(Note: This is copy-pasted from a post I made originally on WebFictionGuide, and realized it might be of some value to the local Guild. While the content herein was intended to be specific to the WebSerial author community, I trust and hope it will be of use to my fellow guild members. Please comment and reply if you have any of your own statistics to add and compare re: Marketing on Reddit.)
budget spent imps purchased imps delivered cpm clicks ctr cpc
$10.00 $2.01 10,000 2,011 $1.00 6 0.298 $0.34
Here’s what my marketing campaign on “From Winter’s Ashes” looks like on Reddit right now. I’m currently advertising in /r/Fantasy, and I’m at 20% of the campaign budget’s run. I decided to see what gambling a modest $10.00 would look like advertising this way, and here’s my results.
For those who don’t speak SEO:
Budget: The total budget of the advertising campaign.)
Spent: The amount spent to date.
imps purchased: Impressions Purchased. Every display of my ad to a person, successful or not (adblockers, etc.), is tallied here.
imps delivered: Impressions Delivered. How many times was my ad served to readers? (Successfully or not.)
cpm: Cost per thousand impressions. How much I’m paying per impression, by the thousand.
clicks: How many people actually clicked that link and visited my site?
ctr: Click-through-rate: What percentage of impressions resulted in a click on the ad, in %?
cpc: Cost-per-click. How much money am I spending per person actually visiting my site due to ads?
Background: In a past career, market research and development was one of my jobs. I’ve done statistical and strategic market analysis for a few organizations, as part of their research and marketing campaigns.
/r/Fantasy has just shy of 82k subscribers as of today, with a daily peak user count at any given time of approximately 350-450.
A $10.00 represents a very modest advertisement campaign, a ‘tester’ to determine the cost effectiveness of the effort.
Setting up the advertisement took approximately 10 minutes. In most markets on Reddit, one cannot instantly advertise. The advertisement for From Winter’s Ashes had a lead-in time of approximately 28 days after acceptance.
Analysis: Reddit provides modest return on investment in efficacy. Despite a highly targeted audience, the very high technical base of Reddit users coupled with the age demographics of the site means that an anticipated 12-40% of users by demographic will have adblocker software installed.
The inventory of advertisement for a given subreddit of /r/Fantasy’s size appears to be between 4 and 8 rotated advertisements at any given time.
In 12 days running, the promotion has generated 2000 impressions, that represents approximately 167 impressions displayed a day, with a click given once every few days.
Click-through rating is entirely middle of the road: Managing major Google advertising and Yellow Pages Online advertising, the realistic target of any online display ad campaign is %0.2-%0.4 percent. (Anyone who offers you greater than a 2% CTR rating is LYYYYYING, or obfuscating that they’re talking about Search advertising, not Display.)
Reddit’s reasonably consistent around the 0.3% mark, which puts them at middle of the pack for what I’d expect on a targeted display ad campaign.
Cost Per Click is ultimately my most important metric in this equation. At $0.34 per (actual human?*) viewer, and with a conversion rate of about 12% overall from landing on chapter 1.0 to reading through all of chapter 1.3 in a sitting, the cost per actual dedicated human reader to me is approximately $2.83.
For those of you good folks making real money from your webserials and are willing to talk turkey, what’s your conversion rate from First chapter through fourth, and what percentile of your readership monthly contributes money via Patreon and/or PayPal?
Updated a while later:
budget spent imps purchased imps delivered cpm clicks ctr cpc
$10.00 $4.24 10,000 4,242 $1.00 12 0.283 $0.35
A quick update on the numbers, as I hit the 40% point in the campaign: Not much change, still middle-of-the-road.