Are you looking for a new advertising platform? Interested in advertising on Reddit? Well, then let’s get started!
Actually, it’s quite easy to set up a campaign on Reddit, especially if you already have experiences on Facebook or Google ad accounts. Reddit’s ad platform is similar to others with less complexity and features. Here are the steps to create Reddit Ads Campaign from scratch;
- Log in to your ads.reddit.com account.
- From the Ads Manager, click the + Create Campaign button in the upper-left corner.
- Name your campaign (something easy to spot later, up to 200 characters).
- Confirm funding (how you’ll pay for these ads). Reddit ads only accepts credit or debit card as a payment options. Check out Payment Methods article if you are having troubles.
- Choose a campaign objective, once you save your objective, you won’t be able to change it, your ultimate goal here:
| Objective | Optimized for | Post types available | You bid on/ Pay for |
| Brand Awareness and Reach | Brand or product awareness | TextLink (can include image)VideoGallery | Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) |
| Traffic | Traffic driven to your website | Link (can include image)VideoGallery | Cost per click (CPC) |
| Conversions | Valuable actions taken on your website | Link (can include image)VideoGallery | Cost per click (CPC) |
| Video Views | Increased views of your video | Video | Cost per view (CPV) |
| App Installs | Mobile app installs drivenNotes: Will only serve on native mobileAndroid and iOS platforms will need to be broken out as separate ad groups | Link (can include image)VideoGallery | Cost per click (CPC) |
Learn more about Ad Unit and Specifications
What is the best campaign structure for Reddit Ads?
Similar to other ad platforms, the campaign structure breakdown into 3 levels;
- Campaign: Your house where all your ad groups and ads live. One of the difference here is not having budget option on campaign level. You need to set budgets only on adgroups.
- Ad groups: Rooms to store your ads and keep them organized for easy management and monitoring
- Ads: Your brand’s crew, standing by to start a conversation with the right redditors
If you separate your campaigns (break them up and make them more specific), you’ll have a better understanding of your campaign’s performance across your different targeting buckets. Because Reddit Ads follows a second-price auction model, you can also try out different bids for each segmented campaign. The top bid for a given targeting set will end up clearing on the second highest bid plus $0.01.
I’d recommend you to start to segment the campaigns by Device (desktop vs. mobile) Objective (traffic vs. conversion etc.) and Placements (Feed vs. Conversations) as these segments have specific features, characters limits, performance and cost which you can easily differentiate the targeting when you’ll continue to create the adgroups and ads.
Obviously, you can also segment the ad structure by Audience types (remarketing vs. custom Audiences) and then Targeting (interest vs. communities) Additionally, you can go for more detailed campaigns by segmenting them Countries. Btw, only USA targeting can go deeper targeting by state or cities. In that case you’ll have better understanding each type of targeted segment lists. You just need to be careful not to narrow the audience list or budget too low. Do not worry for the number of campaigns, even there is no Editor software for Reddit Ads, you can still use template file to make any bulk changes later on.
There are several option to select targeted audiences, including pixel data for remarketing and Reddit users based on interest or users who interacted with or are subscribed to a communities.
When you just created your campaign it’s recommended to start with interest targeting. If you’re using community targeting, aim to target at least 15 separate communities per ad group for the best results, Reddit focusses on niche communities (also known as subreddits), find the most suitable ones for your products or service.
What is Second-Price Auction?
Second-Price auction is a type of auction model in advertising where the highest bidder wins but only pays the price equal to the second-highest bid plus one cent. For example; if Advertiser A bids $1.50 and Advertiser B bids $2, Advertiser B would win but would only pay $1.51. On the other hand, First price auction is a model wherein the buyer pays exactly the price they’ve bid on any given advertising impression.
The same method is also common for auction based listings and classified platforms. In that case, it’s crucial to set a limit that you are willing to pay for an ad or item.
Essentially, when placing a bid, your bid represents the greatest amount you’re willing to pay for the ad. Bidding your true value is the dominant strategy in second price auctions. Any deviation from the true value would not increase the advertiser’s payoff. In the case that the second highest advertiser has the choice of increasing their bid and they decide to do so, their new bid would surpass their initial bid. If they so happen to win, the advertiser/bidder would end up paying more than their original value, decreasing their payoff.
How to implement Reddit Ads Pixel Code?
If you are planning to run “Conversion” based campaigns, you need to Set Up Reddit Pixel on your website. You can implement it manually or via Tag Manager which is the simplest way, here are the steps;
- Log in to your Google Tag Manager account
- Select the Workspace for your website
- Select Templates, from the menu
- Under Tag Templates, select Search Gallery
- Choose Reddit Pixel from the list of tag templates
- Select Add to workspace
- Copy your Advertiser ID (find it on your account)
- Select Tags from the menu, then select New
- Under Tag Configuration select Reddit Pixel
- Paste your Advertiser ID into the Advertiser ID field
- Select the events you want to track
- Select event triggers (when the pixel should fire, turning an action on your site into a conversion event).
Repeat these steps to configure events and triggers for each page you want to track conversions on. Depends on your goals, you can add Reddit Tag for pageview, addtocart, purchase conversions
Test your tracking pixel before launching a campaign.
Third-party trackers allow you to track data on impressions and clicks, and validate delivery, using a third-party vendor we work with.
Where Reddit Ads will be shown?
There are 2 main product to show Reddit ads: Auction Products which is self-serve type available for all advertisers with an ad account and Takeover Products aim to maximize the reach that requires to contact the sales to use this placement.
Auction Products placement also includes 2 options; Feed – show your ads to users who are browsing their Home and Popular feeds, as well as individual community feeds or within a Conversation thread – which show your ads to users who are engaging with others about a specific post. The ad will appear in a fixed location between the post and the first comment.
Both feed and conversation placements can be effective based on your campaign goal, still there are limitations depends on ad types, so I’d recommend to create separate ad groups/campaigns to test for your ads. Hence, if you’ll enable “allow comments” option, conversation placement might be more efficient to get feedback from users.
How much bid and budget should I set?
Obviously, it depends on your strategy, limits and expected goals. It’s recommended to start with $2K or equivalent amount at least for 4 weeks campaigns to let the system reach the optimum learning phase and get more relevant results. By the way, if you are planning to run short-term campaigns, better to use “lifetime budget” instead of daily budget.
And as mentioned before, you shouldn’t set whole/even numbers $1,50 or $1,00 for bidding, but $1,51 or $1,01 etc. in order to beat other advertisers and get better results within a Second-Price Auction methodology. If you not sure with optimum bid amount, I recommend you to set a bid much higher than average at the beginning. In that case, you are able to scale up the reach and easily analysis the segmented audiences. And as you will only pay $0.01 more than other advertiser, you can decrease the bid in time.
The estimate feature is also suggest you a minimum budget based on your selection and end-date of campaigns. You should follow these estimations and increase the budget accordingly with the performance.
What Are the Different Types of Reddit Ads?
Reddit offers advertisers different ad types under 2 category: Promoted Posts which includes “Image, Video and Carousel” ad types, Premium Takeover packages includes “trending tilea, rich media banners, video spotlight” ad types
Therefore, once you’ve made a post from the account you have already logged in to ad account, it’s possible to search it by post id and use it for ads. Select a post from existing posts or create a new ad.
I’d suggest you to test minimum 3 different type of ads using alternative assets and ad texts to find out the most relevant and appealing one for Reddit users.
Review and submit your Ad
And just like that, we’re almost there! One last check:
- Click the Review button at the bottom of the page.
- From the Review Page, scan your campaign, ad group, and ads, and click Edit in blue — next to the relevant section — in order to make any last-minute changes.
- When you’re good and ready, click Submit.
Keep in mind:
- Before an ad can go live, a human on the Reddit team has to review it.
- Ad review can take up to 48 hours.
- Ads submitted for review over the weekend will be reviewed the following Monday.
- Depending on the content of the ad, the review process might take a little longer. Ads that are set to “run continuously starting today” will start running as soon as they are approved.
Is Reddit Ad Traffic Fake & Bots?
After testing several type of campaigns, I can confidently tell that Reddit traffic is one of the highest doubtful paid social source comparing to the competitors. There are many discussions on Reddit and related forums that share same inferences. And these opinions are not only related by choosing wrong type of campaigns, assets or targeting the company does not provide any tangible explanation other than sharing a simple FAQ page link.
Here is one of my campaign during the sale period of an ecom client:
The ad account was created in a cooperation with Reddit account manager, Reddit pixel was tested and verified with a smooth implementation. The campaigns were segmented to mobile and desktop at campaign level, also divided by audience (not expanded only related audience and subreddits), country (mostly tier1 major ones), placement at adgroup levels, added 4 different ads to each ad groups. We had active campaigns on several other platforms and obviously the end results as sales, was much higher with that amount of cost. Even at some level discrepancies might be acceptable -especially for traffic campaigns-, still we were “not” able to track most of these traffic or pixel events on client side.
So, I strongly suggest on making on your own test with relatively an expendable budget and try various assets that tailored to this platform.
Advertising on Reddit: Worth it?
Based on my experience Reddit campaigns are quite easy to set up at simple level, but give headache when you try to expand and/or segment into detailed targeting. The duplicate option may be useful to re-use the previous settings, therefore it limits to make new changes at new duplicated campaigns, like you are not able to select desktop targeting if duplication was only for mobile targeting. So, it takes quite a time to create sub campaigns and adgroups which lets you to quit on at a point. Feel free to have a look to Best Practices for Reddit Ads.
I’ve also experienced that size audience estimations and bid scale predictions are either too ambiguous or misguided which lets you just to expand your audience lists to spend your budget on broader userbase, ends up unpredictable total cost at the initial plan.
Even it might be considered as a part of paid social ads vertical, Reddit campaigns results are far behind than Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter in term of reach, landing page, conversion or any performance based KPIs. And depends on your targeting and campaign structure, the costs may be lower than other platforms as there are less competitiveness. Therefore, it’s obvious that you shouldn’t use the same strategy or even same asset/messaging that you used on other platforms. If you are seeking on cheap traffic or efficient sale campaigns, better to skip Reddit Ads. Reddit ads may be “only” successful with finding a viral Reddit post. It’s better to create an ad that share a message (not only Sale XX% OFF etc.) to drive conversation and engagement among Redditors.
At last, whether advertising on Reddit is worth it for a particular business or individual will depend on a variety of factors, including the nature of the business, the target audience, and the specific goals of the advertising campaign. if your business suits to that social platform and related content preparation, and you believe your audience mostly consume Reddit forums, sure it’s worth to advertise on Reddit.
Bonus Tips
- Start with creating a business profile. And you need to change your account to SFW before you can advertise
- The username will appear on the ads you create and all users will be able to see it. So, use a company username
- Your avatar will also appear on your ads alongside your username, redditors will click to see your profile. So, update your profile sections including Avatar and banner image
- Reddit user like to read and engage, create ads look like a native post that they can comment and discuss even share it.
- Allow comments on Reddit post (The default is “off”) so viewers can engage with your post in conversation with you and one another.