Reddit continues to build on its marketing opportunities for brands, with the launch of a new ‘Conversation Placement’ ad option, which will enable bands to promote their products within its highly engaged post comment threads.

As you can see here, Conversation Placement enables businesses to position their promotion within relevant reply chains, beneath the original post and above the first comment. The option also includes a prominent CTA button to help drive response.

As explained by Reddit:

“Community conversations are the heartland of Reddit, where the most engaged exchanges take place across a wide variety of passions and interests, every day. Conversation Placement allows advertisers to connect with their audiences as these exchanges are unfolding, and it works in collaboration with Reddit’s in-feed advertising to reach even more users where they’re most leaned-in.”

Indeed, Reddit further notes that more than 350,000 conversations occur on the platform every day, while Reddit users spend 42% of their time in the app, on average, within comment threads.

The bigger question, then, is how will Reddit users respond, and will it be a welcome and effective placement option for brands.

Reddit says that in beta testing with over 600 partners, Conversation Placement campaigns have driven ‘significant success’ across all industries, verticals and campaign objectives.

“In aggregate, beta test partners saw a 9% average increase in clickthrough rate (CTR), 10% higher downstream conversion rate (CVR), and 23% lower Cost Per Click (CPC) rate when using both Conversation placement and Feed.”

Reddit also notes that when Conversation Placement is used in a broader ad approach, in partnership with its regular Feed ads, brands have been able to increase their overall reach on the platform by up to 20%.

Which makes sense, given the tandem exposure potential, but you can see how that approach could help you get your brand and offers in front of the right users, based on specific subreddits and the most engaged conversations in each.

Maybe, simply by association, that will help drive better ad response, and there’s definitely evidence to suggest that sheer mention and exposure volume can drive better response.

In terms of placement, some Redditors will no doubt be unhappy about seeing ads in comment streams, but most are now more open to ads, given the broader placement options across the web, and the general understanding that this is a requirement to fund the services they use.

It could be worth an experiment – Reddit’s Conversation Placement option is available to all Reddit advertisers from today.