r/selfserve and saw someone complaining: "$100 for 13,000 impressions is a rip off. I've been advertising for years online and this is lowest I've seen by a mile" and following up with a comment saying "$100 buys 150k impressions anywhere else". At that price you…

> wasn't optimistic that it could give good results. That's what it came down to for me, I'm not optimistic that I'll ever get great results spending $30 a day advertising a $2 app to Redditors. But yes, the $30 / 1 day data isn't large enough to draw any real conclusions.

> But yes, the $30 / 1 day data isn't large enough to draw any real conclusions.

It's your business and one primary reason you are where you are is that you've used your "nose for business" along the way to make judgments - judgments, I'm sure, that in many cases could be classified as "Not enough data to make a conclusion" yet you made a conclusion, were right, and here we are. If you think that the data tells you that it's not a worthwhile place to advertise, then go with that. The statisticians and internet commenters with nothing at stake will always ask for "proof" (in terms of trial runs, # of impressions, 30 days, etc) but never forget that you are where you are because of your decision making ability...

And just to be clear, I'm not trying to disrespect/discredit/etc corin_'s comment - mine is just a general comment meant to say that "educated intuition" is just fine when you are a business person running a very small business.

Re: Subreddit advertising: a $30 postmortem

#12

Post by crjohns » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

I have had poor experiences with Reddit advertising as well, although with similarly small sample sets.

My ad ran site-wide for 2 days last December (total $40) and saw 331,901 impressions but only 148 clicks (CTR of 0.044%). Since it was advertising a free app which itself makes money through advertising, each of those clicks (and the far fewer conversions) were worth a lot less than what I paid for them.

I bet Reddit advertising works great for expensive physical goods (like watches, Amazon affiliate links, and Not Safe for Wallet links I see advertised a lot) where you can afford to spend a few dollars per conversion in advertising, but it does not seem to be a very good choice for apps.

Re: Subreddit advertising: a $30 postmortem

#13

Post by corin_ » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 6:20 PM UTC

ScottWhigham wrote: post #11

pkamb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wasn't optimistic that it could give good results. That's what it came down to for me, I'm not optimistic that I'll ever get great results spending $30 a day advertising a $2 app to Redditors. But yes, the $30 / 1 day data isn't large enough to draw any real conclusions.

> But yes, the $30 / 1 day data isn't large enough to draw any real conclusions. It's your business and one primary reason you are where you are is that you've used your "nose for business" along the way to make judgments - judgments, I'm sure, that in many cases could be classified as "Not enough data to make a conclusion" yet you made a conclusion, were right, and here we are. If you think that the data tells you t…

No disrespect taken - just to clarify, I did similar to him in terms of not spending enough to judge fully but deciding not to commit more time/money into finding out, and think that's a fine (and often necessary) way of doing business, even for people like me who are spending six figures a month on advertising, not just for small businesses.

My bigger point was just that while individuals can make these judgement calls, their experiences shouldn't necessarily be looked at by others. The problem with blog posts like these is that too many people will look at them and think "so that's the CTR/eCPC/etc. price I can expect" or "those results are what I can expect", without realising that at a $30 spend it's pretty irrelevant to them.

Re: Subreddit advertising: a $30 postmortem

#14

Post by pkamb » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 8:45 PM UTC

punee wrote: post #9

Seems like a bad choice for a headline/title. You're advertising a gimmicky, non-essential feature of your app instead of one of its valuable benefits. But curiosity-based headlines can only be so efficient when they're not paired with a more fundamental appeal (e.g. the fear that your wallet is not safe in the example you mention).

This might be true, and something I will definitely play with if I re-up. When the person clicks through to the Mac App Store they're immediately shown the real app icon and description, which is what I was going for.