Advertising on Reddit – Does it work? (Case Study)

Advertising on Reddit case study.

On May 13th-14th 2016, we ran a small advertising campaign on Reddit to see if we could drive traffic that would convert into leads or sales for the BGDM site. We ran the campaign for 24 hours with a budget of $6. For the campaign, we promoted the blog post 12 Must read books from millionaires and billionaires who were once just like you.

Reddit ad
Reddit ad

Targeting.

Reddit allows you to target your content at the subreddit level. I’m not sure what the maximum amount of subreddits are that you can implement into a campaign, but we tried to include as many relevant subreddits as possible. For this campaign, we targeted the following subreddits.

  • Salespitch
  • Millionairemakers
  • Salesforce
  • Affiliatemarketing
  • Makingmoney
  • Entrepreneur
  • Businessbuilder
  • Billionaire
  • Smallbusiness
  • Sales
  • Marketing_tips
  • Business
  • Business_ideas
  • Businessschool
  • Copywritng
  • Marketing
  • Entrepreneurship

The landing page has affiliate links to the books on Amazon for web visitors to purchase. According to Amazon’s analytics, there were 2 clicks from 1 unique visitor that can be attributed to the campaign.

Results

  • Impressions – 5202
  • CPM – $1.17
  • CPC – $0.76
  • Clicks – 8
  • Click through rate – 0.29%
  • Affiliate sales – 0

Below is a snapshot from Reddit’s analytics console.

Reddit traffic dataReddit traffic data

Reddit ad delivery breakdown
Reddit ad delivery breakdown

Findings.

The campaign generated a few clicks and if a higher budget was spent, it could have yielded more traffic and potentially a few more conversions.

The fact that the advertising can only be bought on a CPM basis and that the audience targeting is at a general interest level makes it difficult to attract the most relevant traffic to the web content. On the plus side, the traffic was relatively inexpensive, so trialling the campaign with a few dollars was interesting.

I’ve also used Reddit organically and I felt that if successful, the organic traffic would bring in far more qualified traffic than the paid traffic. Although paid advertising will get your content more exposure across many more subreddits and even the front page if you choose.

In all honesty, I’m not convinced by the commercial opportunity that Reddit advertising provides, however I am prepared to do more testing to see if there are other ways to improve the ad performance from the platform.

Have you had any experience with Reddit ads? Did you find them useful in your web marketing campaigns? Share your thoughts with us below.

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1 thought on “Advertising on Reddit – Does it work? (Case Study)”

  1. Hello Sir

    Nice blog.I am about to advertise on Reddit at the minimum CPM rate of 0.20 USD. I want to know that what was your minimum CPM in the campaign for 24 hours.Does Reddit bill us more than our budget. I am a article writer and I am thinking about Reddit or any other similar ad network to increase my website traffic and to generate CPM revenue only. I am not expecting anything from CPC.

    Regards
    Hrishi Dere

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