This week I ran my first advertising campaign on reddit. The ad can be seen here.

I had intended to do this a few months ago, but I discovered that unlike reddit gold, you can't buy reddit ads with PayPal. So I had to get a credit card, and wait until I had some more money. In a way this delay was good, because it gave me time to refine my ideas, and also boosted the amount I had available to spend.

The campaign consisted of three days of untargeted advertising spread over the whole of reddit, at a cost of $100. This comprised 582,454 total ad impressions. I don't know whether the number includes ads blocked by adblock, or only counts those that were actually shown.

These resulted in 1,152 clickthroughs to /r/MensRights, amounting to a total of 0.198% of all impressions. The cost was 0.017 cents per impression and 8.7 cents per clickthrough.

So much for the raw numbers, which carry some certainty. Evaluating the impact of the ad requires a bit of guesswork.

The ad itself received 35 net upvotes and 115 comments. However, these numbers are pretty meaningless, since the ad was linked from both /r/MensRights and /r/SubredditDrama, which would have skewed both the voting and the comments. Most of the comments were in an argument subthread started by a troll. Still, there's no doubt the ad gained attention!

As for the main intent - to spread awareness of our subreddit - I consider it a mild success. 1,152 people clicked on the ad and saw /r/MensRights, many for the first time.

An unknown number subscribed as a direct consequence of seeing the ad. Of these, two posted comments that I later found. One had never heard of men's rights before, and the other had been an occasional reader who decided to subscribe and become a regular reader.

Usually, the number of subscribers is 10 -100 times the number of commenters, so I'm estimating from 2 to 200 new subscribers were brought in by the campaign. Additionally, I guesstimate there would have been around a thousand people who were previously unaware of the existence of our subreddit and who now know it is here.

The next experiment will probably involve targeting a specific subreddit with ads.

Edit: Another new subscriber has commented, saying he found our subreddit through the ad.