

Review HN: RewardLevel - Increase conversion on your forms by offering rewards - noahkagan
http://RewardLevel.com

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epi0Bauqu
Something is fishy on HN. This story was #3 and then immediately jumped to #38
(on the second page). Was it secretly penalized or something?

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paraschopra
Maybe a mod flagged or something? I have seen stories dropping off the
homepage just like it and have no clue why that happens.

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nhashem
So I tried signing this up and throwing it up on my site, and I got some
reward for a free coupon to UserTesting.com. I am mostly confident my
customers will have zero interest in this reward. The $5 gift card at Amazon
though would be great.

I was wondering if it was possible to configure the rewards offered. I
actually tried playing around with the snippet of code you give your
publishers:

<iframe src="<https://www.rewardlevel.com/plugin/index?plugin=XXX>
width="100%" height="60" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"
scrolling="no" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>

XXX is an integer, and I was able to get different rewards to show up by
changing its value.

I assume this isn't intended and my value for XXX is supposed to be static
indicator of my account ID. But how do you plan on configuring the rewards
offered by the publisher?

Shoot me an e-mail if you want talk to more. My site gets quite a bit of
traffic and I'd love to offer some easy incentives and this is way more
streamlined to use than anything I've tried with TrialPay et al.

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joshdotsmith
I'm a little confused now that TechCrunch has a story up. It seemed from the
discussion here that you were only making money from your affiliates, but you
also charge upon conversion?

"Reward Level charges $5 per conversion, but if the company offering the
reward is also a publisher with Reward Level’s widget installed, they only
have to pay $2.50 per conversion."

Is this accurate?

If so, I might find it hard to justify paying $5 per conversion, especially
for a .2-30% conversion rate increase. This means I'd be paying for _every_
conversion, essentially spending what I'd normally spend and then $5 for each
and every signup on top of that? No thanks. While this might make sense for
some, it probably wouldn't make sense for those following the freemium model.
Sounded great when it was "too good to be true," though.

~~~
ktsmith
The conversion rate increase appears to speak to the publisher, ie the company
with the landing page being incentivized and not the company offering the
reward.

According to the tech crunch article the company offering the reward pays the
$5 and the publisher gets the widget and offers the reward to their potential
users for free.

~~~
joshdotsmith
It's a little unclear to me. The problem is with "the company offering the
reward" language. I took that to mean the company that presents the reward for
the signups, but you're saying it's the company actually offering the deal,
e.g. Amazon. That makes more sense. So that company not only offers their
reward but _also_ pays $5 to Reward Level?

~~~
ktsmith
That's the way I interpreted it.

It looks like RewardLevel is set up as a broker. They get publishers to
install widgets on the sign up forms, that data is then passed to advertisers
(the reward offerer) and RewardLevel makes a commission on the conversions at
the advertisers end. I would also guess that while the advertiser may be
giving out a reward to each sign up on the publisher site (discount, voucher,
coupon, gift etc) they may not be paying $5 to RewardLevel each time. There's
probably separate language that defines what a conversion is for the
advertiser such as a signup or enrollment in service with the company
providing the incentive in addition to the initial sign up on the publishers
landing page. We'll have to see if Noah speaks to how advertisers sign up as
it's been asked a couple of times.

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acabal
This looks like a great idea.

I think it would be great to use as an incentive for participating in a site
after signing up. For example on my site, Scribophile, I don't consider a user
'converted' until they 1) sign up and 2) post a critique. Just signing up is
useless to the site unless the user also participates.

Looking at the way you've implemented the widget, is there a way I can make
the above scenario happen? So say there's a message after you sign up for
Scribophile that says something like "write a critique within 5 days of
signing up and get xxx reward!"

Also, how do you target these rewards? Again, for a site like mine, users
wouldn't want a Kissmetrics account. They'd want something writing-related,
like an Amazon.com gift certificate, or the like. Is there a way to choose
specific rewards?

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ktsmith
You'll find that users only looking for a reward are more than happy to jump
through one or two hoops to get their reward. An incentivized user is often no
better than no user, especially when the reward is tangible like a gift
certificate.

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aaronbrethorst
The language on the home page around 'too good to be true' made me pause
before signing up. It almost sounds like you're saying 'there's a catch!'

I think being a little more clear about your business model will go a long way
to allaying concerns among users signing up for RewardLevel.

~~~
noahkagan
Aaron.

Awesome feedback. Should we include how we make money in that paragraph?

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aaronbrethorst
Ideally, yes. Maybe you could say something like "Sound too good to be true?
It isn't: Reward Level is completely free for you and your users. We make
money through our partner referrals."

Except that what I wrote is terrible, but hopefully you get the idea :)

Edit: and please put this above the fold.

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noahkagan
Yea, pretty terrible :P

Let me think of something. Don't really want to push changes live but tonight
or early tomorrow.

Please keep the feedback coming!

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aaronbrethorst
Sounds good, I look forward to seeing it! Plus, I did sign up, and I'll let
you know offline if I have any more feedback.

This product looks awesome, btw!

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paraschopra
Interesting idea, Noah. But there are two questions in my mind:

a) How are you going to monetize this? (You say on website it is free for
companies using it, but you must have thought of some monetization strategy)

b) You incentivizing users signup for a service just to get that exclusive
offer under the signup box. Aren't those users going to be no better than "no-
users"? I mean, if the only (or part-of) reason for a user signing up for a
service is because he wanted to get that exclusive offer, chances of him
becoming a long term customer are pretty low. Right?

~~~
ktsmith
After three years of working with an affiliate marketing, lead generation and
advertising company I would say that incentivized traffic is the worst kind of
traffic. This is after seeing thousands of offers and processing millions of
leads.

The problem with any type of incentive on a signup form (not checkout, that's
different) is that it changes intent. You end up with two groups of people:
those interested in your product and those looking for a reward.
Differentiating those two groups can be very expensive. If you are sending out
a news letter or other marketing material you also should expect to see higher
unsubscribe rates and spam complaints from incentivized sign ups. These people
will often not remember where they signed up or what it was for and that
leaves you dealing with problems at your ESP or wasting money on increased
numbers of mailings. I've seen offers for services where an agent calls the
person signing up to complete the process and those are even more fun. Then
you have to deal with people that are pissed they are receiving a call from a
"telemarketer" even though they signed up to receive a call. There are also
other factors working against incentivized forms such as forums set up for the
sole purpose of detailing places you can sign up for something for free and
receive a tangible reward in return.

Other types of incentives for the check out page of a pay service or store
selling goods can work really well. The best example are check out pages that
have free shipping thresholds. If you prompt the user "Hey, spend $X more and
you get free shipping." You have a great opportunity to upsell or to push
smaller items that might have more markup. Additionally a reward like this
site seems to be offering might push people to finish the check out process if
the reward is good enough.

Having been down this road I would be very skeptical of the quality of the
signups as a publisher in this system and as an advertiser I'd want good terms
on what qualifies as a conversion as well as well defined return policies on
leads. It doesn't look like advertiser information is available yet (did I
miss it?) so hard to say what terms they are getting.

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ecaroth
Love the idea! Just some design suggestions/thoughts from my first look
around. Because of the heavy contrast between the white in the upper portion
and the blue on the bottom, I get the impression that the bluk of your
relevant content is in the lower section.. when in reality of ease of adding
the 'Reward' feature to the form seems like it should be your focus.

When looking at your signup form, it's not really obvious what I'm supposed to
do, because the reward button, question button, and submission button are
grouped so closely and look so similar. I would tone down the yellow of the
input boxes a bit and change the colors for the reward info buttons - example:
<http://i53.tinypic.com/29mt4l5.jpg>

Also, I think if they click in the reward box it should only check the box,
not check/uncheck like a label.

Great idea though! I Apologize if you don't like my thoughts, just some quick
first impressions!

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brianbreslin
So any raw figures on conversion rate changes?

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noahkagan
We've seen .2% up to 30% increase. Varies by website and still a bit early as
we are adding more rewards to the system.

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mikegreenberg
Really like the idea. At first, I thought you were building a funnel for your
other venture, but this application has much bigger vision. My one primary
turn-off here is relevance of the reward to what I'm signing up for. I'm sure
this is what you're going after and hasn't materialized yet due to lack of
offers to pass around. But I'm curious how you're planning on solving this in
a way that scales well.

PS: Tidy up those "Reward Detail" popups! Keep it up!

PPS: The email link on the about page is "protected" (hi [at] rewardlevel
[dot] com) whereas the email link at the top is not.

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noahkagan
Mike,

Appreciate the feedback.

We will solve it with inventory and the algorithm, just takes some time get it
all right.

Redesign for pop-up and hopefully js version with roll-over coming shortly.

Yea, hopefully google apps can do its job at protecting spam.

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mikegreenberg
What I was trying to point out about the email link is if you're going to
share it as a link in the top nav, you should do the same in the about page.
(At least for consistency/convenience.)

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HyprMusic
Is there any way to stop the service offering competitors products?

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noahkagan
Great question. Yea, go to profile > block rewards

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jwomers
I see it's easy to sign up to put the rewardLevel code on one's website but
nowhere to sign up to become a reward offerer? I assume it's only for a
handful of known clients for now, will this change and eventually allow any
business to offer it's products/services to be shown in the rewards network?

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hariis
Can I select the type of offers that can appear on my site? for example,
financial products/services

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noahkagan
We tried to enable that and saw worse results than just letting the algorithm
decide. We'll test more of this in the future.

For now you can block sites you don't want showing on your profile link.

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hariis
In the long term, as a publisher, what is preventing me from getting my own
deals from the same vendors?

Are you getting me any exclusive deals with these vendors?

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ktsmith
There's probably nothing stopping you from getting these types of deals set
up. The problem is that you then go from working on your core business to
managing relationships as a lead seller.

The novelty of this approach is that RewardLevel acts as a broker and manages
all those relationships and then their algorithm supposedly shows the deals
that work best on your site. That leaves you with higher signups and in theory
more revenue, and RewardLevel's advertisers with more leads. RewardLevel makes
money by sitting in the middle and managing that pool of advertisers. You
would have to weigh the cost of having someone manage those relationships for
you versus the supposedly free increase in conversions on your landing page by
having RewardLevel do it for you.

I would caution anyone planning on implementing this that while it is "free"
to place the RewardLevel widget into your sign up forms there will be costs
associated with those people that sign up for nothing more than the reward.
The balancing act is to find offers that only really appeal to your core
market to begin with and that is in the hands of the RewardLevel algorithm.

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forcer
How does this work on non-US websites? Do you geo-locate offers or only offer
US-specific offers at this time?

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noahkagan
Good call on the geo-location. Coming soon.

Right now the algorithm optimizes to the rewards that work best for your site.

