Launching Ads on reddit: How to create a new ad campaign

Creating an ad group on reddit

Like any major social media advertising platform, reddit is set up to be fairly intuitive. If you have marketing experience with Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, Twitter/X, or Linkedin, you should be able to learn how to launch your reddit Ads campaign without too much difficulty.

When starting a campaign, the objective selections are very similar to other social media platforms, offering campaign managers the option to set their focus on Brand Awareness and Reach, Traffic, Conversions, Video Views, App installs, Catalog sales or Lead Generation. (As of this writing, catalog sales and lead generation were still in beta)

Before starting, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, you’ll need to plan on building out the needed creative to the appropriate specs. You will need the below built out to JPG, PNG, or GIF for Image Ads, and MP4/MOV for Video Ads.

reddit advertising specs:

Image Ads - 1080x1080 square, 1080x1350 portrait, 1440x1080 landscape, 1920x1080 landscape

Thumbnail - 400x300

Video Ads - Same aspect ratios as Image Ads, 1:1 square; 4:5 portrait; 4:3 landscape; 16:9 landscape

Carousel Ads - 1200x1200 square, 1920x1080 landscape

(Need more? All the specs from reddit for business: https://business.reddithelp.com/helpcenter/s/article/Reddit-Ad-Unit-Specifications)

Creating an ad account on reddit

Once you are excited about your creative, you will need to log into the ads manager and create an account. Navigate to reddit.com and click the drop down at the far right of the page with three dots. Select “Advertise on Reddit” and you’re off to the races.

Once you have created a profile, you will land on reddit’s business dashboard. If you click the hamburger (three horizontal dashes) at far left, you will be presented with drop down menu that offers a range of reddit’s options for running your campaigns on reddit. Select + Create Campaign to get started:

Creating a campaign objective on reddit

The next step is in selecting your campaign goal. The top options for campaign objective include purchasing for Awareness and reach, Traffic, Conversions, Video Views, or App Install. Your selection will likely be made in part by your business type, but also the nature of your business online.

For example, if you have a CPG brand, your KPI is likely based on driving reach or gaining awareness. In this type of campaign, you will pay for CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Whereas if you have an ecom business, you'll want to focus on driving conversion, so you would be well suited to test a campaign for Conversions, where you’ll pay for CPC (cost per click) and reddit will optimize the delivery of the ads toward conversions.

The primary difference in reddit ads, between a Traffic campaign and a Conversions campaign is that, while you will be charged by the click (CPC) for both, the plaform will optimize toward clicks more in a traffic campaign than in a conversions campaign. Meaning, if all else is the same, you will likely have a higher bid in Conversions campaign, than in a traffic campaign…and you may convert more of the traffic to site.

Achieving ROAS on Reddit ads

Video views should be pretty self explanatory. We would recommend looking at your average CPV as a measure of success, but CPC is another measure of campaign efficacy in relation to traffic campaigns is a good way to evaluate one campaign in relation to another.

Generally, we recommend that all of our clients launch a Traffic campaign first, before venturing into other ad campaign types. Regardless, it is important to ensure that you/your agency evaluates performance directly in relation to other social media channels. (For more reading on evaluating traffic sources through a single dashboard, check out https://www.littleads.co/blogaboutredditadvertising/how-to-compare-your-linkedin-ads-buy-to-a-reddit-ads-buy)

Tracking your ad campaign performance on reddit

To ensure you can check performance of Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc. in relation to reddit, you'll need to append a UTM to each and every ad creative. This will allow you to check the quality of traffic to site not just from reddit, generally, but from each creative type and every new post on reddit. If you haven't used a UTM builder before, here is a link to a very easy one https://utmbuilder.net/

How to select your target audience on reddit

Ok, so you have selected a campaign objective, what’s next? Determining your target audience is the secret sauce of reddit, the power of the platform. Generally speaking, target audience selection can be broken into one of three areas: Communities and Interests, Keywords, or Custom Audiences. Each offer you the opportunity to target reddit users, and send them to whatever destination url (website) you want. Communities will likely be your primary selection, but there are positive aspects to the other options as well.

As you build your audience, you’ll want to keep an eye on reddit’s projection of audience size at right. Placing that audience size in relation to your budget and your campaign goal is a bit of an art form, but, generally speaking, if you are focused on driving awareness a broader audience is better. On the other hand, if you are attempting to drive conversion, you’ll likely need a significant number of impressions (ad frequency) against your target. Meaning either a smaller audience size, or a larger budget may be necessary.

How is a keyword audience on reddit different than my PPC campaigns?

A keyword-based audience is similar to a PPC campaign, in that you are essentially bidding on specific keywords that redditors are viewing. However, keep in mind that this audience is less search-oriented than your Google/Bing PPC buys. Also, this audience selection may unnecessarily broaden your target. While it may be a faster way to get to market, doing some up front research about which specific subreddits would be most likely to engage with your product or service is incredibly beneficial. Which leads us to our most-recommended audience type: Communities and Interests.

When selecting the Community option for your audience segmentation, you are guaranteeing ad placement in subreddit communities that you know are a great fit for your product or service.

For example, say you are selling home gym equipment like our friends at Crandal Fitness. Then subs like r/naturalbodybuilding or r/liftingroutines could be a great fit for going after folks who like to get swoll. Knowing these niche communities really well is the best way to ensure that you create and publish the most relevant ad content that your users are looking for. The difference between a great post and a run-of-the-mill ad campaign.

Below subreddit Communities, you’ll find another option for targeting your selected audience on reddit: Interests. Similar to a Keyword campaign, this selection will bucket users based on content that they have recently viewed. To continue discussion around our weightlifting theme, under Interests you might select “Healthy Living” to reach active exercisers, but make sure you uncheck the other segments underneath it, if you want to limit your audience size. In this particular case, we would recommend unchecking everything besides Exercise and Fitness.

Expert Level Marketing: Custom Audiences on Reddit

The last major audience categorization that you can check is a Custom Audience. This would include a customer list, remarketing group based on website traffic, or re-engaging with redditors who have previously engaged with your content. These are fairly expert-level segments, and we would recommend running Community-based targeting first for your ads, before uploading a prospect list or going straight to remarketing.

(Although, if you have the capacity to do it, not a bad idea to get that remarketing pixel on the site sooner rather than later. Depending on your traffic to site, it can take a while for a significant remarketing group to load up onto that pixel.)

From here, reddit offers a few different ways to winnow down the audience projection. You can tailor your selected viewers based on geographic location, gender, and device type before then selecting your ad placement.

The two primary options you an select for ad placement include Feed (users general home page or community pages) or Conversation placement (fixed location inside a post between the post itself and the comments). Keep in mind that there are limitations, particularly for Conversation placement, where you won’t be able to do video AND your character count is necessary limited by the smaller geography of the ad type.

Determining your ad budget on reddit

The final step in creating your ad group, and before moving over to adding your ads is in solidifying your daily budget and bid strategy. Like evaluating your spend in relation to projected audience size, this step can also be a bit of an art form. If you are unaccustomed to setting PPC bids in the digital space, it can be a bit daunting.

Our best recommendation here, in absence of having your specific goals in mind, is to initially accept reddit’s bid recommendation on the lower end, and optimize it from there. We tend to recommend a more conservative approach when optimizing for reddit advertising cost, and then let the campaign performance dictate future bid strategy.

You will also have the option of setting a campaign lifetime budget, which will help you ensure that you don't overspend. But, in our experience, reddit's recommended bid is a good starting point to get your ad spend headed in the right direction. Make sure you are logging in to your reddit account frequently, checking each ad, and working to understand how you are performing against your campaign objectives.

Congratulations! You have created an ad group on reddit

Now you're ready to submit your ad creative and launch your reddit advertising campaign, which we will talk about in our next post. If you have any questions about reddit advertising or your reddit account, or need help getting your reddit campaigns or creative off the ground, it’s all we do here. Send us a note at littleads@littleads.co