Advertising Nationally With Reddit
(Small Niche)
Maybe your business sells something in a small niche (meaning: not something for everyone). Your target audience is a very small and defined niche. If that is the case, I recommend advertising with Reddit Ads and here is why…
Let’s say you sell something that only musicians can use. With Google Ads, you can target people who like music but that would be much too broad. You want to target musicians themselves. And with Meta Platforms (Facebook and Instagram) you probably can target musicians (as their targeting is much more detailed) but like I mentioned in previous lessons, I don’t recommend Meta for national or international advertising (it would be too expensive). However, with Reddit Ads, you can target a small niche by targeting subreddits for that niche.
For example, if you head over to reddit.com (not Reddit Ads just yet), and search “musicians”, you will see that there are subreddits (which are basically forums) for musicians…
Inside Reddit Ads, you can actually target your advertising to show only on specific, individual subreddits such as those. That makes Reddit Ads a great way to advertise nationally but only to a specific and small audience.
The downside to Reddit Ads is the high cost. Be expected to pay like $0.50 cents a click! But when the audience pool is as small as it will be (with niche targeting), it’s not so bad. Plus, I’ll have some tips on how to keep the cost per click as low as possible.
Campaign Setup
To start, go to
and create your account. Creating an Ads account will also automatically credit a traditional Reddit account for your business (even though you may have a personal one already), just FYI.
Any time you are returning after the initial account setup, click the “log in” link at the bottom…
To begin creating your campaign, click the “+ Create Campaign” button…
Next, choose the “Advanced Create” option. It’s always best to not let the ad platform do anything for you. It usually results in overspending. It’s best to always have control where you can…
Now, of course, name your campaign and then choose “Video Views”. Just like with the Facebook campaign, video views cost less, they still build awareness, and are much more attention grabbing than anything else…
Scrolling down from there, we come to the “Spending” section. Setup the credit card you are going to be paying with. Then, underneath “Campaign lifetime budget”, you can leave that blank. Just like I’ve explained in previous lessons, you can start, stop, and edit campaigns as you wish so I never use that method of budgeting. Now just click “Continue”…
Now, we’ll name the ad group. It’s the same drill as with Google Ads and Meta (I like to name the ad group based on who I’m targeting)…
Scrolling down a bit, we arrive at the “Define your audience” section. This is where we will target the subreddits (also known as “communities” in Reddit Ads). Start by typing in the “Community audience” field and when some subreddits pop-up, select some matching potentials…
Immediately after you select those communities, it will suggest some more potentials. That’s something new they’ve started doing. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether you want to add them or not. For me, my audience is large enough so I’ll leave them alone and move on. Then, I would uncheck the “Use dynamic audience expansion”. Once again, never let them do things on their own…
Now we’re down to the “Custom audience” section. We can skip past this part. It has to do with things like retargeting. Well, I don’t like retargeting on Reddit Ads because the pixel doesn’t track people who visit my site outside of Reddit. It only tracks people who have clicked-through to my site from my Reddit advertising only. On Google Ads and Meta Platforms, those pixels track everyone who visits my site (so I could run retargeting ads that show to them no matter how they first arrived at my site). But on Reddit Ads, I have to run ads first, and then retarget them later (missing all the Reddit users who might have already visited my site through other means). So we’ll just move on for now.
Next, add the country or countries you want to advertise in…
Now we’re at the “Devices” section. I’m going to leave that on “All” since my site is optimized for both mobile and desktop. And under “Placements”, they have it set to the only option anyway: “Feed” (probably because we’re doing a video ad). And the feed is the only place we’d want it anyway…
We’re now down to the “Set up delivery” section. This is where we’ll set up the budget and bid. I’m gonna start it at $20 a day and see if that’s enough or if I need to make it higher. I’m also gonna bid the highest suggestion of $0.15 cents (since I only targeted those three subreddits, if I don’t beat the competition’s bid, my ads don’t show). I’ll probably even up it to $0.50 cents eventually.
Then, I’ll leave it set to “Run continuously starting today”…
Down in the “Estimates” section, we see that our audience is very narrow. That’s good! That means we have targeted our tiny niche of musicians well. Just click “Continue”…
Creating Ads
You’ll now arrive at the ad creation page. First, you’ll name your ad and then you’ll proceed to creating it. The concept here is the same as using video on Meta Platforms. It doesn’t have to be a well produced video with talking (like what you see on TV or YouTube). It just has to be some kind of moving image so when people are scrolling their Reddit feed, your ad stops them for a sec. You can get these video clips from an app called Boosted. I covered this in more detail in my lesson on Meta. I’d go back to that if you haven’t read it (or to brush up). Anyway, we’ll use the same concept here.
What you’ll do is write your headline and then upload your video clip…
Then, choose a thumbnail image from the strip of thumbnail options taken from the video, add your website’s URL, and choose a call-to-action button from the drop-down like “Learn More”…
Now we’ll skip the next “Tracking” section for now and we’ll look at the ad preview. If all looks good, continue…
Now we wait for Reddit to approve the ad and they will launch it as soon as it’s approved.
But what about retargeting (remarketing)? You set them up for Google Ads and Meta and are wondering how to run them. That’s what my next lesson is on…
