
Results from my Reddit advertising attempt - ezl
http://blog.ezliu.com/blog/reddit-advertising/
======
unreal37
Also I don't think it's necessarily a fail.

You got 6 invitations to your service for a $150 spend. So that's a $25 cost
per invite. What's the total lifetime value of a landlord to you? If it's more
than $25, that's a win right? You have to discuss these results using math in
order to say win/fail.

Also you're right that spending more and playing with the headlines day to day
is a good idea. (I hear @patio11 in my head shouting "A/B testing!") The $25
acquisition cost could drop to $10 or $5 with the right message wording and
trying different subreddits.

Lastly, I always shudder to hear about $100 FB ad campaigns people run and
declare them to be a waste of time. As someone else said, it is a bit like
golf. You have to play it a few times to get a sense of if you're good at it.
The first time out is not a sufficient test.

~~~
ezl
Agree. I don't actually consider it a fail. I generally treat forays like this
as exploratory research, and like many other situations, you have to pay for
information.

6 invitations != 6 conversions, but yes, I'd agree that 25/conversion would be
pretty reasonable. I haven't done recent metrics on what my customer LTV is,
but its at least in the ballpark of 25.

I entirely agree that this needs some split testing -- I didn't explore the
reddit advertising tools enough to see if there's an easy way to split test,
but it didn't jump out at me.

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zacharycohn
I think your big problem was the headline. If I'm on Reddit and I see that
headline, I have no idea why you want to talk to my landlord and have no idea
how much time it's going to take for me to connect you with them.

~~~
brown9-2
Exactly this. If you want me to give you someone else's contact info you
better make the value proposition to me crystal clear.

The headline as written sounds somewhat spammy and confusing, and not many
users are going to click thru to learn more and alleviate their confusion.

------
amalag
Was your campaign asking users to do something for you? Whats in it for them?

~~~
sixQuarks
This is probably the most important part of a headline. Answering the
question: What's in it for me? People don't care what you need or want, they
only care about their needs and wants.

~~~
Domenic_S
Underrated thread.

I read the landing page waiting for a "you get a $25 Starbucks card for each
landlord signed up" or something, but there was nothing. Just "help me grow my
business (that won't benefit you in the near term) for free please?"

------
orangethirty
You spent $150 to learn the most valuable copywriting lesson to be learned.
That the headline is the most important part of an advertisement. The job of
the headline is to get people to keep reading. Your headline proved to be bad.
Its ok, now go back, redo it and test the results.

Advertising on reddit is a bit of a puzzle. The community does not respond to
very informercial sounding messages. They do respond to personal, first person
point of view stuff.

You should try a variation of the following.

 _Reddit: Help me get in touch with your landlords. I want to talk to them
about something that might benefit you._

 _Help! I might have a way to help your landlord (and thus, you) but I have no
way of getting in touch with him/her._

 _Guys, this is my startup. It aims to help your landlord do some things
better, and thus make your life easier. Help me spread the word._

And so on.

------
jiggy2011
A lot of people don't have great relationships with their landlords. In most
cases it seems to be somewhere between neutral and active dislike.

In other words people contact them as little as possible unless there is
something really wrong.

------
yahelc
One minor note: If you're using Google Analytics for your web analytics data,
your time on site metric is somewhat meaningless. Bounces get counted as time
on site = 0. That means that 37 seconds metric is weighted down by 89% of
visits having a time on site of 0. Your non-bounces time on site number is
probably more like 5:37.

~~~
ezl
Thanks. I wasn't aware of this.

I generally just look at changes in my google analytics numbers rather than
absolute values to see if I'm doing better or worse.

Admittedly not the most sophisticated GA approach.

~~~
yahelc
That's probably the right way to think about GA data in general; the only
reason I highlighted it is because the bounce rate so heavily skewed the
metric that it made it almost meaningless.

------
bunkat
We've had nothing but great results from Reddit advertising. We average 0.18
CTR and 2.6 pages per visit with <70% bounce. The actual ad makes a huge
difference, you really need to connect with the Reddit audience. We tried a
couple of different ads before finding one that worked well for us.

~~~
TamDenholm
Can you elaborate?

~~~
bunkat
Redditors generally click on things that look more like content then an ad and
stand out enough to catch their eye. If you try to just sell them something,
they tune it out. But solve a problem for them in a relatable way and they
will click. We paired an awkward penguin meme with a problem/solution
statement to get our best results.

~~~
dmfdmf
> We paired an awkward penguin meme...

Is this the post-internet equivalent of when your favorite bands from
highschool and college start selling their popular songs for car and financial
service ads for the middle aged? Of course today's redditors all think it will
never happen to their generation.

------
mnicole
Sorry this didn't work out for you. I make an effort to actually look at the
ads on Reddit because I think those are some of the smarter advertisers.
Ignoring that you actively advertised on r/realestate, here are some issues
you probably ran into on the main page push (please correct me if I overlooked
any of these):

Taking into account the median age range of the average Redditor, do they even
have landlords or do they live in dorms or with their parents? Then if they do
have a landlord, what's their relationship like?

Even as someone in my mid-20's, my relationship with my landlord isn't buddy-
buddy because I have no intention of staying at this location and can't
guarantee that she'll have a property in an area I look into in the future. We
get along fine and she wants to be a connection on LinkedIn, but that doesn't
make the scenario you're proposing anything more than an awkward, incentive-
less sales pitch about a product I know nothing about. Additionally, another
reason I went with my particularly property manager (and possibly why others
have too) was because she is already using Appfolio (so everything is done
online), which I'm going to assume has a somewhat similar feature to your
product.

You also don't cite any trial time or discounts to property managers who want
to compare and contrast before taking the plunge, which would at least give me
an easier way to make the pitch. The sample is expecting me to fill out the
form to see the rest of the experience, if there's even anything else there,
whereas as a landlord I would be just as interested (possibly even moreso) in
the admin interface and my customization options.

I'm also less likely to click on an ad with some random person's face. I don't
know what it is, maybe the Jimmy Wales (et al) Wikipedia fundraiser effect,
but I just ignore it because it's weird.

Lastly, does suggesting this service to her imply that I am unhappy with the
one she currently uses or - worse - that I'm making a commission off of this
sale unbeknownst to her? I just don't want that kind of baggage tied to the
person who determines whether or not there's a roof over my head.

------
corin_
I recently screwed up with Reddit advertising, but I think the mistake was the
decision to do it, not how I did it - note that I'm talking about my
particular case, not saying Reddit advertising is bad in general.

Promoting an event in Paris I targeted /r/Paris and /r/France, and achieved
underwhelming $60 CPM and $10 CPC rates.

I sort of expected it and didn't spend too much money to mind, only really
tried it because at the time I was pretty desperate to try any option possible
(side note, a week later and all my marketing issues with this event are
solved, hooray).

Really my issue was lack of targeting options, the only way I could limit the
advert to relevant people was through subreddits, and as they were relatively
small ones, it was never going to achieve great results. Hopefully some time
in the future they'll offer better options, for example I would have loved to
target French (or better Paris+10miles) readers of big subreddits like
/r/gaming.

(I didn't actually bother with any AB testing for this as it didn't seem worth
it, but hey, we got a pretty awesome CTR on the tiny number of impressions!)

edit: This is the only time I've ever used Reddit advertising, is it normal
that total uniques aren't shown? I can see unique impressions and total
impressions for each hour, but there's no total uniques over the entire
campaign, which would annoy me if I'd spent more money and wanted to track
roi.

~~~
ashray
Really interesting stuff. Since you were trying to market an event did you try
using Facebook ads ? I read a post on HN a few weeks ago about how Facebook
ads for a garage sale event were super successful!

Would love to know if you tried them and if you have any positive/negative
experiences to share. Can never learn enough about marketing effectively!

Also, congrats on managing to market your event =)

~~~
corin_
I did, yes, and was pleased to get basically the results (in terms of CPM and
CPC) that the Facebook platform had me expert before starting the campaign.

Again I didn't spend much (~$500) but got roughly $0.08 CPC (a little higher
on CPM bidding) and overall I enjoyed both the flexibility of the platform in
terms of demographic targeting, and the stats breakdown which let me compare
how different adverts performed within the campaign.

(I don't have figures to hand for conversion from clicks to event
registrations, they weren't fantastic, but that's largely because our landing
page is much more targeted towards a specific audience who will go there not
from adverts, and it's not great at converting people who clicked an advert
and don't know much about what they are looking at.)

As a bit of context: I have no experience with advertising on Facebook, Reddit
or similar platforms. I have a lot of experience in other digital advertising
(on the selling end rather than buying - though not working in sales), but
it's a very different game to social network advertising..

------
TamDenholm
Im not sure why a redditor would bother helping you out, you need to appeal to
them with something, karma, fame, an iPad giveaway or something.

------
MicahWedemeyer
Thanks for sharing your results. Advertising effectively is enormously
difficult.

I've had results similar to yours in all areas of advertising. Someone asked
me once, "So how has the ad we run on our blog for you been doing?" My reply,
"Well, I think it's the least poorly performing ad we run, so maybe that's a
win?"

~~~
dwj
Yes, me too. I've used google adwords quite a few times, and I always end up
spending more than I make back from it. The problem is that it just costs too
much to grab each new customer that it usually isn't worthwhile. Facebook is
the only one that is actually useful, but it only works for certain types of
campaigns.

~~~
conrey
It's all about having the right campaigns and optimizing for conversion. It
isn't easy, but it is certainly doable for most people. Adwords is like golf -
it's a simple game to play but the being good requires a mastery of nuance and
fine details that takes lots of experience.

------
trafficlight
It's all about the headline. I think it has to sound authentic and not like an
advertisement at all. More like the start of a discussion.

And don't use memes. I've noticed that the advertisers that screwed up the
meme, even it's a slight mistake, get roasted for it.

------
binarysolo
Need better A/B testing of titles. Not a lot of data either.

Also as others have pointed out already, your incentives (get landlord leads)
are not aligned with your viewers (uhm... feel good helping another
Redditor?).

------
systematical
I think your biggest problem was, you weren't offering anything to the user.
Helping you is not an incentive for me or most other people. What can you do
for me? You weren't doing anything for me.

------
timruffles
I loved 500px's terms and conditions page, but it's designed as a terms and
conditions page. It's still enormously wordy. Additionally, all I saw in the
ad or landing page were pleas for help - I was never sold the benefits.

I'm no copywriter/designer, but prehaps try rerunning the ad and A/B test some
designs/headlines that sell the benefits ("no more real estate agents" or w/e
the benefit is to redditors).

------
_chap
I like where I live and I don't want my landlord to be thinking about how easy
it is to replace me.

------
mzuvella
Still better than Fb ads right now.

------
francov88
Great post Ezl. Thanks for sharing

------
sixQuarks
I think your ad was a win, simply because you're learning by doing. This is
very valuable.

------
djbender
There's nothing in it for the viewer of this ad.

------
jacques_chester
Almost nobody knows who their landlords are -- almost all rentals are handled
through agencies.

Plus: who wants to remind their landlords to come and do an inspection?

~~~
ahi
You and I live in very different markets. I have always known who my landlord
was, and have asked my landlord to perform inspections.

Even if you only rent from property management companies, they are still the
target demographic for the advertised SaaS.

