Experimenting with Paid Ads on X and Reddit: Here's What Happened

[bluesky68]

Hey everyone!

I'm on the challenging journey of promoting my new platform, WiseWriter , to reach my target audience. I've experimented with various strategies:

• Social Media (primarily X and Reddit)
• Online Directories (Great for traffic and sign-ups while featured on the homepage)
• Cold DMs on X (yielded some results but low response rate)
• SEO (Thanks to my SaaS being a content generator, I've auto-published hundreds of blog posts, though it's too early to see substantial results)
• Forums (Managed to attract some SEO forum users, but it's hard to reach many without significant investment)

After exploring these options and enhancing my platform (especially the landing page and onboarding process) based on user feedback, I decided to try paid advertising. I believed the best approach was to target X and Reddit, given their large SEO communities. I crafted a storytelling-style ad with engaging visuals and launched my campaigns.

Here's a breakdown of the results:

X

• 96,252 impressions
• 530 clicks
• 0.55% CTR (Click-Through Rate)
• €31 spent

Reddit

• 9,579 impressions
• 44 clicks
• 0.49% CTR
• €8.64 spent

These experiments ran for a few days and (less time for reddit), at first glance, the results aren't bad – 574 visits to a landing page is good news for a platform as young as mine, still struggling to generate daily organic traffic.However, I've noticed a few things:

• The number of clicks doesn't match the visit metrics on my platform (I use Plausible for tracking). I understand some users might have ad blockers, but the discrepancy (especially on Reddit) is significant.
• The duration of most 'visits' from these clicks is extremely short, typically 0-1 seconds. This makes me question the quality of traffic from these ads. Not everyone has to spend a minute reading the copy, but 1 second with a high bounce rate seems odd.

For comparison, the day my tool was featured on a directory homepage, I received around 200 visits and 30 sign-ups, with much higher average view times. With both ad campaigns combined, I only got 5 sign-ups, from users who haven't even tried the platform yet.

I'd love to hear from those who have successfully run ads on Reddit and X. Any insights on these results and how I might improve them?The campaigns were well-targeted on both platforms, aiming for an SEO-interested audience.

Looking forward to your advice and comments!

 

[theodoric]

@bluesky68 With many products coming in AI writing space, may be most people were simply clicking on the ad and checking how the site looks. But your site looks nice.

 

[bluesky68]

@theodoric Many thanks for the feedback! Yes, that could be a possibility, but it surprises me that they spend only 1 second on the website... they don't even have time to read the first line