Set up a Reddit Ads Campaign to Generate Sales
Reddit generated 8 Billion page views from almost 234 million unique monthly users. There are thousands of communities that focus on every topic. It’s the largest, most influential, and most engaged community/platform/website on the entire Internet. It is the Internet’s Front Page, and home to the Internet’s tastemakers.
Reddit provides cheap traffic. Reddit boasts a large advertising inventory.
Based on statistics alone, it should be a marketer’s dream. However, marketers are not seeing the results they expect based on statistics alone. This is not unusual for other advertisers.
Reddit presents a huge opportunity for advertisers but so many people ignore it. Reddit allows advertisers to properly advertise on Reddit.
Reddit does not look like Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
Reddit advertising is often a confusing area for advertisers who believe they are experts. This can lead to brand damage. This issue is still relevant today, with bot networks, fake news, tracking pixels (ad blocking), new advertising options, and fake news.
Everybody else is either failing to see the potential or turning their backs. People who see the opportunity or turn their backs on it are failing to do so.
Reddit does not offer a quick solution. Successful businesses will do thorough research and follow the instructions.
I was the Reddit Advertising Manager for our first Reddit campaign in 2013. We continue to use Reddit to help clients and property owners with targeted campaigns.
These are the best practices to use when setting up a campaign. Our experience with a targeted and short-term campaign is also shared. These are some of the ideas I’d love to see advertisers report on. These are the next steps that will help you get started with Reddit.
Reddit Advertising:
These were the best practices and steps we took before we launched our Reddit promotion.
1. Find out the advantages and disadvantages
Reddit lets users submit links to subreddits related to gaming. The link is then voted on by users.
If a submission gets more upvotes than downvotes, it is more visible. You can get more visibility if your submission receives more upvotes than downvotes.
Reddit users have a “Front Page”, where they can see the top posts from each subreddit at any time. The Front Page of The Internet is the same thing. It contains the most widely used content that circulates on the Internet.
Reddit has a way for you to advertise. You can either pay to be the Top Post/Link Spot or the Front Page on any subreddit.
Reddit’s greatest asset is its subreddits. They can be organized around any topic of interest.
Redditors can target people uniquely. Redditors are known for their unique way of targeting people and being tastemakers online. They also have some of the most influential opinions.
Want to market to golfers? Use Google Ads to advertise on the forum where people talk about golf like this:
Many targeted, influential pageviews are possible with
There may be both downsides and benefits depending on how you see it.
Redditors dislike marketers and advertisers.
Reddit won’t work for you if you have a poor product or are a sales-driven, immediate-response type.
The Oatmeal offers a great Comic that outlines how advertising on Reddit works. If you’re looking for an effective, cost-effective way to reach a large audience and gain exposure,
2 The basics
These are the items you should buy.
Although it isn’t intrusive, it’s a Reddit top post. The ad should be written in Reddit articles, which we’ll return to in a moment ).
Reddit has a complete FAQs list. There are no strange redirects, misleading headlines, or rush to approve ads. You can also not target multiple subreddits at once
A “campaign”, is a promotion you run on a subreddit or Front Page for a set amount of time.
Reddit ads all work on CPM. This means you can get 1000 views for $[Your Bid] – this is a fraction of other ad platforms, provided you have a good click-through rate.
Subreddit advertising lets you reach people who are interested in your topic and are actively considering it. This is a huge advantage over Facebook which only allows you to advertise to people who like your topic but may not be interested at the moment.
This is where you can find a happy medium between Google Ads that have maximum intent to buy… but are expensive, and Facebook Ads which are more affordable, but still have the intent to buy.
It could also be that we are both interested in camping equipment or hiking in general. It’s possible to purchase gear only in the weeks before a hike.
However, with an ad on /r/WildernessBackpacking, you’ll get in front of us when I’m actively researching a trip.
The Dashboard provides CPC stats. Exports of CSV can be exported to analyze campaign data. Campaign budgets must be between $5,999 and $9,000.
3. Create an advertising account
It is not a good idea to use your Reddit username to start a campaign. This allows you to keep your personal and business lives separate. You can also use your username to interact in the comments of your ads.
Create a new username ( – get one here), and begin running your campaigns. You need to convey a sense of legitimacy and transparency.
4. Find your audience
The Front Page is not the right place for advertising unless you are a movie star or a Nike Agency trying to maximize their spending. Anything funny, interesting, or crazy will be clicked.
Redditors use subreddits to find specific information. They are often highly influential and engaged. audience.
The problem is that you must find them and satisfy 3 criteria to make a campaign successful.
- Find the topically correct subreddit.
- Subreddit should have enough pageviews to meet the minimum spend
- The subreddit should be small enough to have meaningful
Finding the most topically accurate subreddit
Subreddits can be created by anyone. The sheer volume of subreddits can make it difficult to find the right one.
Reddit has “subreddit packs” that can help you organize all your options. These packages are similar to Pinterest bundles and Quora.
Reddit can easily be searched with Google search operators. To explore the site further and see what other advertisers did, you can sign up for SEMrush.
No bundles or third-party tools.
Reddit is in many ways a microcosm of the Internet. By automating the process, you might end up somewhere you don’t want.
Reddit is known for its quirky culture and many inside jokes that are relevant to advertisers. For example, /r/BigSEO can be *very* different from /r/seo. The /r/trees subreddit is dedicated to marijuana while /r/marijuanaenthusiasts is dedicated to trees and forestry.
Do not ask us why. Just do your research. Don’t assume.
Instead, you can use the tools to supplement general Reddit searches. Use the links. Nearly every subreddit has links to other subreddits. They can also recommend other communities. You can also click on the communities that are of interest to you.
A successful campaign starts with good research and planning.
Promotions cannot be run unless there are enough pageviews to the subreddit.
Reddit also offers “interest packages”, which allow you to pull multiple items from sufficient inventory.
Campaigns are $5 minimum and $0.75 per 1,000 pageviews. You can purchase up to three months ahead.
To run a campaign you need to find a subreddit that has 6,600 pageviews within 3 months.
Before you create your campaign, it is impossible to determine if a subreddit is sufficient. You can see the stats on the right sidebar of all subreddits: “### number users.
Subreddit must receive 73 page views per day to reach 6,600 pageviews in 3 months. This includes subscribers who are more than 5,000. Subscribers may not visit the subreddit daily.
Make a list of subreddits in which you want to start a campaign.
Keep track of which posts appear on each subreddit.
If you are running a contest for new desktop gaming motherboards, it is not a good idea to advertise on a subreddit that caters to beginners.
Does your advertisement fit the target audience?
After you have all this figured out you can begin creating your campaign
5. Start your campaign
Reddit has made a significant improvement to its self-serve advertising platform. This is how to set up a campaign to test this post.
Visit Reddit advertising to get started. Click Create an Ad.
Your email will be displayed on the screen. Please follow the instructions.
Spend some time creating images and a URL that you can track in Google Analytics ( guide ).
Use a conversational title. Accept comments.
Reddit provides many examples of Reddit ads. Study. Make a few ads to test the waters.
You can edit your targeting and create new ads after you have created your first ad in the Dashboard.
You can choose to either enter subreddits manually or select bundles.
Subreddits can be searched by visiting their sites.
Choose your platform and budget. Mobile traffic should never be sent to unfriendly pages.
After you have confirmed your campaign, send it to Reddit’s approval queue.
6. Watch for the launch and then check your Dashboard.
You have the option to monitor your promotions using the self-serve tab on Reddit. Once your ad goes live you will receive an email.
You will get hourly impressions and click data after your ad goes live.
9. Monitor, Analyze, Test, and Iterate!
While your ad is live, you can monitor comments and respond to them. Google Analytics can be used to monitor how traffic is performing on your site. My bounce rate was lower than I expected, but there was only one sign-up which I will discuss later.
It is possible to make suggestions for improvements. You can then implement the changes and continue the process.
Reddit updated its Help section, and Ad Walk Through sections. Spend a few minutes reading the manual.
Reddit Advertising Experience
My First Experience…
Reddit advertising was my initial goal for 2013. Reddit advertising was my first goal in 2013.
The promotion was done on /r/web_design which is a subreddit about web design and /r/webdesign. Although it has been merged into web_design, it still receives a lot of impressions through its archive.
My ad’s homepage was also my landing page. This allowed us to analyze bounce rates and conversions against other sources.
These are the 2013 …( Results. /r/webdesign still works, )…
We were able to convert two conversions (which cost $12 each). Our limited experiments have shown that Reddit is a poor medium for direct response, no matter how well-run it may be.
It can still be very powerful if placed at the top or end of your funnel. This will increase awareness. The same was true of our experience with StumbleUpon last year.
Reddit advertising is not well-known. Inventory can be purchased at extremely low prices, especially for smaller subreddits.
All inventory in /r/webdesign belonged to me until February. We will pay $10 for our site to be visible to everyone interested in the old web design discussions.
We will certainly be investigating buying all the inventory of a subreddit. Surprisingly, not many brands have done this.
2016
I had been able to create targeted campaigns since 2013. We decided that we would update the test with one similar to the original 2013.
Traffic is now more affordable than in 2013. This could be due to better targeting.
The quality of traffic is also higher. We saw significantly longer session durations and higher signups.
Even though my CPA was more expensive than in 2013, the email addresses I received were more genuine.
Subreddits with high traffic are often not stocked enough. I’m more interested in B2B and a narrow audience (DIYers, Freelancers).
Reddit can be a great place for companies that consistently perform well. If this is your target audience, you should be able to scale up your campaigns.
There will always be tradeoffs in using an advertising platform. Optimization is key.
I have since closed our newsletter and have not done a similar test on ShivarWeb as the one in 2016.
Two clients have done regular experiments and we have received reports from readers who have used Reddit Ads for their T-Shirt businesses.
The Dashboard may be different but the core audience, opportunities, and challenges remain the same.
Reddit users aren’t necessarily buying but they share and give feedback.
Reddit Advertising Ideas – Experiment with
Reddit advertising has yet to become mainstream. We’d love to see the results of others doing it.
1. Content promotion
Can you provide interesting content? While Redditors generally discourage you from submitting your content on a subreddit, they will allow you to place an ad and get a spot at the top.
Low impressions, low clicks, exposure, and exposure to a wider audience. Your content should be useful.
If you’ve found success through content marketing – using Reddit to promote your content can be a solid, cheap complement to your Facebook/Twitter/everything else strategy.
2. There are many testing options and only a handful of campaigns.
Reddit won’t allow you to make any changes to your ad during your campaign. We would like to see how it works to have multiple campaigns for one promotion.
Multiple versions of an advertisement are common in online advertising networks. It is however a bit more difficult to do this on Reddit. However, you can get great impressions and data by the hour. It would be great to do an A/B test with your friends.
You could run a 1-day promotion by looking for a subreddit with lots of pageviews. Take the CSV files and run an analysis to determine click-through rates.
3. Events, Contests & Giveaways
Reddit advertising can be found at the top, making it an excellent choice for content marketing. Contests and registrations may be a good idea if you have a limited budget and want to get a direct response and last-click conversions.
You wouldn’t need to push (something that won’t work anyway), but you would have a follow-up interaction and possibly an email or follow-up. This would be a great way to get an opt-in.
4. Special Offers
If you want to generate an immediate response, one-off promotions might work. If you are looking for a direct response, one-off promotions may work.
It’s possible to do it in two ways: test, analyze, and then repeat.
5. As a permanent sponsor
In our experience, buying all inventory from subreddits is a good option.
It may be worth it to purchase all subreddit inventories that are relevant to your business. You have the option to buy up to 3 months’ worth of pageviews regardless of how impression data is priced at $[your offer].
Advertisers are thrilled to sponsor people interested in their product, in any medium, even in the physical world.
You will soon be able to interact with moderators to participate in organic marketing.
6. Get feedback on new products
Do you want to get feedback about a product?
7. Copywriting to the Numbers
Tim Ferris used Google search ads to split-test his title and subtitle for Four Hour Work Week.
8. Retargeting
Reddit TOS forbids retargeting on landing page pages.
Either way, we would build out a specific retargeting audience for your campaign…especially because they are going to need a very specific message and tailored frequency to not have it blow up in your face. However, you should still have it – even if it is to exclude Reddit users from your general retargeting campaign.
9. Soliciting comments
Reddit ads are interactive! We may be able to monitor and respond to the responses. We always welcome feedback and discussion.
Next steps
With just $100, 347 clicks, and 5 conversions, we were able to reach 75,000 people In addition to buying inventory for 3 months in a targeted audience who are precisely our target audience
You don’t need to spend a lot to promote a post on Reddit. Reddit requires only $5.
1. Explore Reddit. Search for subreddits that are relevant to your market.
2 Create a test promotion and register for a username.
