Advertising on Reddit offers a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach highly engaged and niche audiences. Unlike traditional advertising platforms that primarily rely on demographic targeting, Reddit’s targeting options are centered around user interests and the communities (subreddits) they participate in.
With over 100,000 active subreddit communities catering to diverse topics, Reddit Ads allow targeting based on users’ passions and behaviors.
The reason behind advertising on Reddit
Since Canada’s Bill C-18, the Online News Act, became law last June, many publishers in the Indiegraf network started to explore alternative strategies and tactics for generating new leads as publications became blocked on Meta.
As part of helping publishers try out new distribution channels, Indiegraf’s Audience team set up a pilot in July to test the effectiveness of awareness ads and lead generation on Reddit Ads. Our goal was to see if there were ad platforms other than Meta (Facebook and Instagram) that could be optimized to generate cost-effective, quantitative results in a post-Bill C-18 landscape.
Why Reddit Ads? Evaluating the platform’s potential for news publishers
We considered the needs of our small, independent publishers, including the requirements for specific geographic targeting and the platform’s reputation as a forum for discourse on news and current events. Overall, we ran three campaigns for this test. Here’s what we learned from each case.
Are Reddit Ads worth it? Here are the results
Reddit Ads test #1
The first set of ads generated 475 clicks at a $1.05 cost-per-click (CPC). According to the available benchmarks from Reddit, this is within the ideal Reddit advertising cost per click, which is anything under $2.45. Traffic from Reddit as a source also went up during the campaign period based on our Google Analytics data, showing that the ads did generate some awareness to the website.
Reddit Ads test #2
The next campaign was conducted for a hyperlocal, Canadian news outlet. We ran a combination of awareness and lead-generation ads. The campaign generated six leads with a $406.83 budget, at $0.95 CPC and $66.85 cost-per-lead (CPL). This CPL is lower than our historical CPL and lead results from platforms like Twitter and Google Ads, and allowed for advanced, specific geo-targeting (small community) and the use of several keywords. However, it’s still relatively expensive for outlets with limited marketing budgets.
Reddit Ads test #3
For our last test, we ran another lead generation campaign, but with enhanced, intentional targeting using communities and keywords. Overall, this specific targeting made it very expensive. The campaign only generated three leads in total, despite a high number of clicks and impressions (which is still useful!). The resulting CPL was $566.66, which is comparable to our experience with more expensive ad platforms like X/Twitter.
Insights on advertising on Reddit
Based on these three tests, we can conclude that Reddit is a good platform for reaching audiences outside of Meta through traffic promotion ads. However, the low return on investment from these tests shows that lead generation on Reddit Ads is currently still the most ideal for financial businesses, and not local news. Even so, we’ll be keeping an eye on this platform in the face of legislations like Bill C-18 that are impacting news promotion.
We understand that local news entrepreneurs are worried about the long-term impact of repressive policies like Bill C-18 and are looking for alternatives, especially as they work with limited budgets. This experiment was made possible due to the flexibility of Indiegraf’s News Startup Fund (NSF), which encourages publishers to think outside the box when it comes to testing alternative marketing platforms beyond Meta.
