Reddit may not get as much attention as other social networks, but the platform has more than 250 million monthly active users – more than both Pinterest and LinkedIn – and is a core originator of a wide range of web-based trends.
Gaining traction on Reddit can give your business a significant boost – it’s not easy, Reddit’s user-curated communities are not overly welcoming to branded content. But Reddit is looking to simplify the process, adding in user profiles earlier this year and refining their ad options to better cater to usage trends.
Furthering this, Reddit has this week announced an update to their self-service ads platform which will provide more data on how your ads are performing, based on specific targeting measures.
As explained by Reddit:
“Advertisers on Reddit currently target audiences in a number of ways, including by interest and subreddit. And with the new Reddit ads dashboard, advertisers can now analyze campaign performance on each targeting option to determine which audience segments are driving the most reach and performance for their campaigns.”
Advanced reporting categories in the new Reddit ads dashboard will include:
- Subreddit and Interest - Subreddits and Interests are the main ways advertisers target their campaigns. Now, advertisers will be able to see how their ads are performing by each subreddit or interest they choose to target.
- Geography - Advertisers will be able to use ‘Country’ or ‘Designated Market Area (DMA)’ to break down their performance by location.
- Platform - Advertisers will be able to view campaign metrics for both web and mobile web impressions.
- Date - Advertisers will be able to break down their campaign results by day.
Reddit also recently released their own version of Conversion Tracking Pixel to help advertisers better align their Reddit ad efforts with actual results.
“Conversion tracking helps advertisers measure their campaigns by associating a website action to an ad after someone has viewed the ad. By installing the Reddit Conversion Pixel, your conversion events will start showing up in the Reddit Ads dashboard.”
The process works much the same as pixel tracking on other platforms, providing another way for advertisers to better track and monitor the traffic being driven by their Reddit ads – though as noted by Marketing Land, Reddit doesn’t allow brands to track separate conversion events like they can on other platforms, limiting the data available.
But their ad platform is evolving, Reddit's working to advance their systems and provide more options. And as noted, given the significant role the network plays for users, and the overall usage, it’s worth considering.
Indeed, in their latest social influence report, Pew Research found that Reddit is on par with both LinkedIn and Snapchat in terms of news usage, with a significant number of those 250 million MAU relying on the platform as a daily news provider. At the same time, trust in Reddit as a news source is also much higher than it is in Twitter or Facebook.
You could argue that Reddit’s people-focused curation approach is actually much more effective in this regard than the algorithm efforts on those platforms – it may not have the size or options of other providers, but Reddit has been able to successfully scale something the bigger platforms have not, despite repeated efforts.
As such, it’s worth paying attention to Reddit, and worth considering its value as an ad platform, particularly as their systems evolve.