Reddit Ads Review

What is reddit ads?

reddit ads is reddit’s self-serve ad platform, providing advertisers with the tools they need to create campaigns to target the millions of people who use reddit everyday.

How easy is it to set up reddit ads?

Creating an account is very easy and only takes a couple of minutes. 

The onboarding is OK, but I felt it does rely on some past experience of using these type of ad dashboards (e.g. Google Ads).

reddit ads pixel

If you want to track more than just clicks on see how many people converted (either through a click or after an ad view) you will need to add the reddit pixel to your site. 

This can be done manually or through Google Tag Manager.

The pixel also give you the ability to create an ‘audience’ based on visitors interactions with your site for remarketing purposes.

reddit ads dashboard

The dashboard on the face of it looks quite sparse, but you have access to loads of different metrics to add/remove based on your requirements. 

Examples include:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Amount spent
• CTR
• CPC
• Click conversions
• View conversions
• CPA
• ROAS
• Vide views incl. % viewed
• App intalls

The account structure follows the tried and tested approach of Google and Facebook of campaign, ad group and ads.

• Campaign: Objectives (traffic, brand awareness, video views, app installs) and funding sources
• Ad group: Audience, location, devices, placements, budget
• Ads: Ad creative and destination URL

Targeting your Reddit ads

One of reddit ads’ strengths is the communities you can target, many of which are very specific and niche driven.

There are two ways of creating a target audience; interests and communities.

• Interests target the person based on content they’ve recently interacted with.
• Communities target Redditors who have recently interacted with or are subscribed to a community. Your ad targets the user in the community and will be displayed to the desired user throughout Reddit.

The communities targeting selection needs work in my opinion and is the weakest part of the whole experience. 

Rather than giving the communities in drop down trees to select, you have to start typing to then be shown suggestions. 

This is time consuming and not efficient.

Once you’ve made your selections the audience can be saved for future use.

Budget and bids

Compared to Google Ads, Facebook Ads and even Bing Ads, reddit ads CPC is really low. 

I’d recommend starting with $50 a day budget and $1 CPC bid. 

Using that combination, I’ve delivered hundreds of thousands of impressions with a CPC of around $0.80.

Ads and creative

Another frustrating experience is ad creation. 

The process for adding title, copy, creative and destination URL is all fine, but if you want to come back to the ad later, there’s no option to save. 

It is either live or deleted.

Performance

Ad performance is hugely dependent on how well you’ve set up your campaign targeting. 

Assuming that’s all been done well, the CTR% is comparable to any other banner ad. 

reddit ads is very much a brand building tool, so don’t expect a huge number of conversions.

Community and support

reddit ads has a good knowledge base to help with account set up and FAQs. You can contact their support team as well.

As you’d expect, there is a reddit ads community on reddit to ask questions and get help from fellow advertisers.

Final thoughts

reddit ads sits at the top of the marketing funnel and should be viewed as a brand awareness tool rather than a traffic or conversion tool. 

If your objective is to increase brand reach amongst a very specific audience, then reddit ads is worth testing out. 

If you want attributable/last click wins traffic and sales I would invest in Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Bing Ads.