
Use Adwords to find the best title for your Hacker News post - myotherthings
http://blog.chargeback.cc/2012/11/19/use-adwords-to-find-the-best-title-for-your-hacker-news-post/
======
jacques_chester
Based on my personal experience, here is a two-step guide for getting a blog
post to #1 of HN for 2 days.

1\. Write lots of blog posts on various topics. Write multi kilo-word reviews
of honest to goodness _books_ with reference to the ideas therein. Really pour
yourself into the work -- take as your inspiration Michel de Montaigne's
_Essais_. Submit some of these. Watch them get, at most, a single upvote.

2\. Write one (1) angry rant about a company well-known to HNers, with no
goals other than to vent a bit. Add "sucks" to the title somewhere. Watch as
someone else submits it and your primal screeching zooms to the top of the
front page and stays pegged to it for days.

Optional step 3: cultivate cynicism about HN and your reasons for sticking
around.

~~~
michaelt
Content aggregation sites like HN and reddit often weight upvotes based on
time. This makes some sense; an article that gets x upvotes in y minutes is
more popular than an article that takes 4*y minutes to get the same number of
upvotes!

But on Reddit this has an odd side-effect; as early upvotes are the key to
getting to the front page, an article that takes 30 minutes to read doesn't
get any upvotes in the first 30 minutes. But a meme or a 10-second gif?
Upvoted in seconds, and on its way to the front page.

Of course, Reddit is quite successful; no shame in providing bite-sized posts
with quick gratification if that's what the market demands.

~~~
napoleond
This is a really interesting insight. What do you think would be a good way of
levelling the playing field for articles which take 30 minutes to read?

------
ScottWhigham
OP - I was aghast at your CTR rates when I first read your post. I don't know
your marketing/segment but it's certainly worth questioning whether or not you
are getting the right keywords to trigger your ads. Your top three ads have a
grand total of 28 clicks over > 21,000 impressions. That is misery. There's
just no way you are going to be able to be profitable/break-even with AdWords
if you can't improve that CTR.

As such, it leads me to question your keyword selection. You need to know
"What were the keywords that actually triggered my ad?" This is possibly VERY
different from the keywords you entered (particularly if you are using broad
match). My guess is you're wildly off the mark in terms of your keyword
selection/filter. Adwords expands broad match keywords to the point of
unprofitability IME. You have to find out what people are actually searching
for that trigger your ad and "trim the fat" by modifying your keywords so that
you don't pay for unrelated things.

For example, let's say you have "payment disputes" as a broad match keyword.
That is so general that Google is going to auto-expand your keywords to
synonyms and "things that Google thinks are _like_ payments, disputes, and
payment disputes". So if you used that as a broad match keyword, you might be
surprised to find that your ads were served for the following keyword
searches:

* Credit repair atlanta

* bankruptcy dispute

* credit card payment was declined

etc, etc, etc - "similar yet different" is not profitable here. I'd suggest
you review the actual keywords and work to get that CTR up.

------
orangethirty
You learned one of the basic rules of writing good headlines. Don't overstate
it. Always get to the point. Quick!

Your first one was really bad.

 _Show HN: ChargeBack.cc – Battling the last frontier in payments_

It has a Star Trek reference, and no mention of what is it that you do. Bad
headline. Good for learning.

The next one is worse.

 _Show HN: ChargeBack.cc – an innovative solution to a messy problem_

A messy problem? You know what products relate to messy problems? Diapers,
toilet paper, tampons, etc. Really bad headline. Its actually quite funny,
though.

The final headline is perfect. Not because of Adwords, but due to the fact
that you just gave up on trying to be clever (which is the worst thing you can
do on copywriting), and were just honest and straight to the point.

 _Show HN: ChargeBack.cc – Get your money back_

Lets break it down:

    
    
        Show HN: - Addressing your audience directly.
        Chargeback.cc - Mentioning the product in the headline.
        Get your money back - Clearly stating what pain it aims to ease. 
    

Writing clever headlines or copy is the worst thing you can do. The people who
will read your ad dont have time to figure out what is it that you want to
tell them. Its as if I went door to door and tried to sell people some
newspapers by telling them about the press the paper gets printed on. Who
cares? Next time you need to write some marketing copy dont be clever. Its a
waste of time.

Using adwords for writing headlines is clever, but not smart. Because you dont
know how effective those ads are (probably not very), and which market it aims
to sell to. You are better off reading a good copywriting book.

~~~
tucson
which copywriting book(s) or material do you recommend?

~~~
jchin
Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples.

It's an oldie but a goodie. It talks a lot about split testing from the print
days -- catalogs, newspaper classifieds, etc. Writing headlines gets its own
chapter. Really great book. Really easy to read and understand. The current
edition is the 5th edition. You can get it from Amazon.

------
cletus
I guess it's somewhat interesting that AdWords can confirm what are good
titles and what aren't but I could've told you at the outset that the first
two titles are vague meaningless titles that won't draw anyone's attention.
"The last frontier in payments"? Really? I know I wouldn't read that because
it sounds like marketing BS.

Also, reaching the front page on the weekend has a lower barrier to entry. I
see posts with 13 votes hang around for hours.

~~~
duiker101
It's true they hang around for more but it's also probably harder to gain
those 13 votes.

~~~
myotherthings
Yup, this is exactly what I've found. Weekends are harder to get votes on, but
the posts last much longer once they get traction.

------
guylhem
I don't want to criticize, but if getting to the first page is _that_
important to you, I don't know, but it doesn't seems very healthy. Revenues
and products are more important than bragging rights.

Ok competition is good, hacking is good, but doing that just for HN sake seems
like overengineering for something not important at all (I mean, not central
to most business)

However, making a product out of it is something quite different - and it's a
great thing you did!

~~~
jwpeddle
I think you underestimate how much attention HN can get you and overestimate
the effort of doing what they did here. Seems like a great time investment to
me.

~~~
guylhem
I tried similar things to play with the Mechanical Turk and Google Ads -
especially since they give coupons like candy.

In the end, it is still glorified advertising, while IMHO the core purpose of
a business is revenue!

Advertising is very important, but securing paying clients does not depends
nor requires advertising.

IMHO again - advertising however is a tool for growing, but just one tool
among many others

This whole thing must have taken say half a day total - to say whether it was
a good or a bad thing for them, you must consider the opportunity cost

And IMHO again, diverting just one mind away from important problems (to fix
side issues instead) is a bad idea.

Focus matter the most.

------
duiker101
New guys starting a startup that want to make their website "viral" look at
this post, and learn. Give something of value, something that I can really
learn from, maybe even not directly related to your startup, and people will
give you credit. Not everyone can write a good post, but when you do be sure
that I will check you website to understand what do you do. Also a couple of
suggestions, your logo should take me to the website landing page, not blog
home, this guys did a fine job by putting both links. And don't be ashamed of
starting with something like "We at ZippilyBooppily(link) do.." this is
perfectly fine, I know that you want my attention for your startup, and if you
have something interesting to say I will check it, that link helps and tells
me about you. Last and maybe most important, don't spam me, or HN or whatever,
write only when you have something to say.

------
snowwrestler
An article about gaming Hacker News is now the top post on Hacker News. I
don't think that is a good sign.

~~~
luckystarr
He is not so much gaming HN but rather HN readers.

------
hosay123
There's insufficient data here to show the new title resulted in the article
score. It's a common trait on these kinds of sites, where an article's chance
of "success" is massively improved after receiving only a very small (2-5)
number of votes.

It's perfectly possible the original articles slipped down the new page too
quickly before they got lucky and found a few interesting readers.

------
hmexx
good to know HNers react to the same class of stimuli as the average google
search user. I might try some Cialis-entitled posts

~~~
tterrace
Here's 12 weird old haskell tricks discovered by a mom!

~~~
TallboyOne
OBEY! What Hacker News doesn't want you to know!

------
lazerwalker
Huh, an interesting concept. I wouldn't be surprised if, for certain products,
HN hits are higher-quality hits than the average (higher conversion rate,
possibly higher engagement rate after sign-up).

Of course, this is the sort of thing you need to be measuring. If that's not
the case, you absolutely shouldn't be spending your money and, more
importantly, your time on vanity upvotes and hits that don't result in a
tangible benefit.

As an aside, I'd love to see a blog post from a generous individual willing to
share how HN referrals as a cohort tend to perform compared to other traffic
sources for their product/service.

~~~
myotherthings
HN does not generally result in a lot of targeted visitors who are going to be
long term users of your product.

However, I find the feedback in the comments section to be hugely valuable. HN
readers are inevitably pretty savvy about startups. While you can get a lot of
criticism - it can be quite constructive, pointing out things everyone else
you show the site too has missed. Getting onto the front page is vital to get
any volume of comments.

------
TomGullen
I love this idea, very clever. A small spend can indicate a good option to
you, and the traffic HN can generate is well worth it.

The spend isn't even a complete waste of money either, it's still pulling in a
few new visitors during the test.

Very smart!

~~~
myotherthings
Thanks!

I was hoping it might be helpful to other people launching their startup. If
you're already running Adwords, then that's a great place to start looking for
guidance about how to market your product in a single sentence.

------
loceng
If hit count is your leading metric, then sure. But if you care what happens
afterwards then you need to track what happens afterward, and see how the
traffic clicks interacts; Quality over quantity..

------
mixedbit
My impression is that ranking algorithm, as described in the HN FAQ, is too
simplistic, and as a result luck is too important factor in many HN
submissions.

The more advanced algorithm would be for example to identify a set of HN users
that actively up vote stories, and do not only follow links that already have
a lot of votes; each new submission could be then injected to the front page
of several random users from such set. With such approach, all new stories
would have more or less equal exposure and equal chances of being noticed.

------
wiradikusuma
can't find the thread but i remember we sort of "agree" (lack of better word)
to help upvote Show HNs at least to give credit to those who ship. i think if
a submission (1) has Show HN (2) and really showing your newly launched
product, it deserves an upvote

------
hayksaakian
Editing flub?

'If you do wish to dispute this type of payment, we strongly lodging a
ChargeBack with ChargeBack.cc so that we can optimise the speed and
convenience of your refund'

<https://www.chargeback.cc/paypal>

------
demoo
If that is a screenshot of the experiment you were running, you just wasted
$70. None of those differences is statistically better than the other one.

If you got benefit out of being #2 on HN, good for you, just say so.

~~~
myotherthings
I think there’s real value in that it lets you think or other candidate titles
which I would have originally dismissed as too simplistic or too boring. I'm
not always going to pick the top one, but some degree of confidence and
guidance about what resonates with people is better than nothing!

Also there were a lot of other titles with far lower results than are visible
in those screenshots.

~~~
TallboyOne
I believe he's saying you didn't gather enough data, which was my first
impression.

I have also done this for years (not for titles on HN though -- good one),
it's just that isn't enough data to really tell.

------
jheriko
I like this - people are more likely to click on things similar to thinks
people are more likely to click on.

Its almost trivial and obvious... but not.

The only problem is running ads is an investment of its own...

~~~
lazugod
Can I ask why you use ellipses so often?

------
koide
I wonder if the other parameters were controlled in this experiment, like time
and type of day of posting, amount of votes of other articles in front page,
etc.

------
herf
HN is already over-optimized for good headlines. Voting up after clicking is
harder to implement but would improve quality.

------
kozikow
You just invented A/B testing. Congratulations.

------
JrodS
so meta

------
winstonian
0.15% ctr is beyond shit

