Um, one thought is that HN users are more targeted than just people hanging out on /r/programming.
I've done a lot of PPC over the years and the one thing I learned over and over again is the best ROI always comes when you inject yourself into the end of the buying cycle. What I mean is, the closer to making a purchasing decision they are, the more likely they are to buy whatever product fits what they are looking for because they've already been educated about the problem, solution, etc.
In the affiliate marketing world, this is why review sites are so darn popular for making money. People go to them when they are making a buying decision and if they click on the product link after reading the review, it drops a cookie and in many cases they will buy that same session anyway.
Price comparison or deal sites are also kind of in the same end point of the buying cycle. The person has already decided to buy a particular item, so whoever can offer the best deal or whoever has the best bonus item/service/brand is going to probably make the sale.
By being on HN, there are probably a lot more people looking for your particular solution than just the average reddit reading programmer. There is some overlap, but I would imagine the average HN user is closer to a devops role than the average reddit programmer. If only cuz I'd imagine a lot of reddit programming readers are working on some enterprise software where they aren't allowed to touch the DNS anyway.
Also, good job on making a follow up post that did make it on HN. When life gives you lemons...
With such a small sample size, I generally tend to shy away from speaking of results in percentages. Stating the results as "5 conversions from 26 visits" keeps things in perspective.
I appreciate the insight into your experience, but the sample size is way too low to draw meaningful general conclusions.
The individual sample sizes are small, yes. The variance between the paid vs organic conversions was still stark to me, e.g. 54 paid visitors had a 0% conversion rate to trial vs ~20% with 5 of 26 organic users converting to trial.
FWIW, the reddit ad campaign is at nearly a hundred views now, and still no trials.
My experience in ads is that most digital display ads for technical people are a waste of money. You will have zero conversions, period. Our demographic does not click and convert. My data include million-impression campaigns for other salesforce products on channels like Reddit, AOL, Yahoo, and Google...
For perspective, 100 views is extremely small in advertising. Hobby-small. You'll need a sample size of a few thousand views before you'll get even 100 interactions to compare. The sample sizes of conversion for this experiment are too small to make any conclusions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685928
I suspect you will see better conversions from this content ad (i.e. blog post) posted to HN. Which, coincidentally, I fear blog ads are a large percentage of the content posted to HN today.... still nice to see others' findings, so thank you for posting.
Anyway, good luck with the product, but I can't emphasize enough that you should be skeptical with any of the results you have. You simply have too few data points to deduce any trends.
One possible reason for the failed HN launch is the landing pages makes the basic mistake of listing features rather than benefits or use cases. It is a description of what the code does, rather than why it was written.
I am still lost to the benefits of managing DNS with github. I can't see the documentation, and the free trial button leads to the scariest signup page in history. It wants read/write access to my private repos.
the free trial button leads to the scariest signup page in history
To be specific, this goes to the OAuth page for GitHub. That's NOT a good experience. You need a page before it explaining what is going to happen.
The same thing happens with the link on the blog post. It says "check us out....", I clicked and ended up with an OAuth page.
Once I finally got to your site (manually typing in the URL..) I thought it looked interesting.
GeoIP? Weighted records? Round Robin Load Balancing?
Ok.. I'm interested - I've build CDNs before, and I'd like to understand how your GeoIP is implemented... hmm, no docs, but "Our quickstart tutorial will have you up and running in no time".
The only thing that I got out of it was, if you are using GitHub, why not use it to manage your DNS. This type of service would be interesting to me since I do need to create a lot of short term sub domains but I wasn't sold. This is my current workflow:
- User requests a free trial for my product
- I spin up a private VPS for them.
- I create a temp subdomain so the user can access the newly created VPS. I use Amazon Route 53 and their command line tool dnscurl.pl to create a new DNS record set.
- I keep an eye on the VPS and after an hour, I'll destroy the VPS and remove the temp subdomain with Amazon's dnscurl.pl
All of this is automated and adding/removing DNS records takes seconds and I pay about a buck a month. The only thing that I find annoying about working with Amazon S5 is you have to use XML files and they do not support IPV6. I would rather use JSON to manage my domains but I'm not sure it's $50/month nice.
I also have concerns about introducing a layer in front my DNS management. GitHub is not available from time to time and I'd hate to have this be another thing to worry about. Maybe I'm not the type of customer you (Namecast) are looking for, but I can see how this would benefit novices. From their point of view, they'll just have to know how to edit a file and do a git push to GitHub.
I've done a bit of advertising on reddit (though it was a few years ago), and my one take away is don't target specific subreddits.
I think a general pattern is people subscribe to subreddits and just let reddit do it's thing to populate their front page, never actually visiting the specific subreddit. I do this myself for a lot of subreddits I subscribe to.
I wonder if reddit has any plans to modify the ad display logic to display ads on the front page that are targeted to specific subreddits if the user is subscribed to the same subreddit. I think that'd be interesting.
Which probably accounts (in part) for Reddit's low conversion rates— a significant portion of the page-views will be from people not in `programming-mode', compared with almost none from HN.
Funny I never use the front-page and visit sub individually. I had never considered that I may be abnormal in this regard. Damn now I want to see metrics on this...
Great article! One question - The math doesn't work, does it?
A 1.2% conversion ratio end-to-end for SaaS startups that don’t ask for a credit card in advance suggests that if we can get 1000 visitors, then we should expect 100 trial users, converting to 1 paid user. At least that’s the theory.
I follow that the 1.2% is from the total visitors. 10% * 15% * 80% = 1.2%. So they should have expected 12 paid users per 1000 visitors.
One question on the conclusion... Indeed Show HN seems to be a much better (more efficient) option for a good product. But how do you scale it? There are only so many communities you can find. Advertising can be much more easily scaled. If you want 100 more view, pays 100 more times the money. Or perhaps 50 times the money if you can get a volume discount.
On our website, http://clara.io, we found that HN sent us about 8000 hits the day we were hovered around item 15.
In general, our conversion rate from visit to signup is around 30% but with HN traffic it was significantly lower, around ~8% for that burst of traffic. Obviously, HN is not our target demographic of users.
We do not have a paying option, thus we only have the front end conversion number at this point.
It is really cool! I'm teaching kids to code games and I really like using browser based tools as it makes it easier for kids to practice at home and I don't have to worry about specific OS's and hardware.
As a marketing person I had to do a double-take when I read this:
> The conclusion I’ve drawn from this is that paid advertising, even highly targeted paid advertising, is no match for actual user outreach.
What you did was not "highly targeted." Nor does it make sense to draw a conclusion about an entire form of advertising from a single attempt. Paid advertising works very well for some companies (I've run them dozens of times), and can be optimized over time to do even better.
True on both counts. I should have qualified that statement by 1) removing highly (would you at least spot me "barely targeted"? and 2) added "in the ultra-short term" to the end of that sentence. If I'd have known I'd be on the front page of HN all day I'd have toned down the hyperbole. Lazy writing on my part, mea culpa.
If you have any budget for marketing, I do recommend you give paid advertising another shot. Just not Reddit. Try AdWords, but do some basic reading about it first to increase the likelihood of a decent first campaign.
Just curious if anyone else saw a disparity between the amount of traffic Reddit claimed you were getting from paid ads, and what your analytics showed?
I didn't even mention that! Reddit reported 100% more traffic than I actually saw with any analytics service. Not only that, I saw a bunch of suspicious hits from reddit referrers that didn't load any CSS or javascript. Like someone was just running GET requests by hand.
For WeCombinate, I received 84 visits from HN or HN related (showhn.com etc) but for Payments Plugin I saw a spike up to 386 for one day straight from HN.
The WeCombinate post fell away very quickly with zero comments but the post with the Payments Plugin link stayed around on the bottom on the home page for about 6-8 hours.
Overall, I didn't see any conversions as a result of the HN traffic although I don't think HN is my target audience really.
Just thought I'd add some more data points into the conversation.
Did you do analytics of which HN users actually signed up? Is it the ones that follow the Show HN twitter? ie. People highly targeted for signing up for trials of new products?
I would say your sample size is not nearly large enough to be conclusive. :)
True, this is way anecdotal. Believe me, if I could have gotten a bigger sample size, I would have! As it stands I was excited that I had at least two different traffic sources within the same order of magnitude to offer a semi-well-not-completely-unreasonable comparison.
I don't think /r/programming was the correct choice for this campaign. I would think that the web development subs and even the sysadmin subs would be a better place for this stuff.
Yes, but programming is where the hits are ... sysadmin and so on are fairly low in traffic in comparison (programming is almost 10x larger than sysadmin).
You have to dig fairly deep and piece together a lot of little subreddits to equal one /r/programming...
/r/programming doesn't get that specific into programming. I think it's mostly an aggregator of resources for beginners learning how to program. (a large percentage of the posts are questions like 'which language')
I think its possible that your product could have gone over many peoples heads, at least in that particular sub.
Have you looked into subreddits like r/webdevelopment or r/html5( or javascript,CSS)? They have less readers but maybe they're more your target?
I recently did a couple of tests with paid advertisement through buysellads. Actually it was not for a startup but for some affiliate link (Udemy courses with good discounts) and the result I got was very bad:
- a generic Udemy ad on a generic site: 10k impressions, 11 clicks, 0 conversion
- a specific course advertised on a niche newsletter: 1800 impressions, 15 clicks, 0 conversion
And for conversions I mean neither a sale nor a new signup into the system.
I'm currently (attempting to) use reddit advertising, and I'm quite confused by how it works. I purchased all of the available impressions for a given subreddit over the next 4 days, but I've yet to actually see my ad (or any other ad for that matter) displayed despite reddit indicating 800 impressions.
They may not be showing to you if you're signed in, because they don't want to charge you for an impression to yourself.
Also, depending on how many days have passed and the subreddit you've chosen, 800 impressions may be a very small number of overall pageviews, in which case only a small percentage of people will see the ad.
I eventually saw the ad while I was logged in. It appears that ads are only shown for a percentage of page impressions, so even if I purchase all of the available impressions, my ad won't be shown for all pageviews. I suppose this makes sense, I just wish they made it more clear.
My gut tells me that part of the reason why Reddit was a flop is AdBlock. I would not be surprises is much of r/programming ran it. These guys are tech savy without necessarily being in the start-up scene.
Numbers that low could be attributed to miss-clicks, users who thought it was an r/programming post.
vittore - ping us and maybe we can discuss? i'd like to hear more about your use case at least. You can hit us up at support at namecast dot net, or just log in, start your free trial and ping us via the support button.
And now, amusingly, they are on the front page with a post about the post. That's around 10k views, although the conversion rate to the namecast link at the start might be low it will still be lot more traffic than the original show HN post.
If your launch on HN fails to get any votes in the first 5-10 minutes, and you feel your post has significant merit for the community, your best course of action is to just delete the submission and try again.
I've never done it, but considering how random it is to get or not get just a first upvote from someone else (let alone the 5+ needed for front-page), I can't blame people.
HN still needs a vastly better way of separating the wheat from the chaff for new submissions, that involves the whole community, not just the few who occasionally look at "new".
I reckon they should make every submission appear as the last item on the front-page for 60 seconds. Essentially make that little slot an extension of "new".
I wouldn't do it, on the other hand it proves it's entirely luck what submissions make it to the front page. Your post can be pushed down and get no attention just because a bad dice roll.
I have posted before and got no attention, I started getting attention after I changed the title. Truth is, you got to make the title as attractive since that's all users are seeing here.
If the post was Show HN: "product name" then I wouldn't click it since I don't know if it'll be a waste of time.
Interestingly, a few startups have been putting "Show HN" in their titles even when it's especially unwarranted (i.e. a product that's been on the market a long time) for that Hacker News SEO.
Probably. My thinking is that the low CTR (click through rate) can be explained by poor targeting, but once you arrive to the landing page you should have a pretty good indication of whether you want to trial or not. The low number of conversions to trial just from reddit is a bit strange.
That said: any ideas for better subs to target? /r/sysadmin, /r/linux were some of the smaller ones i'd considered, or i could go wide with /r/technology, but this experiment has left me feeling cautious.
I've done a lot of PPC over the years and the one thing I learned over and over again is the best ROI always comes when you inject yourself into the end of the buying cycle. What I mean is, the closer to making a purchasing decision they are, the more likely they are to buy whatever product fits what they are looking for because they've already been educated about the problem, solution, etc.
In the affiliate marketing world, this is why review sites are so darn popular for making money. People go to them when they are making a buying decision and if they click on the product link after reading the review, it drops a cookie and in many cases they will buy that same session anyway.
Price comparison or deal sites are also kind of in the same end point of the buying cycle. The person has already decided to buy a particular item, so whoever can offer the best deal or whoever has the best bonus item/service/brand is going to probably make the sale.
By being on HN, there are probably a lot more people looking for your particular solution than just the average reddit reading programmer. There is some overlap, but I would imagine the average HN user is closer to a devops role than the average reddit programmer. If only cuz I'd imagine a lot of reddit programming readers are working on some enterprise software where they aren't allowed to touch the DNS anyway.
Also, good job on making a follow up post that did make it on HN. When life gives you lemons...