Full guide- how to create "effective Reddit ads"

Hi,

Lately topic about "effective Reddit ads" is getting more and more serious and important, so i'll try to explain and give you my 2 cents how to make it happen (as fast as possible and even spending time and energy on things that are not necessary).

My background: Redditor for 15 years, Reddit advertiser for +5 years and certified Reddit agency partner.

To clarify- "effective" means producing the intended or expected results. This post will give you the guidelines to do exactly that. This will be as specific as I can.

For effective ads you will need 2 things:

Clarity about where you are. In other words- what are your capabilities/ situation.
Clarity where you want to go. In other words- what you want to achieve.

Stupid to say this about advertising but you'd be surprised how important these 2 questions are.

Let's go through each of their subquestions.

Clarity about where you are.

1.1. What budget you can allocate for 30 day test?

1.2. how many unique creatives and headlines you can make (I don't say different but unique- different positioning)?

1.3 can you set up your website tracking (Google Tag Manager) or you can do Shopify? If your are using 3rd party platform (Steam, Skool, YouTube) do they offer tracking?

1.4. have you figured out who is your target audience (no, "everybody" is not an answer- be as specific as you can be)? Do you have pre-existing data about your audience?

These points will help you exactly to see what you got and give you an idea about what you need to do to achieve "where you want to go".

2. Clarify where you want to go.

2.1. How success would look like to you (reached X amount of people, got X amount of website visitors, X amount of sales/ leads etc.). Pick only 1 success goal.

2.2. How will you measure the success of the ads?

Now you have everything- your tools and options and how/ where you want to go. In other words- you got the tools and a map to your treasures. Everything else - does not matter, because it is just a crap that you think is importantn but probably isn't.

The setup is the next part and we will use your answers from your previous questions to set up the account.

1.1 Allocated budget should be more at least $35 a day (or $1000 a month) for 2-3 months. Budget any smaller would give you false negatives (I have been there). If this is not you- i'd not suggest you to run ads (any ads platform).

1.2. If you can do 3 unique creatives (images/ videos) and at least 4 unique headlines then you would have 12 unique ad combo (3 creatives times 4 headlines).

1.3. If you got Shopify- Reddit has several click setup which is easy and painless. If you have your own website, I'd suggest to use AI or YouTube (or contact a professional) to set up your Google Tag Manager which will give data from your website to Reddit ads dashoard.

1.4. I will always suggest to run community targeting (excluding "expanded audience") to show ads to your customers. To find your communities, I built a tool that does exactly that (no email required)- https://subreddit.undecided.agency/ Add your keywords or phrases, remove or edit the keywords that it got and you should be able to find Reddit ads targetable audiences.

2.1 All of your advertising optimizing decisions need to be aimed at this specific goal. If you want/ need more sales- account need to be optimized for conversion ads to "add to cart" and/or "purchase" AND have remarketing campaigns. If your goal is to have as many visitors as you wish- optimize for high CTR and cheap "page visits" (still I don't suggest to use traffic campaign for website visitors).

2.2. This is the most important one. I'd prefer to have both Reddit ads data AND website data. Reddit ads data not only tracks what users who clicked on your ad did, BUT also tracks users who only saw the ad (did they later visiter your website or later converted). Website data shows only the people who visited your website so their data is somewhat limited but important because a lot of times you might see increase in results from other sources as well (google organic and direct).

Extra: If you really want to measure the full Reddit ads importance- measure your business performance before Reddit ads (2-3 months before Reddit), performance while running Reddit ads and after you are pausing your test check your performance after the Reddit ads.

That is all. This is the same framework that I'm using right now to figure out the most effective way to set up Reddit ads.

If I could shorten this framework, I would use a sentence: "Figure what you have and where you want to go".

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Full guide- how to create "effective Reddit ads"