When we think of social media advertising, the networks that typically come to mind include the conglomerate of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Although not many think of Reddit, it is now emerging as an auspicious advertising platform.
Reddit is an online forum that is constantly updated with breaking news, interesting stories, memes, pictures, and videos from across the internet. The platform has more than 330 million monthly visitors, 130,000 active communities, and 21 billion monthly views. Users spend an average of 36 minutes in the Reddit app daily. Its primary audience demographics include gamers, TV and film fans, fashion enthusiasts, consumer tech aficionados, health buffs, and sports savants.
While Reddit is already popular across a variety of demographics, its advertising potential is still growing. According to an Emarketer report, Reddit’s net US ad revenues will reach $119 million this year. That number is expected to more than double to $261.7 million by 2021. For advertisers looking to expand their horizons, Reddit certainly offers a great deal of promise.
“Reddit’s users are tech-savvy and highly engaged, making them attractive to advertisers,” said Emarketer forecasting director Monica Peart in the aforementioned Emarketer report. “A large portion are unique users, meaning they don’t use other social platforms. That means advertisers have the potential to reach new audiences in a highly targeted way.”
But before an advertiser jumps blindly into Reddit advertising, it’s important to know the basics of advertising on this unique platform first. This article will cover Reddit’s ad objectives and ad targeting, followed by step-by-step instructions for creating a Reddit ad campaign.
Reddit’s Ad Objectives
Reddit offers five ad objectives:
- Brand awareness and reach
- Traffic
- Conversions
- App Install
- Video Views
The brand awareness and reach objective is ideal for advertisers who want to build interest in their brand and reach their audience. The traffic objective is best for driving traffic to a desired landing page. The conversions objective focuses on driving conversions, app install on driving mobile app installs, and video views on generating video views.
Each objective also has a particular post type. For brand awareness and reach, post types include text, link (can include an image), and video. For traffic, conversions, and app installs, post types include link and video. For video views, the only post type is video.
When creating a Reddit campaign, advertisers should know precisely what their goals are so they can choose the right objective and drive results.
Reddit’s Ad Targeting
Reddit also offers five different ad targeting categories:
- Locations
- Interests
- Community
- Device
- Time of day
Targeting by location allows advertisers to reach an audience in a specific location: country, US state, or from Reddit’s list of 210 US cities. Advertisers may choose this option if their products are popular in a particular location. For example, if advertisers want to promote their ridesharing apps, they could choose to target audiences in cities where ridesharing is popular, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Houston, and Philadelphia. Location targeting allows advertisers to deliver more relevant ads to users.
Reddit’s ad server is set to no location targeting by default. If untouched, that means an ad will be delivered worldwide, using only any other selected targeting parameters to designate a particular audience.
Interest targeting uses the browsing behaviors of users to target specific groups and subgroups. It allows advertisers to define either a wide audience or a more granular one. For example, an advertiser promoting a sports gaming app would select the gaming interest group and the video gaming and eSports subgroups. Reddit looks at how users engage with different kinds of content to determine which interest groups to classify them as.
Advertisers who want to reach groups of like-minded individuals can use community targeting. Community targeting delivers ads to users based on topics they engage with in the form of subreddits. Reddit targets subscribers and visitors of a subreddit or community, displaying ads to these users either while they are visiting the targeted subreddit or even while they’re exploring other subreddits.
Targeting by device is the ideal option for advertisers who want to reach an audience that uses a specific device. Advertisers can target audiences that use desktop or mobile, as well as Android or iOS. For example, advertisers want to promote an iOS-only app, they would select mobile as the device type and iOS as the specific type of mobile device.
Finally, advertisers can also target by time of day. Some audiences are more receptive to ads during specific days and times. For example, a user that engages with news content may be more active on Reddit during work hours than later in the evening. Advertisers can specify the day of the week and the hours they want their ad to run. It’s worth noting that targeting by time of day reduces the total number of possible impressions.
Reddit’s Cost
Much like most social media advertising platforms, like Facebook and Pinterest, advertising on Reddit is a bid. You set your budget for the duration of time you want your ad to run and select a bidding type. Do you want to spend $1,000 a day on your ad campaigns? You can do that. Do you want to spend only $500 a day on your ads? You can do that too.
However, because Reddit advertising is a bid, you don’t want to bid too low for the spot where you want your ads to appear, lest competitors outbid you. Like in any auction, you want to outbid other people for the spot you want.
Reddit has five bidding types available. All of these bidding types are paired with the appropriate objectives. For example, if you use traffic as your objective, the bidding type available to you is cost per click, or CPC. These are Reddit’s bidding options:
- CPM or cost per 1,000 impressions (brand awareness and reach objective)
- CPC or cost per click (traffic objective, app install objective, and conversions objective)
- CCPV or Cost per video views (video views objective)
How to Create a Reddit Ad Campaign?
You need the following to create a Reddit ad campaign:
- A Reddit username and account with a verified email address
- Ad assets, such as ad copy, card and thumbnail image, video in MP4 or MOV format (for video ads), destination links, and click trackers (for app install ads)
- Valid credit or debit card
Step 1: Sign into the Reddit ads dashboard. On the “Create Campaign” page, name your campaign.
Step 2: Select a campaign objective.
Step 3: Proceed to follow the prompts for building your ad group, defining your target audience, and setting your ad’s schedule and budget.
There are two types of budgets to choose from for your campaign:
- Daily budget: an amount you want to spend on your campaign per day. This is an average amount, as sometimes a bit more or a bit less will be delivered.
- Lifetime budget: an amount you want to spend over a given date range. The ad attempts to deliver your average daily spend each day until you hit your total budget.
Advertisers are spending more on Reddit for a good reason. Although the platform is known for provoking controversial content at times, it is a valued space both subscribers and visitors engage with on a regular basis. It may not be a leader of the social media pack like Facebook or Instagram, but it is certainly a name that’s attracting more attention.
