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 - Chrome. 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 $0.82 every time someone clicks my ad:
(Yes, it’s brutally expensive. If you really hate ads, install AdNauseam. You will cost advertising companies thousands of dollars.)
But okay that’s fine, because roughly 2,000 people went to my site, right? Lets see what they did when they went there
See - There’s something interesting about this, and it’s less apparent in other advertising networks. You see while Reddit charged me 1,600$ 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?
Anyways, that’s all for now. Reddit doesn’t only screw over their users, but their advertisers as well.
So users are mis-clicking on an ad and immediately closing their browser so it registers as a “click” on Reddit but not google analytics?
It’s not registering as a click anywhere but Reddit, because half the users are clicking Back before their browser loads, and a quarter are clicking Back within a second of the page appearing.
This happens in all advertising networks, but not to the rate of Reddit
Yeah, back before I used uBlock, when I would missclick and see it’s loading an alb.reddit.com url, I would immediately hit the back button before it has time to redirect me to the ad.
As someone who uses Reddit on devices that don’t always have ublock, this is exactly what happens.
That should show under bounce rate though, right? I can’t imagine a user being able to click ‘back’ before an http request gets sent to the analytics server
Doesn’t the AdNauseam you mentioned also cause site visits that look like this in the statistics? I think it’s also safe to assume that Reddit users use an extension like that more than people in any other mainstream social media.