How New Reddit CPC Ads Can Help You Reach Valuable Customers

In addition to Reddit’s current offering of digital advertising, the recently announced Reddit CPC ads are a new way to target customers and drive more revenue for your product, or more users to your site.

In addition to these new CPC ads, Reddit’s self-serve advertising platform offers CPM (cost per mile 0r cost per impression) and CPV (cost per view) ads.

The introduction of CPC ads will allow advertisers to set their bids based on their click-through performance, rather than the number of impressions or video views that the ad receives.

CPC bidding has been a featured option for years on many other digital advertising platforms such as Facebook, Google Ads, and LinkedIn. The announcement of Reddit CPC ads follows several months of beta testing with more than 50 advertisers.

According to the CPC rollout announcement on the site’s blog, “The new offering will open up more inventory, enable a brand new kind of advertising on Reddit and should result in better ROI as advertisers are only paying when someone clicks on their ad.”

Intro To Reddit As An Advertising Platform

Reddit offers a unique platform for online advertisers. The site is structured around Reddit’s user-driven and user-moderated communities called “subreddits.”

Visitors can view news and content in virtually any area that interests them. Users can create subreddits that are specific to any topic or interest. This allows people to find and subscribe to communities built around content that interests them and also helps them find communities of like-minded Redditors to discuss and share their content.

Reddit’s thousands upon thousands of subreddits cover politics, news, hobbies, trades, entertainment, and nearly anything else you can imagine. Since its launch in 2005, Reddit has developed a highly engaged and active community of regular visitors.

Reddit consistently ranks in the top 10 most visited sites in the US and in the top 20 most visited sites in the world.

Source: Alexa.com

Reddit offers advertisers a number of ways to target their preferred audience. You are given the ability to target your audience based on their interests, specific subreddits, location, device type, and time of day.

Interest-based targeting can be selected through broad, pre-defined categories such as Business & Finance, Entertainment, Travel etc. These broad categories are then broken down into more specific sub-categories that you can choose to add or remove from your targeting.

For example, Entertainment is divided into Humor, Movies, Podcasts, and several more specific areas of interest.

The option to target specific subreddits means that, in many cases, advertisers can find communities that are highly engaged with their product, service, or industry.

Reddit is home to over 150,000 active communities and averaged 14 billion views per month in 2018.

If you can’t find a desired existing subreddit to target, it means that it is too small (too few subscribers) to target. You also have the option of excluding specific subreddits from your audience targeting.

Reddit’s Advertising Programs

Reddit has two programs for advertisers.

1. The self-serve program.

This has a minimum budget of $5 per day and will accommodate most small to mid-size advertising needs, and offers an array of targeting options as well as an optional conversion pixel for a deeper analysis of ad conversion performance.

2. The second program is called the managed advertising program.

This requires a minimum of $50,000 quarterly ad spend. Managed advertising comes with premium advertising products (such as traditional banner display ads), custom traffic reports, campaign planning, set-up, monitoring, and a dedicated account manager.

Above: Example of a banner ad, a premium ad product offered in the managed advertising program

The ad creation process in the self-serve program is pretty straight forward. Ads created through Reddit’s self-serve program are known as link posts, text posts, or video posts and will appear as promoted posts within the Reddit feed.

Promoted posts are differentiated from normal posts by a blue highlight and are labeled as promoted within the window of the post.

They can contain text, images, videos and accompanying “Learn More,” “Watch Now,” or a variety of other CTAs to drive traffic, views, or brand awareness as desired by the advertiser.

Video, Link and Text Reddit CPC Ads

There are two types of Reddit CPC ads that advertisers can use, these are:

1. Video posts
2. Link posts

Video posts can feature MP4 or MOV format videos up to 15 minutes in length.

Link posts will take users to an advertiser’s site.

Links vs Text Posts

While text posts take users to another page in Reddit where an advertiser can expand on their product or offer or facilitate discussion among users – these are not a feature that Reddit uses for CPC, as of yet.

Link posts are ideal for driving traffic to your site, while text posts are better suited for promoting discussion and engagement with your audience.

It should be noted, however, that text posts currently only allow CPM bidding.

Creative advertisers who are familiar enough with the Reddit community can utilize text posts to harness the power of Reddit’s user base to increase awareness and get people talking about their product.

These three varieties of ads will appear as promoted posts within the main feed of the site. A visitor who is scrolling through the site will generally see promoted posts toward the top of the feed and occasionally as they scroll down the feed.

Above: A Verizon link ad within the Reddit feed.

How Does Reddit’s CPC Advertising Work?

Using the self-serve advertising platform, the objective that you choose for your campaign will determine the bid type (CPC, CPM, or CPV).

In other words, the goal of your campaign is tied to the method that you will be bidding (and ultimately, how you will be charged) for your ad’s performance.

Campaigns with Traffic, Conversions, or App Installs selected as the campaign objective will be bidding on a per-click basis.

This means that they will be charged for every click on their ads, based on the bid that they have set.

Campaigns that have selected Brand Awareness and Reach as the objective will be bidding on a CPM basis and will be charged for every 1000 impressions.

The Video Views objective will have a bid type of CPV (cost per video view) and will charge for every view of their video.

Above: Campaigns with Traffic, Conversions, or App Installs selected as their objective will automatically utilize CPC bidding

Above: Example of a video post.

Reddit Video posts are a naturally popular medium for film marketing teams and streaming services looking to introduce new movies, shows, or season premieres to the Reddit audience. The ability to add videos up to 15 minutes in length allows advertisers the freedom to go well beyond the approximate 2-minute range of typical a movie trailer.

Above: Some of the content features available for link posts in the self-serve ad program.

General Advice For Advertising On Reddit

The best thing to do if you’re thinking of advertising on Reddit is to take some time to familiarize yourself with Reddit as a whole and some of the subreddits that would be appropriate for your target audience.

The same engaged and passionate user base that rewards properly-executed and creative promotion on the site can be brutal to advertisers or promoters who they feel are misusing or spamming the community with poorly disguised or misguided marketing efforts.

Reddit’s CPC bidding is sure to attract new advertisers, but they would be wise to study and understand the nature of the platform and what separates the success stories from the failures.

Conclusion

The addition of Reddit’s CPC bidding will give advertisers more control over their ad spend and may offer a higher ROI for many advertisers who were previously only able to advertise with CPM and CPV bidding.

There are more advertising announcements coming in the future as well.

According to the CPC announcement on the Reddit blog, “CPC is the first, and biggest, of several upcoming performance offerings from Reddit, that include enhancements to targeting, reporting, campaign management and more.”