Getting Started With Reddit Advertising: What You Need To Know

In a social media landscape increasingly dominated by the global Meta and TikTok networks, another channel is starting to get some of the recognition it deserves: Reddit.

It is second only to TikTok in terms of annual growth in 2021Reddit is a very diverse and passionate channel filled with interests that revolve around every hobby, topic, interest, or lifestyle you could possibly imagine.

This makes it an especially exciting channel for digital and social media advertisers looking to reach their target audience.

Reddit 101

For a more in-depth primer on Reddit as a channel, I highly recommend Brent Csutoras A Beginner’s Guide to Reddit: How to Get Started and Be Successful.

But to understand the platform’s advertising opportunities, we need to understand the basics.

Reddit consists of a huge collection of communities called subreddits, all organized around a specific topic.

that s / The prefix refers to the names of these subreddits.

Subsidiaries can vary widely in subject matter and scope, starting with something as broad as p/worldnews (with over 27 million subscribers) for something specific like r/RealBeesFakeTopHats Dedicated to taking pictures on bee pictures.

Depending on the rules of each community, members can post photos, videos, and text to these subreddits.

It can then be liked (upvoted) or disliked (downvoted) to allow the most popular content to get more exposure.

Reddit users create an account and then explore the wide range of subreddits that the site has to offer.

The global Front Page aggregates the most popular and trending content across various topics. This earns Reddit the very appropriate (and self-proclaimed) title of “The Front Page of the Internet.”

In essence, Reddit dates back to the early days of the internet, before the explosion of social media, where online message boards and forums were the standards.

Just Reddit is home to about 3 million different communities (subreddits), all under one roof.

Why do you advertise on Reddit?

Reddit can offer advantages to social media advertisers over some of the more established advertising channels like Meta or Twitter.

specialized targeting

With over 3 million active subreddits covering almost every niche interest known to humanity, Reddit can potentially help you focus on your target audience.

Reddit claims it can be submitted anywhere from 25-70% Unrefined reach, depending on the platform.

If you’re having trouble finding your audience on another platform, there’s a good chance it’s on Reddit.

Highly engaged audiences

What Reddit lacks in the number of users on its platform compared to Facebook or Instagram, it makes up for in user interaction.

People who use Reddit regularly generally do so for about 34 minutes per day.

Reddit’s user base is also oriented towards the younger age groups from 18 to 35, and its users are very active in specific sectors such as gaming, fashion, and entertainment.

Lower costs

Less competition on the Reddit ad platform means that you can expect CPM (cost per thousand) and CPC (cost per click) that are much lower than the major social ad networks.

While costs will vary based on location, goal, and objective, we’ve seen CPMs less than a third of Facebook’s and CPCs less than a quarter.

Getting started on Reddit Advertising

Little is needed to get a Reddit ad account up and running. All you need is an email address and a credit card.

You’ll need to get started by creating an account if you don’t already have one.

This is easy and requires an email address or an existing Apple or Google account. Note that all Reddit advertisers require a profile, so if you’re creating a profile for a company or brand, keep that in mind when selecting a username.

Once you’ve created your Reddit account, go to ads.reddit.com and add a payment method to your ad account. With an active payment method, you can start advertising.

Reddit advertising objectives and campaign structure

As you’ll notice, most campaign objectives have a CPA bid type rather than a CPM.

This will require more testing and bidding strategy than other platforms with automated results-based bidding algorithms.

But in the end, you should be able to find a great place that will give you the size and price you want.

Reddit’s campaign structure is very similar to most social media platforms:

• Campaign (goal and funding).
• Ad group (audience, placements, and delivery).
• Advertising (creative and tracked).

Ad group targeting options

There are three main types of audiences you can use on Reddit: interests, communities, and custom audiences:

Attention targeting

It uses the audience’s perceived interests based on their content consumption behavior.

You will find that interest targeting is much broader compared to a channel like Meta.

At a high level, interest targeting contains about 15 different interest groups, each with a variety of different sub-groups:

• Animals and pets.
• Graphic design.
• the cars.
• Business financing.
• entertainment.
• family relationships.
• drink food
• the games.
• Healthy life.
• news and education.
• sports.
• Style and fashion.
• Technology and computing.
• the television.
• Travel.

Community targeting

This is aimed at Redditors who have recently interacted with or subscribed to a specific subsite.

This is where you can get high profile and specific with whom you want to show your ads.

custom audience

This targeting uses a variety of behavioral and first-party data to serve ads to specific audiences.

These include:

• Customer list targeting (emails).
• Engagement retargeting (people who watched a video, clicked an ad, or interacted with your content.
• Redirect websites (people who visited your site and/or took specific actions.

You will probably notice Reddit does not have age or gender targeting Due to the limited amount of profile information collected. However, you can target based on geography.

placements

Reddit has two placements for ads displayed on their website: feed and conversations.

• the fodder mode It displays ads to users browsing their “main” feeds, “trending” feeds, and individual subreddits.
• the Conversation placement It takes things to a deeper level and displays ads to users who engage in a particular post. These ads appear in the same place between the post and the first comment.

Connecting

Budgets are allocated on a lifetime or daily basis and can be run continuously or over a specified period.

Unlike most paid social platforms, Reddit does not have an automatic bidding algorithm. You have to set the maximum CPM, CPC or CPV (depending on the objective) you’re willing to pay.

While this can be daunting for media planners and novice buyers, Reddit will make recommendations based on your target audience.

creative

There are four main types of Reddit creatives, all of which should be familiar to you if you’ve implemented social media campaigns before:

• Text ads.
• Image ads.
• Video ads.
• Ads with picture gallery (carousel).

You can find a detailed list of specifications for each design type in the Reddit ads site.

However, it generally aligns with the standard specifications and aspect ratio recommendations on other social media platforms (1:1, 4:5, 16:9).

Now that we’ve covered the basics of Reddit as a platform, here are a few things to consider if you’re looking to launch a new campaign or improve an existing one:

Best practices and pro tips

Do not rush

If you’re new to Reddit ads, avoid the temptation to take short-term tests.

Instead, be sure to set a longer campaign duration to allow Reddit to optimize based on the initial results. Reddit recommends a minimum of 12 weeks, but you should aim for at least four weeks.

Expand your horizons (Targeting)

Take advantage of Reddit’s low CPM and CPC by rolling out a broader targeting network.

Use applicable interest categories to get started, but be sure to add relevant subreddits to your interests to reach everyone you want.

Find the appropriate Subreddits for the target

Unfortunately, Reddit does not offer suggestions for subreddits to target within the platform. But take advantage of This tool is easy to use Visual graph of subreddits related to your audience’s interest.

Creativity is the key

Success on Reddit relies more on developing the right creatives than on other social platforms. Here are a few things to take into consideration:

• Be clear and briefRedditors appreciate it when they know what you have to offer and what you want them to do. Make sure to highlight your CTA clearly and early on. This is not the place for flowery brand language, get to the point, and your audience will appreciate it.
• Be realKnow your audience and develop ad content that speaks to them. Don’t be afraid to speak up and use the language and phrases he knows and is familiar with.
• Reddit is awesome for promotionsDon’t be afraid to offer deals and promotions to your Reddit audience. several subreddits (like this) dedicated to bargains and special offers. They love them.

It is contained

Reddit is a rapidly growing social network with a lot to offer advertisers looking to reach broad and niche audiences.

While the interest targeting options aren’t as robust as Meta, LinkedIn, or Twitter, the ability to specifically target members of the more than 3 million subreddits can help you reach your intended audience.

Since Reddit is smaller than the top social networks, advertisers can expect a much lower CPM and CPC, which allows for the potential to get more publicity for their marketing.

Reddit is an interesting platform, and you should consider testing it as part of your social media marketing strategy, especially if you have an audience that is difficult to reach or difficult to interact with.

More resources:

• 15 great social media marketing examples
• How to search engine optimization for niche markets
• How to Dominate Social Media Marketing: A Complete Strategy Guide

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Featured image: Vitalii Vodolazskyi / Shutterstock