Curious about leveraging Reddit for advertising? This guide explains how to use Reddit Ads effectively, reach niche communities, and optimise your campaigns.
What are Reddit Ads?
As referenced in Reddit Business page, ‘Reddit Ads allow your brand to reach an audience of 365.4 million weekly active uniques, who are having genuine conversations on millions of topics’. These ads are paid promotional content designed to connect brands with highly engaged communities.
On Reddit, discussions are organised within subreddits, which are user-created communities focused on specific topics or interests. These allow advertisers to target niche audiences with a common passions, ensuring their content appears in highly relevant contexts. Submissions with more upvotes rise to the top of the subreddit, gaining visibility and fostering further interaction. This unique community-based structure makes Reddit a valuable platform for promoting products and sparking genuine conversations about your brand.
How to set up a Reddit Ads campaign
1. Create a Reddit Ads Account
This is required to start advertising on Reddit’s platform. The setup is straightforward, but if you need support, Reddit representatives are very helpful and will gladly jump on a call to ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible.
You can use this link to schedule a call with a Reddit ads expert.
7DOTS Tips
- If you’re creating ads on behalf of another company, make sure you mark “I work with an advertising agency”.
- Country and currency can’t be changed later, bear this in mind for media invoicing!
2. Create a campaign
Campaigns on Reddit follow a standard structure: Campaigns > Ad Groups > Ads.
7DOTS Tip: Use “Advanced Create” for access to more robust tools and precise control.
Choose Your Objective – Objectives include:
- Brand Awareness: Maximise impressions.
- Traffic: Drive visitors to your site.
- Conversions: Track specific actions like purchases.
- App Installs: Promote mobile apps.
- Lead Generation & Catalogue Sales (Beta).
Define Budget and Spend – Define how you’ll pay for your campaigns and if you have any preference on spend cap.
3. Create an ad group
This step allows you to refine targeting, placements, and delivery.
7DOTS Tip: Select ‘Automated ad creation’ if you’re going to set up video or single images ads. This will use multiple assets to create dynamic ads to improve ad performance. Do not select if you’re going to implement a carousel or free-form ad type.
Define your audience – Here is where things get interesting with Reddit audiences! Reddit offers versatile options:
- Keywords – Engage users interacting with specific terms.
This approach tends to yield better results in the lower stages of the conversion funnel compared to other audience targeting options. According to Reddit, advertisers who use keyword targeting have reported up to 60% lower cost-per-action compared to those using interest-based targeting. - Community audiences - Target community members and users who have recently interacted with that community. We recommend to spend some time navigating these audiences and ensuring you find the right community for your advertising goals.
If by any chance, your audience could be interested in the following subreddits (communities) you’re in luck because these are extremely popular:
Tech & Crypto - r/technology , r/CryptoCurrency and r/CryptoMoonShots
Gaming - r/gaming, r/Games , r/leagueoflegends and r/boardgames
TV Series & Movies - r/movies , r/television and r/anime - Custom audiences - Retarget website visitors or build lookalike audiences (these audiences have to be previously created in the audience manager section).
- Demographics - Choose the locations you’d like include or exclude in your targeting and the gender.
- Devices - Choose types of devices or cell carriers (mobile network operator) to target. By leveraging cell carrier targeting, businesses can craft highly relevant campaigns that resonate with their intended audience, particularly for telecom services or mobile-related products.
Select placement – Choose where on Reddit you want your ad to show up and exclude selected communities or keywords for brand safety purposes.
- Feed — Home, Popular, or Community feeds
- Conversation — Comment threads, blending with discussions.
7DOTS Tip: Keep multiple placements enabled for better reach and lower costs.
Set up delivery – Select the amount you’re willing to spend, data range for your campaign and the bid strategy. Select ‘Lowest cost’ for greater volume but if you’re campaign is still underspending move to ‘Cost cap’ with the recommended highest bid.
7DOTS Tip: Reddit provides better results for campaigns that run a minimum of 3 months. Keep this in mind when defining your Reddit advertising strategy.
ESTIMATES – Use the graph on the right-hand side to estimate your audience size and weekly / daily results. This will provide some guidance on the expected performance for your campaign before going live.
4. Create your ads
Remember that if you have selected ‘Automated ad creation’ you’ll only be able to see here Image or Video creative options. In that case, upload your creatives and provide different headline variations.
If you haven’t selected this, you’ll be able to select between Image, Video, Carousel or Free-form post types. Simply drag your creatives and write your copy in the relevant fields.
Reddit supports four main ad types:
- Image Ads: Simple, attention-grabbing visuals.
- Video Ads: Engaging multimedia content.
- Carousel Ads: Showcase multiple images or products with unique links. There are some fields (such as final URL) that will only appear once you’ve added the creatives.
- Free-Form Posts: Rich-text ads with inline links and media.
You can also enable comments on ads to encourage discussion. However, monitor responses to maintain a positive impression.
There are also some other types called ‘Premium Takeover units’ but these are reserved for managed advertisers on a CPM model and you will need to reach out to a Reddit ads expert to access them.
Advertising costs on Reddit
Reddit Ads operate on an auction-based system, making them flexible for budgets of any size.
The minimum daily budget is $5 and the minimum lifetime budget is $160.
Your budget will vary depending on audience size but you can start testing the platform with a small investment and monitor your campaign to see if it’s worthwhile integrating into your always-on strategy.
Based on our experience, the average CPC has ranged from £0.20 to £0.70, but that will always depend on targeting and competition.
Tips for Success
- Run Campaigns for at least 3 months: Reddit’s algorithms optimise better over longer durations.
- Test multiple targeting options: Use keywords, community audiences, and demographics to refine your strategy.
- Monitor and adjust: Use Reddit’s reporting tools to analyse performance and tweak your approach.
Reddit Ads Support
We hope this guide helped you get started with Reddit Ads, but if you need a partner to take care of your Reddit advertising, please reach out to us!
Additionally, here are some helpful resources where you will likely find some answers:
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