If you can’t read that, I will summarize:

I spent $40, got 140 clicks ($.29 cents per click) at a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) of $1.47

Reddit actually gave me 1,278 extra impressions (between 6–7 extra clicks: Thanks!)

My click through rate of .513 (read as 1 click per 195 impressions) is actually better than I thought it was going to be.

The stats from Reddit were pretty good.

Here is the downside:

Those 140 “clicks” only registered as 60 clicks on my site!

Taken from my Shopify stats page

I’ve worked in the digital marketing quite a while now. I get that there is generally a discrepancy between what two parties see in their reports.

But this discrepancy is more that 50% over-reported (or under-reported depending on who you want to blame). And I get it, sometimes someone will click and not wait for the page to load. I will give away 20 clicks going to that reason. That would still put me at half of the clicks not being registered by my landing page.

60 clicks makes a huge difference to a small business like mine. My conversion of similar traffic sources purchasing something on my site is about 1%. That means I would get one sale per 100 clicks. At 60 clicks, zero sales, at 140 clicks 1.4 sales!

If one sale on my site = $55 (current Lifetime Value of a Chivaz customer) then I would pay $40 to get a $55 sale. If I get .6 sales (which was zero in this case) then it isn’t worth it.

I don’t get a lot of traffic on my site and every

So I wrote to Reddit and asked them why:

and this is what I got:

Maybe it was because I included screenshots or maybe they had a full inbox?Apparently so, because the next time I wrote, I didn’t include an attachment and to my surprise, they responded within five hours.

Here is what they said:

Thanks for your email. Here are a few things that may help A decent number of our users use Ghostery, Noscript, and other things that won’t let them be tracked by Google Analytics. GA relies on sampling data so what GA reports and what we report isn’t exactly one-to-one. It’s possible that users went to your landing page, then immediately clicked the back button, so they spent very little time on your landing page. But our system still counts this as a click. GA doesn’t necessarily count this as a click.

Customer service was nice and responsive and even said they would look into further. Hey, that’s great, but that lack of clear information makes it difficult to understand what is really going on. Should I just “trust” the Reddit numbers? I guess that’s up to me because there is no other option.

IN THE END, I DON’T BLAME REDDIT:

This was a good learning experience. I was so excited to try out this advertising, that I just set it up without thinking too much about it.

I made a few mistakes: