How to run ads on Reddit: Guide for Beginners

Every online marketing specialist has definitely heard of Reddit. This is one of the most active online communities in the world. The platform has more than 330 million active users and more than 14 billion views a month.

However, advertising providers rarely run ads there as there is no information on how to work with this website. I want to tell and show you what I learned from my own experience when running different marketing campaigns on the platform.

What do you need to know about the Reddit platform?

What is the main differentiating feature of Reddit and why has this website become so popular? The factor of human communication played here.

Reddit was one of the first websites that gave users the opportunity to freely discuss sensitive topics in a forum format. On this website, you can talk about everything: from how to brush your teeth in the most effective way to the stages of building your own business.

Follow the platform rules

The first thing you need to know about promoting on Reddit: it is a very specific and rigorous community that has its own statute and secretive rules.

I do not recommend starting a promotion without prior preparation. Namely:

• create an account and read the general platform rules;

• familiarize yourself with the structure of the platform and the basic terms;

• select your thematic subreddits (sections, sub-forums) and subscribe to them;

• study the rules of your subreddits (they may differ from the general rules of the platform);

• Finally, read your subreddits. This will help to understand the mood of the potential audience and its style of communication and to determine the pains of users and their interests.

Try to catch the mood of your audience

Always keep in mind that Reddit consists of ordinary people and their mood completely depends on external factors. This way, the same advertisement can cause a different reaction depending on when it is published. Judge for yourself: will the advertising of the user data collection service be successful when the topic of the Facebook users’ personal data drain is in full spate.

Do not sell directly

Open advertising will not work if you do not offer something really cool and interesting. Users come to Reddit for communication and do not appreciate aggressive advertising. Better show them how your product or service solved a problem. The problem should be real and widespread, not fake. You can also provide a personal story with the product. In general, engage the audience in the discussion and you will be happy.

Considering the advertising opportunities of Reddit, this platform offers two promotion types:

1. Promoting publications in subreddits.

2. Website sidebar banners.

Unfortunately, sidebar banners are sold only through the direct sales team and are not available in the “self-service” format in the advertising tool. Therefore, we will consider the first type of promotion – publication in subreddits.

Such ad outlook

How to create an ad account?

Reddit has its own mini promotion help. It contains all the basic information that will be needed at the start. Using a Reddit advertising account, you can run promoted publications in selected website subreddits. How to create it?

To do this, go to the page https://www.redditinc.com/advertising, click “Place an ad”, and then “Register“.

Fill in the basic information about the account and pay special attention to the Username field. This is the name which will represent your ad on Reddit. Ideally, the brand name should be indicated there. If it is already taken, use the prefix “official” (for example, “Name_official”).

After successful account registration, you will immediately be redirected to advertising creation. I recommend temporarily postponing this step and making basic setup.

How to make a basic setup of your ad account?

In order to configure your ad account on Reddit, you need to enter the company name and pick your industry:

Then enter your payment details (Reddit only supports postpay via credit card):

Fill the billing address:

Save the data. Here the most interesting thing about Reddit: an advertising tool does not work in all countries.

Unfortunately, there is not any full list of unsupported countries.

Here are two solution options available:

• if you have representative offices in other countries, try entering their addresses and find the one that will be accepted by the system;

• no representative offices – forget about payment documents and enter the location of the USA (this is not a good option for business, but maybe suitable as a temporary measure for the period of the advertising test).

Now you need to configure the Reddit Conversion Pixel: a piece of code that will track the performance of a specific action on the website.

Pixel example with a recommendation for installation on a site:

At this stage, we will face another pain of promotion on Reddit – the limitations of Conversion Pixel. In other advertising systems, you can collect remarketing lists and track various conversions through Pixel. Reddit allows tracking the only conversion. To do this, we implement Reddit Conversion Pixel on all pages of the completed action (for example, on all pages of the “Order Successfully Issued”).

Also, we need to mention separately the viewing of data that can be collected using the Reddit Conversion Pixel:

1. In order to view data on completed conversions, go to the “Metrics” section:

2. Check the “Conversions” and “CPA” columns, and also set our attribution window (its size depends on the action that you are tracking):

3. Now you can view conversion data in the table with campaign statistics:

How to create marketing campaigns?

The interface of the Reddit dashboard is very similar to Facebook Ads, and the account hierarchy itself is all well-known advertising tools:

• campaigns are the top level of the advertising office: advertising campaigns;

• ads groups – ads groups divided by audience targeting are created within the framework of the campaigns;

• ads – create ads in each group.

To create an advertising campaign, you must specify its name and the purpose of promotion (Campaign Objective).

The campaign name is usually indicated by geotargeting and promotion goal (for example, “USA / Conversions”).

There are three types of promotion goals:

1. Traffic – campaigns aimed at increasing the number of visits to your website.

2. Brand Awareness and Reach are campaigns aimed at reaching an audience and increasing your brand awareness.

3. Conversions – campaigns to increase the number of conversions (which you track using the Reddit Conversion Pixel).

The next step is to create an ad group.

Now let’s go through the settings that can be set at the group level.

First, you’ll need to specify the name of the ad group. I recommend specifying the targeting that you will use (for example, “New York / Interests / SEO” or “UK / Subreddits / Marketing”).

Next, you should target your audience. Three types of targeting are available on Reddit: location targeting (Locations), interest targeting (Interests), targeting specific subreddits (Subreddits). For broad topics, it is possible to create various combinations of targeting based on the principles of “narrow the audience” or “exclude the audience” (for example, ask the interest of “Marketing” and exclude the subreddit “bigseo” from it).

Now you define the devices you want to show the ad on:

Next, we can set the schedule for displaying ads (if we want the advertisement to be shown not around the clock):

Now you should enter your ad group budget. Two types of budgets are available: “daily” (suitable for ad groups that will work on an ongoing basis) and “budget for the entire duration” (suitable for advertising activities with a certain validity period).

The minimum daily budget you can set is $5. The minimum budget for the entire validity period depends on the number of days the advertisement will operate, but at the rate of at least $5 per day (for example, if an ad group is launched for three days, then the minimum budget is $15).

Next, you need to indicate how much you want to pay for 1000 impressions of your advertising. The minimum bet is $0.50; maximum – $100:

The last step is to set the duration of your ad.

Important: Reddit can spend 20% more than your daily budget. Keep this in mind when setting a budget for a group.

How to create an ad?

There are two types of ads available on Reddit Ads: Link Post and Text Post.

Link Post is a type of ad that will redirect the user to the specified URL when clicking on it. The following settings are available here:

1. Post Headline – ad text. The maximum number of characters is 300.

2. Post URL – The final URL. Do not forget to indicate here the UTM-tag.

3. Display URL – The URL that the user will see. Usually, publishers indicate their website domain.

4. Card Image – a large image that will be displayed in the post. Resolution: 1200 x 628. The maximum size is 3MB.

5. Thumbnail Image – Thumbnail image for preview. Resolution: 400 x 300. The maximum size is 500KB.

6. Allow comments – comment function for your ads. Most likely, advertisers turn off the commenting feature but do not forget that this can be a good source of feedback from users.

7. Call to Action.

Text Post — after clicking on the ad, the user will be redirected to a more detailed post version (but will remain on reddit.com). The following settings are available here:

1. Post Headline – The title of the ad. The maximum number of characters is 300.

2. Post Text is your expanded ad text that the user will see when they click. The maximum number of characters is 40,000.

3. Card Image – a large image that will be displayed in the post. Resolution: 1200 x 628. The maximum size is 3MB.

4. Thumbnail Image – Thumbnail image for preview. Resolution: 400 x 300. The maximum size is 500KB.

5. Allow comments – comment function for your ads. It is better to save the opportunity to comment on ads and receive user feedback.

6. Call to Action.

As a result, summary information about the customized advertisement and the “Submit” launch confirmation button are displayed.

Reddit ad tool targeting types

During the ad group creation stage, I mentioned three types of audience targeting. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Locations mean targeting a user’s location.

What do you need to know about this type of targeting?

You can select a country or city for targeting (unfortunately, city targeting is now available exclusively for the United States).

I recommend not to skip the Locations field, otherwise, the ad will be shown to users with any location. Also, do not forget that you can exclude display in certain countries or cities:

Interests — targeting users’ interests:

What do you need to know:

1. Reddit analyzes the content the user interacts with and assigns it certain categories of interests. You can use them in targeting.

2. The catalyst for displaying ads will be the user, not the subreddit subject. It means that your ads can be shown in any subreddit. For this reason, I recommend excluding low-quality subreddits at the time of configuring the ad group.

3. The list of proposed interests is common and limited. If you use this type of targeting, then do not forget to narrow it. How? Specify thematic subreddits or narrow geotargeting.

Subreddits — targeting particular subreddits:

In my opinion, this is the most interesting targeting option for advertising providers. It allows you to control the places where your ad appears. Here are the key points you should remember about targeting subreddits:

1. The ad will be seen by subscribers or current visitors of the specified subreddit.

2. Subscribers can see your ad when they visit the target subreddit or other subreddits if they recently visited the target subreddit.

3. Since this is a rather narrow targeting, I recommend choosing more subreddits for one group.

4. If the system does not give you the opportunity to choose a subreddit ( you know that it definitely exists), then it is too small for targeting.

5. Subreddits can be selected in two ways:

• enter our target key and select from the proposed options;

• go to the section “Site Analysis / Domain Analysis / SEO-analysis / Positions” and set a filter, where:

1. URL – contains – “your keyword”;

2. URL – does not contain – “comments”;

3. URL – does not contain – “casestudies”;

4. URL – does not contain – “duplicates”;

5. URL – does not contain – “domain”;

6. URL – does not contain – “user”.

This way you will get a list of URLs that you can target.

Conclusions

1. Reddit is a specific and demanding online community. Before proceeding to it, you need to become a real user of the website, experience its principles and learn the rules.

2. Selling aggresively and directly is strictly not recommended. Make advertisements inconspicuous, useful and creative (especially in terms of visual content).

3. Keep track of trends in the country you are targeting. Use the latest hype topics for your advertising.

4. Remember to configure Conversion Pixel for your target action.

5. Remember that the Reddit advertising tool does not work in many countries yet and you will have to find “workarounds” for launching the advertisement in case you are not from the USA.