In this guide, we’re going to take a look at how you can advertise on Reddit. Recently the network has provided the advertising platform with Reddit Conversion Pixel. Reddit ads is a good tool for omnichannel marketing and bringing the message to the target audience.

About Reddit

Reddit was founded in 2005 by two college friends. Nowadays, it’s one of the most visited sites in the US. On average, every month the site gathers over 14 billion page views. You can find all you want including sports, cryptocurrency, marketing, or just entertaining stuff. In this article, we’re going to take a look at how you can use the advertising platform provided by the Reddit recently.

reddit ads, reddit pixel, ad campaign

Reddit Advertising Platform

Reddit’s team launched a self-serve advertising platform in March 2017. It is young ad platform, but it is developed actively now.

 

Viktor Filonenko, FB Regional Client Partner at Httpool, shared his work experience in Reddit ads:

“We have started working with Reddit ads almost since the time this tool became live. The speed of this platform’s development and the amount of work the developers are putting into it are really impressive. Updates roll out almost every fortnight. They successfully add more features to make Reddit ads closer to its ‘older brothers’. Yet, the system is far from ideal now.

As automatic optimisation is probably far from this network yet, one needs to understand that proper advertising here requires some manual labor and efforts. To get good results, one needs to run lots of tests, both on targeting (ad set) and creative (ad) levels. But after the perfect match is found, the outcomes can be impressive.

After all, even if one doesn’t have much time and budgets for multiple tests, Reddit ads is a good tool for omnichannel marketing and bringing the message to the target audience.”

How to build your Reddit campaign

First of all, you’ll need:

  • Reddit account with a verified email address.
  • Ad copy (headline).
  • Thumbnail image (400x300px (500KB) maximum).
  • Mobile card view image (1200x628px (3MB) maximum).
  • Valid credit/debit card. The platform currently does not accept payment with Paypal, bitcoin, check, or invoicing.

Then visit ads.reddit.com and let’s get started.

The First Step — Create Campaign

From the ‘Create Campaign’ page you can start by naming your campaign.

reddit ads, reddit pixel, ad campaign

Then select a campaign objective: Brand Awareness and Reach, Traffic, or Conversions. Check the Reddit’s definitions of each objective below:

reddit ads, reddit pixel, ad campaign

Next Step — Reach Your Audience

Next, you can build an ad group audience which you want to reach.

What parameters do we have for targeting?

Locations

Here you can choose the country which you want to run the ad in. City-level/State-level targeting is currently available only for U.S. cities in 210 metro areas. The audience of Reddit is mostly the US, the UK, Western Europe and Australia.

Interests

Unfortunately, it’s not Facebook interests, as they are constrained. If you choose just some ‘interest’, your ad is shown in different subreddits. But there is another way to target ads on Reddit, and that is by ‘subreddits.’

Subreddit

What we really need. Subreddits are communities focused on a particular topic. They run from pretty broad (e.g., the r/Entrepreneur subreddit) to niche (e.g., the subreddit for r/ecommerce). It’s the only way to target narrowly. There are a lot of subreddits actually, but the platform only allows users to target the top 5k most trafficked subreddits as other subreddits do not garner enough traffic for advertisers to hit their minimum budget. You can check top subreddits here.

reddit ads, reddit pixel, ad campaign

If you target the ‘news’ interest group and the subreddit r/digital_marketing, your ad appears for users interested in news as well as users browsing the subreddit r/digital_marketing. Check the daily impressions meter on the top right to understand the potential size of your ad group.

reddit ads, reddit pixel, ad campaign

Device

Then you can select which devices you’d like your ads to show in.

reddit ads, reddit pixel, ad campaign

Desktop — to display ads to desktop devices.

Mobile — to display ads to mobile devices.

After you select ‘Mobile’, you can specify if you’d like only to reach Android or iOS devices. By the way, mobile app for Reddit ads is coming soon!

reddit ads, reddit pixel, ad campaign

Time of day

Here you can indicate days/times for your ad. But be aware that choosing a precise time can reduce the total number of impressions available to you.

The Guide To Reddit Ads: How to Advertise on Reddit

Note that you can exclude specific locations and subreddits and your ad will not appear there.

Ad Schedule and Budget

The next step is to choose schedule and budget.

The Reddit Ads platform is an auction-based system like any other ad platform. Reddit offers $2 bid by default. It’s a tricky thing as most of users think that it’s enough. But there is a minimum bid, but no capped bid amount. The bid you place is the highest CPM (cost per thousand impressions) you’re willing to pay for your ad to be seen. We recommend to set up, for example, $20 as the highest bid always wins, but the price paid is the second-highest bid.

The Guide To Reddit Ads: How to Advertise on Reddit

The minimum daily spent for an ad on the platform is $5.

Creative Step

Next, you can set up your creative. Start with naming your ad. Note that users will not see ad’s name, but it’s practical for tracking purpose.

There are two types of post: link post and text post.

The Guide To Reddit Ads: How to Advertise on Reddit

A ‘link’ post type is just like a usual PPC ad, whereby someone clicks on the ad, and they’re taken to some URL (e.g., a website or landing page).

You have to input the headline of ad copy and a link to the website you want to drive visitors to. All your text can be in a headline and it’s only 300 characters.

The Guide To Reddit Ads: How to Advertise on Reddit

A ‘text’ post type is where people go to a Reddit page that has some text written on it. You can still also include a website and format the ad using formatting tooltip. This option is useful if you, for example, need an additional stage in your customer flow or you need only your target audience which will definitely engage with your ad.

The Guide To Reddit Ads: How to Advertise on Reddit

Comments are off by default. If you want to enable them, we suggest reading Reddit’s guide on how to resolve it.

Then you have to upload a mobile and a thumbnail image.

Recommended sizes of images:

  • Thumbnail image for desktop — 400x300px (500KB) maximum.
  • Mobile card view image — 1200x628px (3MB) maximum.

Note that now you can also promote an organic post that lives on your Reddit profile. To do this, select ‘Use Existing Post’ during the ad creation stage.

The Guide To Reddit Ads: How to Advertise on Reddit

The Guide To Reddit Ads: How to Advertise on Reddit

Card View Mobile Web

Submit Your Ad For Review

Check all your ad details before submitting. If everything has been set up correctly, click the ‘Submit for approval’ button. The Reddit team will review ads before approval. Sometimes this process can be long and weird. After you set up the ad, it won’t run right away. They’ll send you the confirmation letter on your account’s email and ask for identity verification. You need to take a photo of your passport or driving license that you have submitted it in the ad account, send it to them and then wait for a day or two until they manually review it and let your ads through.

Reddit Conversion Pixel

By installing the Reddit Conversion Pixel, your conversion events start showing up in the Reddit Ads dashboard. To track conversions, you need an e-commerce order thank you page, a lead form success page or a sign-up to a web app. As your pixel won’t load unless you put it on the separate thank-you page.

The Guide To Reddit Ads: How to Advertise on Reddit

To install the Pixel:

  • Log into Reddit Ads and go to Dashboard.
  • Click get conversion pixel.
  • Copy the code that is displayed.
  • Place the code in the <head> of your website’s conversion pages.
  • 1-day post-view conversions will show up in your Reddit Ads dashboard.

Pretty easy.

After that, you will be able to check different metrics.

The Guide To Reddit Ads: How to Advertise on Reddit

The attribution window is the time between when a Reddit user views an ad and subsequently takes an action. Conversions are attributed using a post-view window of 1 day, 7 days, or 28 days.

Conclusion

The Reddit ad platform is young and far from ideal in comparison to Facebook. But updates roll out twice a week. Recently, Reddit has rolled out a new native video ad format that will be auto-played by default when a user scrolls through a feed.

If you have any questions regarding Reddit, feel free to contact Median ads team! We will be happy to help.

Quora is another network that’s very popular in the US. It’s a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and answers. Read in our guide how to start your first ad campaign on Quora.

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