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 and target the millions of people who use Reddit everyday.

Here’s an example of a Reddit image ad in the wild…

How easy is it to set up Reddit ads?

Creating an account is very easy and only takes a couple of minutes to complete. The UI and campaign structure is very similar to Google Ads and LinkdedIn Ads, so if you’ve used them before, you’ll be able to pick it up very quickly.

Out of the box, Reddit comes with a good selection of pre-click and click based metrics to measure performance. 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. 

To find your pixel, open the left side menu and click ‘Events Manager’ and then ‘Set Up Reddit Pixel’. This can be applied to your website manually or through a Tag Manager. Read our guide on how to set up Google Tag Manager.

The pixel also give you the ability to create ‘audiences’ based on visitors’ interactions with your site, which is super useful for remarketing purposes. Read out guide on creating remarketing banners that work.

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, with Campaign > Ad Group > Ads. Here is a good way to structure your campaigns…

• 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

There are a number of ad formats you can pick from, each with there own pro’s and con’s. The most common type, and the easiest to set up,  are ‘image ads’ (the example used above).  

Here’s a breakdown of the various types:

• Free-form ads: With free-form ads, you can mix and match text, images, GIFs, videos.
• Image ads: Use a static image or graphic accompanied by relevant text. 
• Video ads: Run long and short-form videos alongside your copy.
• Carousel ads: Showcase multiple images or videos within a single, swipeable ad unit
• Conversation ads: Deliver an ad within a conversation thread, beneath the post and before the comments. 
• Product ads: Create ads directly from your product catalog and dynamically serve them to reach redditors.

I find ad creation frustrating on Reddit and it is another area I would like to see improved. 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. This makes planning ahead and having campaigns ready to go at the flick of a switch almost impossible!

Reddit Ads 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 from their traditional display ads.

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. It is currently a private community, and only approved members can view and contribute.

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 or Facebook Ads.