Reddit

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.

It's not just about it being open source, it's about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That's the only person you want running something like that.

And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.

Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don't understand why. It's beautiful.

That's stage 3 enshitification for you.

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?

Agree 100%. I’m a media director in a mid-size agency and saw similar results in a test campaign we did. Bounce rate was 97.1% on traffic coming from Reddit. It’s so high I wouldn’t put it past them if it was just bot traffic.

I clicked at least a few ads a week average on Reddit. All entirely on accident, closed them immediately. So, your numbers make perfect sense to me. Funny to think reddit charged someone near a dollar for that millisecond before I closed it...

(Yes, it’s brutally expensive. If you really hate ads, install AdNauseam. You will cost advertising companies thousands of dollars.)

Thank you for pointing this out.

So, love this stuff. It's been my career for nearly 20 years

Check out the engagement rate/bounce rate on those. I bet it's 15% engagement, tops (meaning 85% bounced). Probably as low as 5%

That's typical for ads like this. You're right that you're losing half your traffic (though I would pick sessions, not users, to see it a bit clearer. GA4 makes it more difficult but you should be able to create it).

What happens is users scroll, users accidentally click, and immediately hit back because, oh shit, they didn't want to click. Ad registers a click, browser window is closed before your gtag registers. I bet their own pixel doesn't even fire, if you have it on the site

Then the ones who don't close it in time, that's what you're seeing in reporting. When your bosses or the marketing team ask what those users did, you can confidently say, without looking, "nothing" and you will be right 99% of the time.

Now, we could argue that display ads are NOT for direct responses. They are to supplement other campaigns so your brand is freshwe when you do something better like paid search or emails. But if they want to charge by the click, it's still useless traffic.

Does Reddit offer CPA (cost per action)? Doubt it, since the sub-0.05% conversion rate means they'll get almost nothing, and they know it.

Also, look into Looker studio for these reports (free with GA), since GA4 sucks so bad right now. Hit me up with a PM if you haven't used it but want some free pointers or lesson (I have a FT job, I'm not scrounging for freelance work)

This is not unique to Reddit, either.

I started diving into YouTube advertising a few months ago, just as a tool for promoting a video of mine that I felt should have gotten more attention than the sub-thousand views it was stuck with. For the record, I don't try to force advertising on people that don't want it, and I was glad to achieve my 2k subscriber count to qualify for AdSense, just so that I can turn ads OFF on my videos. I have a stable full-time job and I feel like it's better to make my videos ad-free then to get whatever small amount of money YouTube is going to pay me for my hobby. If you want to use uBlock Origin to block YouTube ads, including my own, that's fine by me.

Anyway, my experience with Google Ads has been enlightening. First off, just to get clicks of any good quality is already expensive. I tried to be as inclusive as I could, but I have been fighting Average View Duration all the time. I want people clicking on the video that really want to see the video, not people who are confused about why they are there, whether it's in the wrong language, wrong set of search keywords, not the right device type for long-form videos, etc. So, I end up filtering down countries to ones with at least some amount of English-speakers, and aggressively trimming down keywords to just ones that are specific enough for the video content. Even then, I wished the Average View Duration was as high as some of my more organically-grown videos.

What's worse, and this is the point that is relevant to the OP, is that I can't match up Google Ads' click rate with my channel's video analytics, even though they are the same parent company! I can sort views by country in Google Ads, and it does not show the same set on the Geography tab in YouTube's video analytics, despite a view meaning the same thing in both platforms. For a time, it was consistently 30-50% less on video analytics, which is frustrating, because it makes it hard to figure out which countries have good AVD for the video and I wasn't sure if Google was just ripping me off on advertising costs.

Funny, I check it today and the problem is much less pronounced. I honestly think that recent advertising study lit a fire under Google to get them to fix problems like these. I wasn't using TrueView ads, but this might have been a side effect of that.

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.

What does this mean? Are ads being sent in Private Messages on Reddit?

This reinforces my belief that online advertising produces a lot of objective data ("how many times was my ad viewed? clicked?") but benefits from not being able to tie that to outcomes companies are actually interested in ("are the ads expanding business?").

A number of years ago I read an analysis on how some large social media site had changed the order of a few important buttons out of the blue. This was likely from A/B testing showing increased engagement, but it was probably just confused users clicking on it. I bet similar things happen all the time in ads, possibly inadvertently. If an A/B change shows increased ad clicks, it's unlikely not to be adopted, even if it's not intentional clicks.

Why are you suggesting everyone to use ad blockers and tools that would fuck with advertisers, when you yourself are an advertiser?

But honestly don't a LOT of companies intentionally place ads to maximize misclicks? I'm not saying that's ok and as a consumer just flipping annoying but it's definitely not specific to reddit.

On RIF it was easy to tell what was an ad and avoid it if I wanted. One of the many reasons I am not using the official app (and therefore the site) is because they make ads look just like normal posts. It does say promoted but you have to actually be looking for that or you won't notice it.

I think Reddit specific design app so that people misclick more often.

And how is this not fraud?

Interesting, I didn't know the prices vary by user group.

Which groups are the most expensive?

Bottom line: stop advertising and do us all a favor

What are those blurred lines? Do you see people's info when they visit your site/click from a reddit ad? If so, how much info do you get?