Discord Advertisements

[Lotus123]

Hey there,

Recently, I just released my new community and I’ve been experimenting in all sorts to figure out how to advertise the site and get people to here about it. Turns out, so far one of my most effective methods to get some people on a site which is completely empty is Discord!

If you aren’t familiar with Discord, it’s a relatively newer messaging platform aimed to topple Skype (and has successfully done so marketshare wise). Within there, there are many communities/servers for users to join, so whatever may be your niche or interest might be out there! I wouldn’t say it is as niche based as Reddit, however, it does get pretty close.

I’ve found that Discord server owners between 200-2000 users are more than willing to give a site a shoutout on their official channels for anything between $5-25. I would say it’s quite well worth it, getting quite a few clicks almost immediately on announcement, whilst later on still gaining passive clicks. What’s even better, advertising in servers which are focused in your relevant niche allows you to target your audience effectively!

Has anyone else tried out Discord? How has it fared for you? I’m still trying to figure out how to grow my site, so it’d be great if you guys have any tips yourself!

[Vanucci]

I use discord for other means and i also manage several. From my findings is that discord does replace the need for websites that contain discussions so its a bit of a knife edge

[Joel R]

On 7/18/2019 at 12:47 AM, Lotus123 said:

Hey there,

Recently, I just released my new community and I’ve been experimenting in all sorts to figure out how to advertise the site and get people to here about it. Turns out, so far one of my most effective methods to get some people on a site which is completely empty is Discord!

If you aren’t familiar with Discord, it’s a relatively newer messaging platform aimed to topple Skype (and has successfully done so marketshare wise). Within there, there are many communities/servers for users to join, so whatever may be your niche or interest might be out there! I wouldn’t say it is as niche based as Reddit, however, it does get pretty close.

I’ve found that Discord server owners between 200-2000 users are more than willing to give a site a shoutout on their official channels for anything between $5-25. I would say it’s quite well worth it, getting quite a few clicks almost immediately on announcement, whilst later on still gaining passive clicks. What’s even better, advertising in servers which are focused in your relevant niche allows you to target your audience effectively!

Has anyone else tried out Discord? How has it fared for you? I’m still trying to figure out how to grow my site, so it’d be great if you guys have any tips yourself!

Thanks for sharing! 

The question that I have for you is: how many of these users actually stay on your site, and engage 30 days after? 

The idea of promotion on discord servers is good.  But I'm genuinely curious what your engagement pull-through rate is.  I've thought about doing similar shout-outs with partners on various social media sites, but the fear that I have is those users won't make my community a core part of their online experience.  Discord is a chat platform, and fundamentally those users won't be interested in your platform (unless you offer compelling content or an experience that they can't get anywhere else).  But apples for apples, I've seen both firsthand - and heard other forum admins consistently state - that social media users strongly prefer social media, and forum users strongly prefer forums.  There's not a lot of cross migration.  

That doesn't mean it's true for everyone, so I'd be curious to see what your follow-up engagement would be in 30-60-90 days from those users and if you see sustained engagement.  

[Lotus123]

4 hours ago, Joel R said:

Thanks for sharing! 

The question that I have for you is: how many of these users actually stay on your site, and engage 30 days after? 

The idea of promotion on discord servers is good.  But I'm genuinely curious what your engagement pull-through rate is.  I've thought about doing similar shout-outs with partners on various social media sites, but the fear that I have is those users won't make my community a core part of their online experience.  Discord is a chat platform, and fundamentally those users won't be interested in your platform (unless you offer compelling content or an experience that they can't get anywhere else).  But apples for apples, I've seen both firsthand - and heard other forum admins consistently state - that social media users strongly prefer social media, and forum users strongly prefer forums.  There's not a lot of cross migration.  

That doesn't mean it's true for everyone, so I'd be curious to see what your follow-up engagement would be in 30-60-90 days from those users and if you see sustained engagement.  

Given more time working with certain ad platforms and Discord, I believe the platform holds merit to some niches and communities.

Discord is a heavily gamified platform, with a younger demographic attached to it. That may not work for older, more mature communities, however, for communities with younger audiences, you may see some benefit from it. It all depends on who you're targeting.

Discord servers are each their own little community, focused on a specific niche or role. If you can find a Discord server which has the same niche as what your community may be aimed at, you would be in a fairly good spot. After that, it's up to your negotiation skills on how much you pay for a shoutout (some owners, if they really like your goals which occurred a couple times for me, may do it for free or even make a brand new channel of discussion to openly promote it). Typically, you don't need to pay much since these server owners usually never expect to be paid for a shoutout at little disadvantage for them, but it is still finicky dealing with individual people and convincing them to advertise in their community. 

This is simply just targeted advertising at communities you think will resonate with your platform. It's up to you on what Discord servers you choose.

In this case, I'm not sure if it is fair to compare retention rates from this standpoint. That is fully dependent on how appealing and attractive your community is to a user. Advertising leads nowhere if the product itself is of no value, and I don't believe my statistics will offer much insight as we're still at the egg and chicken problem stage. It is incredibly difficult to get people to join an empty community and results will always vary depending on the activity of your forum.

Personally, I don't see many conversions, but that in my eyes is due to us just starting off for the aforementioned reasons and I see not much difference in comparison to other ad platforms, such as Google. But my existing core community who are heavily of support of my forum, interacts with me regularly and chat the most come from Discord. I can tell, because I see their names in Discord servers I've worked with. Google ads, not so much. Discord communities know what a community is and is more open to the idea. A random person from Google may not even understand how a community works. A forum may just be technical jargon to them.

On that note, however, from a CPC standpoint, it's fairly good. For $25 (honestly, you could barter this even lower, I'm pretty bad at this), I could get a ping shoutout with a little description to everyone in 1000-2000 member Discord servers and I can safely say plenty of people do click on those links and give it a look. Unfortunately, I cannot provide direct statistics because I am a bit of a dunce and did not put any tracking links in our URLs (nor do I think it would've been as appealing for casual users to click on since we can't format and hide tracking links in Discord), however, as a rough ballpark estimate I got around 300 clicks from $110 of advertising over the course of 7 days. That's a CPC of around $0.36 which is immensely better than what Google offers me in the competitive market having CPC's in the range of $0.6-1.2. The ads still remain in those servers and still garner a few clicks when their communities also grow, working passively past that 7 day guesstimate.

The only disadvantage is simply you can't advertise for long. In my case, I ran out of relevant Discord servers to potentially approach after less than a week as there isn't an endless supply of communities. 

Again, this is dependent on your niche and product. If people aren't interested in what you are offering, they won't even click on your link. I personally believe that the niche I'm targeting does favor people switching to a new platform and therefore I may be seeing more favorable results than others.

Currently, I've been looking into Reddit advertising and I am fairly optimistic on results. Still haven't deployed it yet. Reddit is quite good at targeting specific people as each subreddit brings together people around a certain interest or topic. It's similar as to Discord in terms of having mini communities floating about, but I would believe Reddit to consist of an older, more mature audience in contrast to Discord's younger demographic. I believe my demographic is more in line with Reddit and I'm going to give that a go soon.
Reddit understands their advertising capabilities and has a dedicated ad manager to make advertising less laborious in comparison to manually negotiating with every Discord owner you wish work with.

To conclude, it's up to who you wish to target ads at. Hopefully that gives you guys a bit more insight towards the situation.