And now, amusingly, they are on the front page with a post about the post. That's around 10k views, although the conversion rate to the namecast link at the start might be low it will still be lot more traffic than the original show HN post.
Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
#42And now, amusingly, they are on the front page with a post about the post. That's around 10k views, although the conversion rate to the namecast link at the start might be low it will still be lot more traffic than the original show HN post.
Which shocked me, to be honest. I think I may have tapped into some latent reddit vs. HN rivalry? Also, I put in graphics. HN loves graphics.
Re: Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
#43Just curious if anyone else saw a disparity between the amount of traffic Reddit claimed you were getting from paid ads, and what your analytics showed? My numbers were very different.
I didn't even mention that! Reddit reported 100% more traffic than I actually saw with any analytics service. Not only that, I saw a bunch of suspicious hits from reddit referrers that didn't load any CSS or javascript. Like someone was just running GET requests by hand.
Re: Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
#44I recently did a couple of tests with paid advertisement through buysellads. Actually it was not for a startup but for some affiliate link (Udemy courses with good discounts) and the result I got was very bad:
- a generic Udemy ad on a generic site: 10k impressions, 11 clicks, 0 conversion - a specific course advertised on a niche newsletter: 1800 impressions, 15 clicks, 0 conversion
And for conversions I mean neither a sale nor a new signup into the system.
Re: Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
#45I'm currently (attempting to) use reddit advertising, and I'm quite confused by how it works. I purchased all of the available impressions for a given subreddit over the next 4 days, but I've yet to actually see my ad (or any other ad for that matter) displayed despite reddit indicating 800 impressions.
They may not be showing to you if you're signed in, because they don't want to charge you for an impression to yourself.
Also, depending on how many days have passed and the subreddit you've chosen, 800 impressions may be a very small number of overall pageviews, in which case only a small percentage of people will see the ad.
Re: Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
#46As a marketing person I had to do a double-take when I read this:
> The conclusion I’ve drawn from this is that paid advertising, even highly targeted paid advertising, is no match for actual user outreach.
What you did was not "highly targeted." Nor does it make sense to draw a conclusion about an entire form of advertising from a single attempt. Paid advertising works very well for some companies (I've run them dozens of times), and can be optimized over time to do even better.
Re: Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
#47I've done a bit of advertising on reddit (though it was a few years ago), and my one take away is don't target specific subreddits. I think a general pattern is people subscribe to subreddits and just let reddit do it's thing to populate their front page, never actually visiting the specific subreddit. I do this myself for a lot of subreddits I subscribe to. I wonder if reddit has any plans to modify the ad display l…
That's actually how it works. If you target an ad to /r/programming it will show up on the frontpage for users subscribed to /r/programming.
Which probably accounts (in part) for Reddit's low conversion rates— a significant portion of the page-views will be from people not in `programming-mode', compared with almost none from HN.
Re: Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
#48Just curious if anyone else saw a disparity between the amount of traffic Reddit claimed you were getting from paid ads, and what your analytics showed? My numbers were very different.
I didn't even mention that! Reddit reported 100% more traffic than I actually saw with any analytics service. Not only that, I saw a bunch of suspicious hits from reddit referrers that didn't load any CSS or javascript. Like someone was just running GET requests by hand.
Could this be partly caused by people running noscript and the like? Although I haven't heard of many people opting not to load CSS by default.
Re: Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
#49One possible reason for the failed HN launch is the landing pages makes the basic mistake of listing features rather than benefits or use cases. It is a description of what the code does, rather than why it was written. I am still lost to the benefits of managing DNS with github. I can't see the documentation, and the free trial button leads to the scariest signup page in history. It wants read/write access to my pri…
I agree with this. What is my problem and how are you solving it? OP has to connect to the pain that I assume they are removing with the product.
Re: Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better
#50Just curious if anyone else saw a disparity between the amount of traffic Reddit claimed you were getting from paid ads, and what your analytics showed? My numbers were very different.
I didn't even mention that! Reddit reported 100% more traffic than I actually saw with any analytics service. Not only that, I saw a bunch of suspicious hits from reddit referrers that didn't load any CSS or javascript. Like someone was just running GET requests by hand.
Could this be from bots scraping reddit links?