Posted by Winslow

According to this reddit post Redditors are 78% more likely to click on ads that insult them. We decided to put the theory to the test.

Our baseline ad that uses typical "Reddit Language" such as "I made this" performed with a CTR of 0.272% and a CPC of $0.13 with 154 clicks from 56,720 impressions.

We then ran 3 insult ads with some creative help from /u/NondeterministSystem and /u/daymaker to create the following ads:
1) "You're not good enough to appreciate our gear!" - /u/NondeterministSystem (0.292% CTR)
2) "Why break the bank for something that will probably just taste like granddad's toilet hooch anyway?" - /u/daymaker (0.333% CTR)
3) "Hey Dumbo! Stop overpaying on homebrew supplies and equipment!" - /u/thebrewoutlet (0.343% CTR)

In total the insult ad campaign had a CTR of 0.323% and a CPC of $0.07 with a total of 35,923 impressions with 116 clicks.

The interesting part is when we start looking at Google Analytics of how the ad visitors interacted with our website. Campaign tags of rdwhahbcircle & rdwhahb are the baseline ads while insult is the insult campaign of the three ads previously mentioned. While the insult campaign had a higher CTR the bounce rate was higher and the conversion rate was lower than the baseline ads. My hypothesis for this is due to the culture of reddit those clicking an ad that utilizies "Reddit Language" are interested in seeing what other people built & created compared to an insult/sales ad would turn more people away if it isn't the product they are expecting or looking for.

Personally, a 0.05% improvement in CTR pales in comparasion to the 13% higher conversion rate of the baseline ads.