• Last week, I was inspired to test out the Reddit Self-Serve Ad (RSSA) platform for Whiteyboard that I had been hearing some chatter about. Mostly, this blog post by Gabriel on his 13 day trial with RSSA for his Duck Duck Go Engine. I will compare our two experiences, although our goals were quite different (he was trying to promote a search engine over a two week period, and I was trying to sell as much Whiteyboards as possible in a 48 hour window, offering free shipping on Reddit.Whiteyboard.com

Budget to Time:

• Gabriel: $650 for 13 days
• Whiteyboard: $700 for 2 days

Gabriel says: Redditors actually try out your site. 3c per unique visitor is pretty good in and of itself, but it’s all worthless unless they actually try out your site. For example, you can get 5c unique visitors from StumbleUpon (presumably in a similar demographic), but StumbleUpon visitors never would try out my sites. Reddit visitors did try out Duck Duck Go.

Jason Wilk says: True, Redditors do actually visit your site and browse around. For seemingly cheap traffic, Reddit drives highly interested customers, however when selling a product, getting that audience to instantly open their wallets is as tough as using any ad platform.  TO be positive, the bounce rate was very low, and average page views was 2.5+, but conversion rates on our site were even lower than usual. One interesting note, is that our Facebook Like button (which we A/B tested quite a bit on the location saw it’s conversion rates drop to nearly zero). Don’t expect Redditors to share your site.

Gabriel says: My ad ran for 13 days, from 3/7 to 3/20. It cost $650, and I spent $50 per day. In total it had 1,288,378 impressions (282,732 uniques) and yielded 20,700 clicks (18,420 uniques).

Jason says: My ad ran for two days from 7/15 thru 7/16. It costs $700 ($350 per day). In total it has 299,784 impressions (63,000 unique) and yielded 4,226 clicks (4,197 uniques).

Jason says: To be honest, this was the not nearly the best traffic experiment we have come across. In the last few months, Whiteyboard has seen far better conversion results when getting any sort of coverage on blogs. With TechCrunch, LifeHacker, New York Times, etc (and any other blog), we usual generate about $1 per unique visitor (TechCrunch and LifeHacker both generated about 9,000 unique visitors. New York Times online sent us 2,500 visitors). Reddit was a fraction of that, but the ad was still profitable at the end of the day when factoring in the $700 price point. A positive ROI in my book, especially on a site with what seem to be topic starters, is positive from a branding prospective. I truly thought however, that based off of Gabriell’s blog post, that we were going to be looking at a $15,000-$20,000 48 hours with Reddit. We even had Alexis Ohanian (Reddit’s co-founder) design a  custom landing page for the readers and offered free shipping.

If any of you Hacker News readers want the same deal that I gave to Reddit readers, I’m keeping the free shipping link live for another day here.

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