Reddit Ads Updates

Reddit’s new advertising format, Promoted Posts, is launching on Thursday August 4th and it looks really neat. The ads allow a website owner / brand to track links from their website or brand mentions shared on Reddit and promote them via the advertising system. If you’re familiar with Reddit you know that Redditors are sharing content and stories about brands and products all of the time.

This new advertising feature will help brands highlight those conversations and interactions with consumers.

In Reddit’s own words from their announcement:

In conversations with many advertisers, we often hear that Redditors have already rallied around brands and products they genuinely like, and advertisers want to know how they can be part of that. But at the same time, we want to ensure that our communities remain free and user-controlled.

We asked if this ad format would make it’s way into the self-serve system, where most advertisers purchase ads. The answer was there were no current plans to do this, but that it could be something they look into in the future.

Right now we are offering this to big brands. This may translate over to self-serve in the future but no current plans. – MyNameIzKhan (Reddit Ads Staff)

This means that to do a promoted post, at least for now, you’ll have to be a big brand or be willing to spend at least whatever the minimum ad buy is for their managed campaigns. That’s unfortunate as many smaller companies, or even those that simply enjoy managing ads on their own, could see really good value in this new advertising format. Hopefully an iteration of this makes it way into the self-serve system soon.

Reddit Ads added a feature yesterday that allows ads with budget left over to automatically extend. Before this update if for some reason your budget wasn’t spent during your campaign you had to setup an entirely new campaign, which was really painstaking.

All new ads are defaulted to the automatic extensions. If you don’t want your ads to automatically extend you’ll need to uncheck the box while setting up your campaign.

You can now target your ads to more than one subreddit with an advertising campaign. This has long been a desire for marketers on the Reddit platform.

To add more than one subreddit start by creating the creative for your ad. Once you’ve gotten the text, link, and images out of the way you’ll be taken to the next step where you can do targeting. Here you’ll see a radio button for your campaign to target reddit users by ‘interest’ groupings or subreddits.

Select subreddits and you’ll now be able to add your desired targets in the box. You can add subreddit targets by either typing out the subreddit or clicking on one that is suggested for you.
Important Note: when typing a subreddit out don’t include the /r/ part of the subreddit and make sure to type enter afterwards to make sure the system adds your subreddit target.

There are some limitations. You can’t target more than 100 subreddits and you currently still can’t target a campaign to the Frontpage and to subreddits as well.