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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.