
My Duck Duck Go reddit ad by the numbers - epi0Bauqu
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/my-duck-duck-go-reddit-ad-by-the-numbers.html
======
hopeless
Reddit doesn't allow targeting sub-reddits yet does it?

I'd be interested in advertising but even at $20 there doesn't seem reason to
advertise on the main reddit page when I know my target audience will be on a
subreddit and can get much better quality clickthroughs.

~~~
jedberg
Please stand by. It is our most requested feature, and should be ready soon.

~~~
hopeless
Sweet! I'll be trying that out as soon as you launch it.

------
vaksel
i actually ran an ad this saturday too...but I actually wanted to test how
it'd work for selling something so I used an affiliate link.

So for $20 I got 19,303 unique views, 63,473 total views, 199 unique clicks,
215 total clicks. And a grand total of 1 sales.

The click numbers were different though, the affiliate program I used reported
lower click #s.

I'll make a proper blog post about this later today, since I've been waiting
for the 24 hour window for reddit to finalize their numbers.

Edit: here is the post with all the numbers/screenshots. Surprisingly I had a
lower CPM than Gabriel which is weird since he was spending a lot more money
than me.

[http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/481918228/tried-out-
reddi...](http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/481918228/tried-out-reddit-ads-
here-are-the-results)

~~~
jedberg
I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience. One thing to bear in mind is that
we (reddit) also run affiliate links, so you were competing directly with us.
If they clicked on our link first, you won't get credit for it. They may also
not count the click from that user twice, which could explain your lower
numbers.

Our traffic numbers come from the same system we use to track our own website
traffic, so we work very hard to make sure it is as accurate as possible,
since we sell our own advertising based on those numbers, and if they were
over-inflated, our other advertisers would complain vociferously.

I suspect the error lies in the affiliate program, who has an incentive to
under-report.

However, if you'd like to provide us with the numbers you got from your
affiliate program, we would be love to take a look and try to figure out what
happened.

Edit: I forgot to mention that AdBlock blocks a lot of affiliate trackers, but
a lot of reddit users specifically disable adblock for reddit, so that might
also be a source of the discrepancy.

~~~
icey
Reddit is one of two sites that have AdBlock exceptions on my computers; and
it's largely because the ads are usually pretty interesting on reddit.

The self-serve advertising system has been a win for me, both as an advertiser
and as a reddit reader; so until Coca-Cola and Viagra ads start showing up in
the ad boxes, I'm sure that lots of redditors will still keep the AdBlock
exception on their machines.

(I guess this is a roundabout way of me saying that I like the way ads work on
reddit, so I didn't mind turning AdBlock off personally.)

~~~
ssp
I have wondered whether the poor response to online ads isn't simply because
the ads are so bad. There might be many people like you who don't mind the ads
_per se_ so much as the flashing, annoying ads for stuff you don't care about.

So a site that made "interesting ads" part of their brand and actively
rejected boring and obnoxious ones, could potentially be valuable. Maybe
reddit is consciously doing this.

~~~
jedberg
> Maybe reddit is consciously doing this.

Maybe. :) In fact, we use reddit quite a bit, and the flashy ads annoy us just
as much as the rest of you. We do our best to keep the ads relevant and non-
annoying.

If we could afford it, we would just turn the ads off, but sadly, we have to
pay the bills somehow.

~~~
frederickcook
jedberg, I'd first like to say thanks for weighing in on these conversations.
It adds a great deal to these discussions having an insider to clarify things
and offer a unique perspective.

> "If we could afford it, we would just turn the ads off, but sadly, we have
> to pay the bills somehow."

This comment, however, isn't helpful, and obviously isn't true. Reddit built a
really cool, useful site for sharing and discussing interesting things, and
nobody begrudges them for trying to turn a profit. Reddit wasn't acquired by
Condé Nast because they are interested in having a cool service, it was
acquired because they intend to make a lot of money off of it.

The fact that Reddit has found a way to do this while keeping the ads relevant
and non-annoying definitely impressive, but we're kidding ourselves if we call
these ads a necessary evil instead of the core of the business model.

~~~
jedberg
> This comment, however, isn't helpful, and obviously isn't true.

Sure it is true. We would love to run the site without ads. There are other
business models besides straight ads, and we are working on moving towards
those.

They just aren't profitable yet.

------
colinplamondon
As an aside, everyone should definitely try switching to DDG as their default
for a day or two- in-line wikipedia info and the !bang system are really
killer.

I've switched to it full-time, and just do !google blah when I need to do an
image search. The !bang flexibility makes it fantastic, and !twitter
searchterm and !flickr searchterm makes it feel like you have a half dozen
search engines at your fingertips. Because you can still execute google
searches, it's not really 'switching from Google'- it's just an improvement,
plain and simple.

~~~
Estragon
Does DDG have a cognate to the google "site:" keyword?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yup, site: should work.

------
tibbon
I also had a fairly solid experience with a Reddit ad.

My main problem came in that the first 48 hours (out of 96) that I ran the ad
were great. A ton of impressions, comments and traffic. Yet the last 48 hours
or so I got almost no impressions or clicks on it. For anyone at Reddit I can
provide my account information (its all under 'tibbon') for you to see what
I'm talking about.

What I personally took away from it was that you should run your ad for two
days, and then not run similar again for a month or so.

~~~
jedberg
> What I personally took away from it was that you should run your ad for two
> days, and then not run similar again for a month or so.

Yeah, we try to tell people that. The problem is that once someone acts on
your ad, we don't show it to them again. So your impressions are expected to
drop off rapidly.

We need to do a better job of communicating that.

------
ssp
Tangentially, a big, red circle with a face and some green and yellow in it is
probably one of the most effective things you could possibly put in an online
ad.

------
kbrower
I ran an ad about a month ago. Paid $20, got 81,196 total impressions and
2,922 clicks. Definitely a success.

~~~
blhack
...wow, that is _really, really_ high. I've run a few ads on reddit and got
clicks in the hundreds for that price, not the thousands.

That's less than $0.01 cpc...which, from what I understand, is completely
unheard of.

~~~
kbrower
I will blog about this later

~~~
jedberg
Please send us the link when you do!

~~~
kbrower
will do!

------
SlyShy
It's interesting that reddit provides both good numbers, in _addition_ to a
number of hard to quantify but tangible benefits.

~~~
mey
I've got several ideas now on how to broadcast the availability of a side
project to a wider audience once it's ready.

    
    
      HN
      Reddit Ad
      Craigslist
      Friends & Family
    

Other suggestions are welcome :) (Not the side project in my profile)

~~~
petercooper
Some of my ideas from 2008 were quite popular here :-)
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138>

I would still recommend Twitter, Reddit, Delicious, and the like, but would
also focus heavily on guest blogging nowadays - its effectiveness has been
proven a lot in the last couple of years.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Where are the best places to guest blog?

Edit: for something for consumers that is broad-based, like a search engine.

~~~
Vindexus
That depends on what you're trying to promote. Your best bet is to find blogs
ready by people who would use your service.

For example if you wanted to launch a site that listed the best places to rock
climb, then you'd want to do some guest posts on popular rock climbing blogs.

------
tomerico
Duck Duck Go must have a pretty good ROI per user if it is worthwhile to pay
people to come to the site.

------
petercooper
Has anyone outside the US had any luck running an ad yet? The T&Cs say you
have to be in the US but I've signed up OK.. just not run an ad as I have
nothing to promote yet.

~~~
jedberg
We (reddit) are not currently able to take credit cards with addresses outside
the United States. Hopefully soon we will be able to do so.

~~~
petercooper
It's interesting you say that, as a sibling poster says they've been able to
(not that we know all the details or if they have a US based card - I'll
ask!).

That said, several years back I got around these restrictions a few times by
putting in my valid address but then selecting, say, NY and zip 10001. Some
card validation systems back then obviously just used the first line of the
address and ignored the zip if the card wasn't actually a US one. I couldn't
believe it worked either and hope payment systems are a bit more robust now
;-)

~~~
dchest
Didn't work with US address and Russian card :-)

------
code_duck
I love the logo. I'm going to use your duck. (the site, I mean).

Interesting info. We sell advertising and based on my experience, the Reddit
offerings seem to be well priced and attractive.

