It’s part of my job to test paid ads on Reddit MyFBAPrep Experiment 2024. I started building our account by commenting and contributing content to relevant subreddits, and by Q4 we decided to start investing in paid advertising experiments. Initially, I wanted to work with an expert since I had never managed paid acquisition before, but the user interface was surprisingly easy to use.
Here’s how I tested, validated, and decided whether to add Reddit to our acquisition pipeline.
Table of contents
Initial Reddit ad setup
First, I dug in and set up an ad account using our existing profile and then opted for the easy account creation process.
After that, I filled out the title, selected a photo, and added the CTA.
Next is targeting and delivery, I chose relevant interests and subreddits to target.
I then entered our payment details.
I also went into the other settings and selected the lowest CPC for our budget.
After I had everything set up, including audience and creative, I had a call with the Reddit team to go over our settings. After they confirmed everything was set up fine, I let the ad run for a few weeks to test it out.
Here are the most important things I do during initial setup:
- Select subreddits that I know are relevant to our target audience
- Added source parameter to all links so it will be appended with ?utm_source=reddit
- Unchecked dynamic audience expansion, at least during testing
i did it no Add keywords because I’m not sure I won’t capture the wrong audience with some of these keywords (for example, if I add “Amazon,” I might get r/antiwork views since Amazon’s return-to-office announcement).
Reddit campaigns, ad groups, and ads
I also learned that Reddit ads can be “nested” within each other. Reddit has ad campaigns, ad groups, and individual ads.
Activity
Activity Is the largest “bucket” of ads and can contain multiple ads or ad groups. Historically, you would set goals and budgets within a marketing campaign for everything it was nested within.
ad group
ad group is a group of similar ads for which you can set specific parameters, such as audience, placements, timeline, and bids. In Reddit, you can also set budgets and goals in ad groups. You must have a campaign to create an ad group.
advertise
advertise is a personal ad on Reddit. These ads can be part of an ad group or a campaign, and they’re a single unit that can have different headlines, calls to action, and other parameters. Ads must be added to ad groups.
Initial testing and adjustments
On October 14, 2024, I first set up three different ads.
- Advertising for Season 4 Focus on the peaks. The ad has a “Learn More” call-to-action, which leads to a bottom-of-funnel blog post about the topic. We tested AI-generated images for this purpose.
- universal advertising Focus on our services. The ad has a “Contact Us” call-to-action that leads us to a contact form. It has a cute duck.
- a brand advertisement A design image with our logo and brand colors, and a CTA to “sign up” for our newsletter.
Although the number of contact form submissions initially increased, it leveled off after the first week. We also didn’t see any contact form submissions directly related to the Reddit UTM, but that probably doesn’t tell the whole story because when I see an ad I’m interested in, I’m looking for that brand.
During this time we were assigned an excellent account manager who was very informative and sent analysis and recommendations every two weeks. He also did an initial check of our ad to confirm that everything was set up the way it should be.
Two-week stay (October 31, 2024)
Two weeks later, our account manager sent the following;
- Compared to the vertical CTR benchmark of 0.33%, your performance is above average!
- Your duck meme has a click-through rate of 0.58%! It’s great to see this, personally it makes sense and this meme really conveys the story you’re trying to tell. It is recommended to try some AB testing, just use this creative and test different titles to see how they react too.
At this point, the cute duck ad was doing better than the other two, so I turned it off and replaced it with;
All new ads have “Contact Us” as the CTA and are nested under our fourth quarter ad group.
This is also when I set up events in the Reddit Pixel.
Set up events using Reddit Pixel
This was another step in the process that was easier than I expected. First, I joined Reddit Pixel to our Google Tag Manager Use community templates.
Then I tested if it works with Reddit Pixel Assistant (Chrome extension).
To set up the events we want to track, I go to Event Manager > Event Configuration > Set Events
From there, I can add the contact form URL to select the events I want to track.
It opened the page and I was able to demonstrate the action I wanted to track to register it as an event.
URL keyword selection looks like this:
I chose the web element because I want to track button clicks. The web element form looks like this:
Here I can set the event type and then use Select Trigger Element to interact with the event on the page.
In the example below, I’m linking the click of the “Submit” button to the event.
Contact form submissions (aka leads) are our north star metric and the only KPI that truly justifies this pipeline.
Sign in four weeks
After another two weeks, I checked in with our account manager to see our progress and next steps.
As of November 14, 2024, the duck meme remains at the top of the list, with a click-through rate of 0.827% (others hover around 0.3x%) and a cost-per-click of $0.71 (others hover around $0.9x).
I turned off all other ads, turned on the retargeting campaign, and tested the duck meme with different headlines.
If contact form submissions don’t increase significantly, this will be our last Reddit test before Season 1.
Final results from Reddit ad test
Another week and a half later, on November 23, 2024, I decided to keep the top-performing ad indefinitely along with the retargeting ad using the same creative.
The main reasons are:
1) Our CTR is up, but the number of clicks is down (which also means less spend).
2) Our contact form submission volume is starting to climb again, above what we initially saw.
3) Digging deeper, the number of “good” (non-spam, in our ICP) leads has remained stable since the launch of retargeting ads on the 14th. On the 21st, we received an inquiry and our co-founder shared an example of our ideal ICP.
Key lessons learned from testing Reddit ads
My biggest takeaways from this Reddit ad experiment are:
- This will take as much or as little time as you are willing to invest.
- Your creativity is everything and our account managers confirm it. He mentioned that he used our duck meme as an example in another call to discuss what good content looks like for the community (a proud moment for us!)
- Due to the nature of how Reddit users view ads, it’s difficult to track results definitively. Instead, I have to look at correlations and monitor everything else going on in marketing to make an educated guess about Reddit’s contribution to our page views and leads.
- Since it’s a relatively new platform, it doesn’t have the bloat and complexity of platforms like Google and Meta. It’s less intimidating, and I’m not worried about missing a legacy switch nested three pages deep that will make all the difference.
After a few weeks of Reddit testing and budget review, we decided to keep the duck meme ad and one retargeting ad until season one. I set spending limits so even if we only check in the first quarter, we don’t go over budget.
All in all, I’m glad Reddit was my first foray into the world of paid advertising. I was able to learn some basics and observe the most important things to watch that our account managers highlighted and use that as lessons learned for other pipelines.
Next, I plan to start testing LinkedIn (higher cost-per-acquisition) and Meta in the new year. stay tuned!
