#I have two (2) interests and zero (0) hecks about how niche the audience for this post is

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BackgroundASCII Prints is an emoji print/poster business. It was launched 2 years ago by Moritz and Martin. They launched on Product Hunt and did $1,200 in revenue in the first month. Upon realizing they didn't know run a marketing strategy, they moved on to other projects and they more/less shut it down.Fast forward to a couple months ago. I'm in the process of testing a hypothesis about micro private equity (see previous post). I reached out to acquire the business but we settled on a partnership. I take over all expenses and marketing in exchange for a controlling share of the business.Deciding where to startI quickly put together a Trello board filled with ideas. Here are just a few:re-engage with our mailing listsending free posters to nerd culture influencersReddit/Facebook/Pinterest Adspost to startup directories: BetaList, ProductHunt, etc.setup other stores: Amazon, Etsy, etc.Paid ads were an easy place to start. I work full time and have very little spare time. Since our posters are squarely in the nerdy/geeky home decor niche, Reddit seemed like a great place to start.ProcessI didn't want to waste time so I created the ad in probably 30 minutes. Just a screenshot of the homepage to convey the product, idea, etc.https://www.dropbox.com/s/m01fxo0w7yg1w9t/Screen%20Shot%202018-10-02%20at%208.34.16%20AM.png?dl=0I chose the following categories based on my gut. I felt like at least some portion of users in each of these categories might be a potential customer:Interior & LandscapeDesignReddit MetaVideo GamingPC GamesCollege EducationComputingProgrammingI initially set the ad to run for 30 days. Obviously I only ran it for 14 days. More on that to follow.I didn't want to spend a fortune so I capped the daily spend at $10/day and the CPM bid at $2.Then I hit Go and waited for my ad to be approved.OpsOur ad was approved and started running on 10/3 and immediately I started plugging the metrics into some very basic formulas. With ~$10 of margin, and looking at an initial CPC (Cost per click) of $0.51, doing some basic division ($10/$0.51) told me that we had to make a sale every 19 clicks on the ad. That's an overall conversion rate of ~5.3%. I'm no marketing guru but that seemed excessively high. The ad ran for 4 days uninterrupted before I decided to make some tweaks.Clicking around Reddit and viewing some other ads, I realized my ad had far too much copy and wasn't very good. Why would it be? I created it in a few minutes! I quickly swapped out the image for one that showed the product in context, mounted above a desk.https://www.dropbox.com/s/py7mt2mcr56bfjv/Screen%20Shot%202018-10-05%20at%209.26.34%20PM.png?dl=0This improved the performance of the CPC metric...I was able to drive it down to $0.42. The lower you can get this number, the more "chances" you get to make a sale. I let this version of the ad run for 7 days before I discovered the Interest breakdown option in the Reddit Ads Dashboard. From this view, I identified that the College Education category wasn't performing as well as the other categories. So, I removed it.The ad ran for another 5 days before I checked back in and noticed that the Interior & Landscape and Design categories had the poorest click through rates. By editing the ad once again and removing them, I was able to drive the CPC down to $0.38 and the CTR up to 0.517%Googling around confirmed that my CTR and CPC were pretty much in line with how other ads had performed.Just shy of two weeks into the Campaign I made the decision to cut the Ad time in half and halt it at 14 days. Why? Read on, my friend.ResultsSo what were the results from all this nerdy traffic I was directing at our store?Zilch. Zero. Nada. Not a single sale.https://www.dropbox.com/s/my6np86tzkl16po/Screen%20Shot%202018-10-24%20at%209.58.32%20PM.png?dl=0In fact, in terms of traffic, we only drove 60 users to the site from our ad.THIS is why I opted to halt my Reddit Ad experiment early.Here are the final resultshttps://www.dropbox.com/s/2fhznuegxhxg8is/Screen%20Shot%202018-10-21%20at%2010.01.19%20AM.png?dl=0Our best performing category was the Programming category with a CTR of 1.16% and a CPC of $0.17.LearningsSo what are the take-aways. I have a few but again, I'm no marketing guru. I'm just trying stuff out.First take-away. I'm a total fucking amateur. I wasn't even using the tools correctly. I should have created separate Ad Groups and Ads to A/B test a whole bunch of Ad varieties. But I was lazy and not particularly interested in getting overly sophisticated or sinking $1k into this endeavor.Second, based on my research, my ad was running similar metrics to other users. I suspect you have to spend 6+ months tweaking copy, targeting, A/B testing, etc. to really optimize your campaign. In my defense, not a single user converted to a sale. Based on my early results, I had ZERO indication that anyone was going to convert. I could have spent 6 months on this project, optimized the heck out of every dimension, double conversion rates, and still never sold a single print.Which leads me to the third, and largest, lesson: Something is off. Either we haven't quite honed in on the target audience, and/or our potential customers are not in a buying mood while browsing Reddit, and/or the ad was simply terrible, and/or our website copy is terrible. It's possible a video ad would have performed better, but again, see above: doubling the Ad CTR drives no sales if the CTR on the website is 0%.And finally, no retargeting. I've seen some much better marketers suggest that it takes 7 touch points to get someone to buy. The reality is that when people click your ad, they aren't necessarily in a buying mood. One downside to Reddit Ads is that there is no retargeting, at least not as far as I can tell. The Ad might follow the user to another subreddit but doesn't follow them outside Reddit. Had I known this ahead of time, I might have opted to try this experiment inside Facebook instead, allows you to make heavy use of retargeting.What's NextSo, where do we go from here? I'm not making any bold claims about the efficacy of Reddit Ads. Take everything I say with a grain of salt. I'm obviously an amateur that invested very little time. But what little time I did invest, I just didn't see results that appeared to scale. That being said, we ARE going to take a look at our copy on the site and see if there are improvements to be made. Down the road it may make sense to revisit Reddit Ads and limit our targeting to our best performing category (Programming) but I suspect the better traffic will come from organic sources. At the moment, I'm more interest in Ad platforms that support retargeting.We've recently created a Pinterest account and I've started actively engaging with the community there. Five minutes of searching and I realized that our prints fall squarely into the "minimalist" camp, so that's a niche I'm starting to explore.We've also setup an Etsy store where there is a ton of organic search activity. I'm also researching setting up an Amazon store as well. All in hopes of getting our product in front of potential customers. Hopefully organic sales start trickling in.Finally, the experiment I'm most excited about is reaching back out to our 50+ person mailing list with updates on new designs, etc.Thanks for following along everyone and stay tuned for write-ups as things develop.