Reddit Ads–An Untapped Potential for Advertisers
Advertising
5 min read
What is Reddit? If you’ve just joined the internet, then welcome! Let me explain.
Reddit is a social media site full of comment threads or forums on a wide variety of topics.
Many people are active users of Reddit, to the point that it’s now become the 6th most used site in the U.S. In fact, Reddit has over 400 million active users each month. Another valuable aspect of Reddit is that the average time users spend on it is longer than most websites. Redditors (another way to say users of Reddit) spend an average of 16 minutes on the website. Despite its popularity and highly engaged users, many businesses aren’t aware of the opportunity to advertise on Reddit.
There are is one obvious reason people don’t advertise on Reddit: the culture. The attitude of Reddit is different from other social media. Just read this thread where someone asked what kind of people use Reddit and see for yourself.
To put it nicely, they are far more opinionated than people are on other sites. Redditors are known for speaking bluntly on the platform. Knowing this, you should be careful how you make an ad on the website or it might backfire completely.
Given that the nature of Reddit, businesses are justifiably afraid of advertising on the website. However, if you’re able to create a witty and authentic ad, you can find a lot of success advertising on the platform.
After working with one company, I created two types of ads. A traditional more conservative one, and a non-traditional more risky one. The first was a clean and simple ad for a business that was recruiting for a job opportunity. The second ad was a humorous cat GIF with the same goal. We were then able to compare the success of each ad type.
While working with this client, we were able to develop a more cost-effective ad campaign, target a specific audience, and create a unique ad that captured the brand and voice of that business.
Now that you understand what Reddit is and who uses it, time to make some fun ads, right?
Now that you’ve decided you want to use Reddit to advertise your business., let’s dive into the specifics of how to run a successful ad campaign. This handy dandy guide will help you create an ad campaign on Reddit.
You know the drill, use an email address to make an account if you don’t have one already.
As you will notice, there are 5 types of Ad Campaigns. You’ll want to pick the type of campaign that fits with the goal of your business. I’ll run through each one, then we will do an example with one of them. You’ll have to name it as well, one important thing to note is that you can have different ads within one campaign. I’ll give an example later of how and why you might make to make different ads.
Let’s quickly go over the five different types:
For this example, we are going to run with my preferred type, which is Traffic.
This is a great opportunity to be really specific and choose an audience that will be interested in what you have to offer. One thing to note as you choose is the daily impressions in the upper right corner. If you’re topic or community is too small, Reddit will tell you and you’ll know you need to expand your parameters (the traits of your target audience).
Obviously, different topics are more popular than others. For example, we can see that 3 million people see topics in Pets, and only 2 million people see topics in finance Not surprising that more people are interested in talking about your dog instead of your mutual funds.
You’ll have to set the highest price you are willing to pay for a click. Now, this isn't saying you are guaranteed to be paying that much, often it will be cheaper. Let’s set our bid to 0.50 cents. In the end, you will likely pay less than this, making Reddit Ads more cost-effective than other advertising sites like Google Ads for example.
Choose an image and your link to a landing page (the page on your website you want the audience to be directed to). I’d suggest using a GIF as movement is more effective at capturing your audience’s eye.
Also, you can choose to enable or disable comments on your ad. I’d suggest leaving comments on since that’s a big aspect of using Reddit. However, if you aren’t going to interact and keep up with the comments, then turn it off.
Another important thing to think about is what the link leading off Reddit leads to. For example, if you created a humourous ad for a job posting, your website should reflect that same humour for consistency. It’s important to remain consistent or else you’ll come off as inauthentic and your audience will lose interest.
And there you have it! A Beginner’s Guide to advertising on Reddit. Hopefully, this article enlightened you and you can use this information to start growing your business in a less conventional way.
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