How to compare your Linkedin Ads buy to a Reddit Ads buy
The default building blocks for the typical media strategy tend to be generally similar, regardless of industry. Start with SEO. Get FREE done first. Own your space, and bring customers to your website based on the keywords you believe they are using. Invest in your own website by purchasing a tool like Surfer SEO and drive engaged traffic to site by targeting people who are actively searching for topics that your business offers a solution to. Invest in customer data by purchasing access via Zoominfo or Apollo, and spin up an email campaign or two...while dodging spam complaints by ensuring you have an Unsubscribe option! Maybe spin up a chat bot. Modern day table stakes.
Next, move into paid media. Focus on Google and Bing PPC for active-search…look for potential customers who are actively looking for your company product or service, convert as many as possible to MQL/SQL or direct sales. Do your math on the back end to check investment vs. conversion for ROI. Measure CPL as closely as you can, based off of time and date of conversion in Salesforce and compare that to native data in Google Ads and Bing. Measure a simple return on ad spend (ROAS) by checking your sources for new business vs. total digital advertising spend.
Justifying Media Spend on Social Media
From there though, the digital space can become more difficult to directly justify ROI for your company or business. Especially with growing constraints on targeting, the end of third party cookies and general privacy protections, it can be hard to justify direct ROI from digital ad spend on PPC. This is especially the case when moving into social or third party media platforms. Many many companies and businesses live in this space. The occasional Facebook campaign. The Linkedin lead buy with a local marketing firm...it's hard to get a social media buy right on a limited marketing budget and average growth. Hard to justify.
Generally speaking, the difficulty in justifying direct ROI from marketing investment occurs as you move higher and higher in the marketing funnel, and traffic to site becomes less likely to directly convert. (Which is why this blog post, and the launch of marketing efforts, starts with potential customers who are actively considering your product or service, before moving onto those who are not.)
So instead, when looking at advertising on Facebook or Twitter/X or any other traditional social network, marketers use secondary metrics for their business. We look at total impressions or clicks, and build a proxy value for making a target audience more aware of a company or brand. (You know, like traditional advertising). The general notion is, this secondary traffic may not convert today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day (and for the rest of their lives).
"Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half." - Jon Wanamaker
Often, marketers and brand managers run a similar playbook for their digital advertising strategy and post in the large digital channels and communities where all consumers live. Heavy Facebook and Instagram spends in the B2C and B2B space make a lot of sense, especially with the broader audience networks turned on to keep average PPC and CPM costs down. If you work in CPG, this spend is simply the cost of doing business. However, in the B2B space, marketers are more frequently held to a higher standard on their spend.
But, regardless of your space in the market, generally speaking, most marketers can easily make the argument that their company product or service is reaching its intended target audience, due to the fact that the platforms are so large, ubiquitous, and used by virtually all people in every age and walk of life. (Did he just say the same thing three times?) Not to mention the fact that the self-serve advertising platforms on media giants such as Facebook and Instagram make it reasonably simple for a marketer with decent abilities to learn how to tightly segment against their target audience, whether that is by age, industry, interest, or if they like Vess Soda + Chevy Trucks + live in rural Georgia (down the rabbit hole we gooooooooo!)
If you're looking at advertising on those broad-based internet media properties, and your company is already driving traffic to site via Facebook/Instagram/ or ...Twitter/X? then it's time to look into reddit. Reddit is an often overlooked platform with tons of engaged users. With over 500,000 subreddits that offer niche communities to engage a wide range of users, it's no wonder reddit is primed for their initial public offering this year.
Uh...this just looks like a big messageboard. What is reddit?
Reddit is a social network that offers a truer community experience than most internet sites and offers an engaged network with millions of comments, posts, and more and more upvotes (and downvotes) on the widest range of discussions, stories, images, videos and topics you can imagine. Are you looking for a community about birdwatching? Sure, 45k members. What about a community that loves the age old art of yogurt making? Mkay. Or what about lovers of that age-old sport of baby-dunking in Norway? Sure.
And if that doesn't immediately convince you, you might consider the fact that, according to SEMrush, reddit is one of the top ten websites on the internet in the world, in terms of total traffic to site, and has over 250 million active weekly users on the site, compared to 300 million active users on Linkedin. So linking potential customers to your website, no matter what you sell, should be doable! (Upvote if you agree!)
LinkedIn is the best place for my company to target potential customers, right?
In the B2B space, LinkedIn has become a strong go-to for marketers investing their awareness/consideration-spend dollars. That 300 million users metric I just mentioned tends to underscore LinkedIn's importance in a B2B marketer's arsenal, and the site has quickly ramped their ad offering since being acquired by Microsoft. That said, while lead-gen campaigns on that platform were initially strong performers, that quickly changed when we started getting 10 InMail messages or more per week.
More recently, there seems to be quite a bit of fat on LinkedIn when looking at PPC costs, which continue to rise YOY. Further, due to the more professional-nature of the site, it has become more and more difficult to build engaging content on the site that is appealing enough/breaks through the clutter to an extent that would entice would be buyers to leave the site for an advertiser call-to-action. Lastly, as a platform, LinkedIn seems to lack the truer opportunities to engage in discussions and chat with other users about key items of personal and professional interest.
To put a finer point on it, thanks to the rising PPC costs on the platform, Linkedin has lost some of its shine and marketers should think twice before simply letting their existing campaigns run, just due to size and fit of target audience.
How is Reddit bigger and better than Linkedin?
While the monthly active user number on reddit is still lower than that of Linkedin, the engaged audience seems to be on the rise. If you haven't been over to https://www.reddit.com/, it might be time to click over to the site or download the app, explore the communities, and maybe make an upvote or two. At the very least, explore the front page, which reddit calls "the front page of the internet." While yes, there still are quite a few cat pics, dank videos, memes, and internet trolls, the growing rise of this media giant ensures that no matter what group you want to target, there are probably one or two niche communities that will work for you.
Consider a few key facts about the users on this website:
49% of reddit users are based in the US
The average reddit app user spends 30 minutes on the website every day
In 2023, 469 million million posts were published on reddit (which is probably why the new york stock exchange is excited about it!)
What about advertising on reddit? Is it better than LinkedIn Ads?
Reddit, however, is the playground of that same target…offering community segmentation that frequently gets you an audience just as segmented as LinkedIn’s Job Title offerings at a fraction of the cost (think 10-25% of the avg CPM you see on LinkedIn! Or PPCs closer to 40 cents than 4 dollars). Meaning more marketers are making reddit a significant part of the media buying strategy for their business, and driving valuable traffic to their company website at a fraction of the cost of Linkedin.
Directly measuring Reddit Ad Spend in relation to LinkedIn Ad Spend
Ok, so we can probably agree that it is fairly simple to go into the native platforms and measure CPC/CPM, after all, these media giants want your money...they aren't going to make it too difficult on an experienced marketer focused on creating campaigns. But how can you evaluate your PPC/CPM through a non-biased partner? How can you quickly evaluate that the traffic coming to site from these buys is the “right” traffic?
Well, assuming you’re appending UTM codes to all of your paid buys, you have the ability to dive down into evaluating the performance of every digitally-served ad you’ve built. Despite all of the turmoil around Google's recent shift from Universal Analytics to GA4, it is still a much more effective attribution model than looking at paid media results natively. And while other attribution platforms exist/ are on the rise (take a look at Hyros if you have that kind of spending money) we would highly recommend looking at your traffic data in either GA4 or Google’s Looker Studio app. However, unless you have a paid analyst on your team or have spent a lot of time diving into Google Analytics, it can be difficult to quickly evaluate one paid media source to another.
What is an Engaged Session in Google Analytics?
Enter the “Engaged Sessions” metric on GA. One of our favorite GA4 metrics to evaluate the strength of traffic to your website is “Engaged Sessions”, measured as any visitor who stays on site for 10 seconds, hits more than one page, or converts to a lead. Sort your campaigns by source, medium, and campaign and you can check out engaged users by ad type, by medium, and, most importantly, by source. This will allow you to easily compare your reddit advertising campaign with campaigns from other channels, including PPC, programmatic, organic, etc.
This allows you to quickly see the number of engaged users in a given time frame, from a non-biased source, divide by total spend, and get an average cost per engaged user. In our reporting we like to call this CPEngaged, and more often than not, we see CPEngaged costs coming in on reddit at 10-20% of the cost of driving that same traffic on LinkedIn.
Additionally, if you’re just pulling native reporting, and not looking at a non-biased dashboard to compare all of your digital traffic drivers to each other, you’re missing a key opportunity to optimize your spend. Looking at Engaged Sessions in GA4 is a simple way to do so, and one that we typically find has a favorable lean towards reddit. If you already have a digital marketing agency, you might ask them if they would be willing to run this evaluation on your behalf.
Why aren't my lead-gen campaigns working?
So why keep running out the same Linkedin Lead-Gen campaigns for your company when they aren’t driving real leads for your sales team or strong consideration for your product? Uh, maybe it's because the majority of Linkedin users are looking for a job...but aren't active an any of the forums? Whereas reddit offers a highly segmented website experience for internet users doing research and engaging with communities and posting their upvotes on topics and forums that matter deeply to them.
We'll leave you with this one simple question: how likely are you to engage with content on reddit in relation to content on Linkedin? And which is a truer engagement for you? Dollars to donuts the answer is reddit. (Man, I could really go for a Boston Cream right about now.)
If you're interested in creating a campaign on reddit for your business, give us a call and get your reddit campaigns going as soon as possible! From the first day your campaign begins delivering traffic, we guarantee we'll drive more efficient and engaged traffic than your Linkedin spend, in terms of both PPC/CPC and CPM, with just as strong segmentation. And more engaged traffic to site means more comments and upvotes for your marketing team. So, maybe it's time to give reddit a try. After all, it is the "front page of the internet."
