Here's How Reddit F**ks Advertisers - Lemmy

There’s been a few people who commented this in the past, but as an advertiser on Reddit, I want to share the numbers I see. First, there’s a few things to understand in the world of advertising: * Cost Per Impression - Usually shown as a cost per 1000 impressions, this is how much it costs to run a regular ad * Cost Per Click - This is a different type of ad where you only pay for who clicks. It’s also the reason sometimes you see really bad ads - They’re only paying per click, so they want the most gullible customers * Analytics - I can watch who comes to my website and what they do. I can actually watch a lot more info than that, but it’s all I need to run my businesses * Organic User - Someone who came to my website without an ad PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/] - Chrome [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm]. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source. Now, with those things in mind, I pay for Cost Per Click, and I target a more expensive user group. In the ad I’m about to show you (picked at random, but it’s within ±20% of most my ads), it costs me an average of $0.82 every time someone clicks my ad: [https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/4c7fdca1-975e-4d99-a96a-b0a1be78733a.png] (Yes, it’s brutally expensive. If you really hate ads, install AdNauseam [https://adnauseam.io/]. You will cost advertising companies thousands of dollars.) But okay that’s fine, because roughly 2,000 people went to my site, right? Lets see what they did when they went there [https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/77829d23-f94e-4650-9a89-62b91ea1ca87.png] See - There’s something interesting about this, and it’s less apparent in other advertising networks. You see while Reddit charged me 1,600$ for 2,000 users, my own analytics show only 1,142 people came to my site in the same time window - and that number also includes my organic users, by the way. So what happened to almost 50% of the users I paid for? Some people accuse Reddit of inflating the numbers, but that’s illegal, and there’s a much simpler explanation. Reddit’s PMs and are deliberately designing ad placement to maximize clicks (and get more money). What they don’t realize, is they’ve made everyone miss-click on ads, so both users and advertisers miss out. In fact, that miss-clicking part is trivial to prove. Guess when I ran advertising campaigns on Reddit? [https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/6bf546bc-48ac-4cc5-baba-0f155f3e6ee0.png] Anyways, that’s all for now.