
Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better - namecast
http://startops.namecast.net/rants/2013/12/05/failed-HN-launch-vs-reddit-paid-advertising:-which-converts-better/
======
programminggeek
Um, one thought is that HN users are more targeted than just people hanging
out on /r/programming.

I've done a lot of PPC over the years and the one thing I learned over and
over again is the best ROI always comes when you inject yourself into the end
of the buying cycle. What I mean is, the closer to making a purchasing
decision they are, the more likely they are to buy whatever product fits what
they are looking for because they've already been educated about the problem,
solution, etc.

In the affiliate marketing world, this is why review sites are so darn popular
for making money. People go to them when they are making a buying decision and
if they click on the product link after reading the review, it drops a cookie
and in many cases they will buy that same session anyway.

Price comparison or deal sites are also kind of in the same end point of the
buying cycle. The person has already decided to buy a particular item, so
whoever can offer the best deal or whoever has the best bonus
item/service/brand is going to probably make the sale.

By being on HN, there are probably a lot more people looking for your
particular solution than just the average reddit reading programmer. There is
some overlap, but I would imagine the average HN user is closer to a devops
role than the average reddit programmer. If only cuz I'd imagine a lot of
reddit programming readers are working on some enterprise software where they
aren't allowed to touch the DNS anyway.

Also, good job on making a follow up post that did make it on HN. When life
gives you lemons...

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DLarsen
With such a small sample size, I generally tend to shy away from speaking of
results in percentages. Stating the results as "5 conversions from 26 visits"
keeps things in perspective. I appreciate the insight into your experience,
but the sample size is way too low to draw meaningful general conclusions.

~~~
namecast
The individual sample sizes are small, yes. The variance between the paid vs
organic conversions was still stark to me, e.g. 54 paid visitors had a 0%
conversion rate to trial vs ~20% with 5 of 26 organic users converting to
trial.

FWIW, the reddit ad campaign is at nearly a hundred views now, and still no
trials.

~~~
ivanplenty
My experience in ads is that most digital display ads for technical people are
a waste of money. You will have zero conversions, period. Our demographic does
not click and convert. My data include million-impression campaigns for other
salesforce products on channels like Reddit, AOL, Yahoo, and Google...

For perspective, 100 views is extremely small in advertising. Hobby-small.
You'll need a sample size of a few thousand views before you'll get even 100
interactions to compare. The sample sizes of conversion for this experiment
are too small to make any conclusions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685928)

I suspect you will see better conversions from this content ad (i.e. blog
post) posted to HN. Which, coincidentally, I fear blog ads are a large
percentage of the content posted to HN today.... still nice to see others'
findings, so thank you for posting.

Anyway, good luck with the product, but I can't emphasize enough that you
should be skeptical with any of the results you have. You simply have too few
data points to deduce any trends.

------
jcampbell1
One 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 private repos.

~~~
nl
_the free trial button leads to the scariest signup page in history_

To be specific, this goes to the OAuth page for GitHub. That's _NOT_ a good
experience. You need a page before it explaining what is going to happen.

The same thing happens with the link on the blog post. It says "check us
out....", I clicked and ended up with an OAuth page.

Once I finally got to your site (manually typing in the URL..) I thought it
looked interesting.

 _GeoIP? Weighted records? Round Robin Load Balancing?_

Ok.. I'm interested - I've build CDNs before, and I'd like to understand how
your GeoIP is implemented... hmm, no docs, but _" Our quickstart tutorial will
have you up and running in no time"_.

Ok, I can read a tutorial. Umm.. where?

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djb_hackernews
I'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 logic to display ads
on the front page that are targeted to specific subreddits if the user is
subscribed to the same subreddit. I think that'd be interesting.

~~~
bsimpson63
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.

~~~
jeorgun
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.

------
mathattack
Great article! One question - The math doesn't work, does it?

 _A 1.2% conversion ratio end-to-end for SaaS startups that don’t ask for a
credit card in advance suggests that if we can get 1000 visitors, then we
should expect 100 trial users, converting to 1 paid user. At least that’s the
theory._

I follow that the 1.2% is from the total visitors. 10% * 15% * 80% = 1.2%. So
they should have expected 12 paid users per 1000 visitors.

One question on the conclusion... Indeed Show HN seems to be a much better
(more efficient) option for a good product. But how do you scale it? There are
only so many communities you can find. Advertising can be much more easily
scaled. If you want 100 more view, pays 100 more times the money. Or perhaps
50 times the money if you can get a volume discount.

------
bhouston
On our website, [http://clara.io](http://clara.io), we found that HN sent us
about 8000 hits the day we were hovered around item 15.

In general, our conversion rate from visit to signup is around 30% but with HN
traffic it was significantly lower, around ~8% for that burst of traffic.
Obviously, HN is not our target demographic of users.

We do not have a paying option, thus we only have the front end conversion
number at this point.

~~~
tarr11
OT to OP, I hadn't seen your site before.

It is really cool! I'm teaching kids to code games and I really like using
browser based tools as it makes it easier for kids to practice at home and I
don't have to worry about specific OS's and hardware.

------
bguthrie
I hope this works as something of a second launch for them, because it seems
like a great product.

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gk1
As 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.

~~~
namecast
True on both counts. I should have qualified that statement by 1) removing
highly (would you at least spot me "barely targeted"? and 2) added "in the
ultra-short term" to the end of that sentence. If I'd have known I'd be on the
front page of HN all day I'd have toned down the hyperbole. Lazy writing on my
part, mea culpa.

~~~
gk1
That's fair.

If you have any budget for marketing, I do recommend you give paid advertising
another shot. Just not Reddit. Try AdWords, but do some basic reading about it
first to increase the likelihood of a decent first campaign.

------
wikiburner
Just 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.

~~~
namecast
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.

~~~
AlecSchueler
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.

------
peacemaker
I posted a launch post for [http://wecombinate.com](http://wecombinate.com)
and also linked [http://paymentsplugin.com](http://paymentsplugin.com) on HN
as well as other places.

For WeCombinate, I received 84 visits from HN or HN related (showhn.com etc)
but for Payments Plugin I saw a spike up to 386 for one day straight from HN.

The WeCombinate post fell away very quickly with zero comments but the post
with the Payments Plugin link stayed around on the bottom on the home page for
about 6-8 hours.

Overall, I didn't see any conversions as a result of the HN traffic although I
don't think HN is my target audience really.

Just thought I'd add some more data points into the conversation.

------
jedberg
Did you do analytics of which HN users actually signed up? Is it the ones that
follow the Show HN twitter? ie. People highly targeted for signing up for
trials of new products?

I would say your sample size is not nearly large enough to be conclusive. :)

~~~
namecast
True, this is way anecdotal. Believe me, if I could have gotten a bigger
sample size, I would have! As it stands I was excited that I had at least two
different traffic sources within the same order of magnitude to offer a semi-
well-not-completely-unreasonable comparison.

------
earless1
I don't think /r/programming was the correct choice for this campaign. I would
think that the web development subs and even the sysadmin subs would be a
better place for this stuff.

~~~
namecast
I'd be willing to try again on more dev and devops related subs, though the
audience reach is a bit smaller there.

------
Alex_Jiang
/r/programming doesn't get that specific into programming. I think it's mostly
an aggregator of resources for beginners learning how to program. (a large
percentage of the posts are questions like 'which language')

I think its possible that your product could have gone over many peoples
heads, at least in that particular sub.

Have you looked into subreddits like r/webdevelopment or r/html5( or
javascript,CSS)? They have less readers but maybe they're more your target?

~~~
namecast
I'll poke around. I admittedly have a bit of 'subreddit blindness'. I'll check
those subs out on www.stattit.com. Thanks for the suggestion.

------
Ecio78
I 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.

------
xur17
I'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.

~~~
gk1
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.

~~~
xur17
I eventually saw the ad while I was logged in. It appears that ads are only
shown for a percentage of page impressions, so even if I purchase all of the
available impressions, my ad won't be shown for all pageviews. I suppose this
makes sense, I just wish they made it more clear.

------
Dakos
My gut tells me that part of the reason why Reddit was a flop is AdBlock. I
would not be surprises is much of r/programming ran it. These guys are tech
savy without necessarily being in the start-up scene.

Numbers that low could be attributed to miss-clicks, users who thought it was
an r/programming post.

All speculation mind.

------
vittore
I like the idea and would've offer it for my company, but we have 200+ domains
so your plans little off.

~~~
namecast
vittore - ping us and maybe we can discuss? i'd like to hear more about your
use case at least. You can hit us up at support at namecast dot net, or just
log in, start your free trial and ping us via the support button.

------
lnanek2
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.

~~~
namecast
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.

------
applecore
If your launch on HN fails to get any votes in the first 5-10 minutes, and you
feel your post has significant merit for the community, your best course of
action is to just delete the submission and try again.

~~~
minimaxir
Don't do this.

pg has said that this is a ban worthy offense. And I still see people doing
it.

~~~
crazygringo
I've never done it, but considering how random it is to get or not get just a
first upvote from someone else (let alone the 5+ needed for front-page), I
can't blame people.

HN still needs a vastly better way of separating the wheat from the chaff for
new submissions, that involves the whole community, not just the few who
occasionally look at "new".

~~~
markdown
I reckon they should make every submission appear as the last item on the
front-page for 60 seconds. Essentially make that little slot an extension of
"new".

------
Kudos
Does this service offer anycast DNS? If not, why not?

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mooism2
Surely there are subreddits more relevant than /r/programming? May not have
been targeted well.

~~~
namecast
Probably. My thinking is that the low CTR (click through rate) can be
explained by poor targeting, but once you arrive to the landing page you
should have a pretty good indication of whether you want to trial or not. The
low number of conversions to trial just from reddit is a bit strange.

That said: any ideas for better subs to target? /r/sysadmin, /r/linux were
some of the smaller ones i'd considered, or i could go wide with
/r/technology, but this experiment has left me feeling cautious.

~~~
thehigherlife
/r/sysadmin is a pretty active community in general. You could always just try
to post to their subreddit.

------
iguana
Interesting post, but your blog has a horrible bug that scrolls the page to
the top on Android randomly.

~~~
namecast
damn you, jekyll! i'll see if i can fix that bug.

