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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 c

by corin_ 14y ago

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 14y ago
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_ 14y ago
  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..

by corin_ 14y ago

ashray 14y ago

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_ 14y ago
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..