Reddit Ads Fall 2021 Updates

Reddit Ads is another paid media platform that we love to use for our clients. We don’t talk about it much because updates in the channel happen few and far between. Well, that changed, within the past few months, Reddit has announced three new features that advertisers can start using within the dashboard.

These features will either help you increase your reach, or help you better optimize your current campaigns. So let’s get into it. We’re going to hop into the ad’s dashboard, and we’re going to show you what these new features are.

One of the recent changes, this one was announced in September of 2021 has been the addition of another placement for your Reddit ads. In order to see where this exists, I’ll go and create a campaign, head over, and just name it really quick. There we see the objectives; I’m going to come back to this really soon because not all objectives are able to use this new ad placement.

To get a better understanding of all the objectives, you can check out the introduction to Reddit ads video that we created right here. But we have our funding already, I’ll click continue. As you go through the ad group setup, eventually you will get to a section called placements, as it says, where our ads will be displayed.

Now for the longest time, the only option we had was the feed. But the conversations option is the new portion that Reddit recently added. Let me go over the difference. To do that, I’m going to head out of the ad platform and just go to Reddit.com to show you some examples. I’m in a particular sub-Reddit, and as I’m scrolling down, eventually, we’re going to get to an ad, and here’s one option for a video ad.

This is one example of a feed placement. These ads can show on the home feed, if a user is browsing the popular feeds, or in this case, on a particular community feed. So that’s one option. But if I scroll back to the top, I want to get into a particular discussion within the sub-Reddit. If I click on this one because I see a good amount of comments, and now we are in a particular discussion.

People are already engaging on this particular question or topic. It makes sense why this placement is called conversation placement, because a discussion is already underway. This ad placement appears right under the fixed placement of what started the thread, and it’ll always be above the first comment. You can see that as I scroll down, but I’m going to head back up.

This additional placement can have two benefits, the first is going to be to expand your reach. With the new placement, we have more opportunities to connect with a particular audience. Second, you could argue that this placement is going to reach a user with a deeper intent.

The home feed could be pretty generic. If someone’s on a popular feed, they could just be browsing whenever is hot at the moment. Even if we are just browsing the overall feed like this running shoe geeks community. Someone could just browse through the feed, realize this is not for them, and leave.

But if someone’s clicking deeper within that community, looking at discussions, engaging with discussions, odds are they’re more interested and more likely to engage with other users and content within those specific communities.

Now, I know in the intro to Reddit advertising video, I do say that community targeting or sub-Reddit targeting is one of my favorites, but not every sub-Reddit that’s created within Reddit is a community targeting option. But if you do find one that is perfect for your target audience, you can now choose this more specific placement, match it up with the community targeting, and craft some very specific and focused ad copy to use. Let’s jump back into the ad’s dashboard.

We see right here while I’m creating the campaign, I’m actually in the ad group view. I want to note that for a reason, because when we do go back down to placements, this may give you the idea to split out your ad group by placement. Especially now that I mentioned that the intent of the user could be different, and we do see our budgets are at the ad group level.

I can’t really give a recommendation on how you should structure your accounts, that’s going to be completely depending on your overall budgets, if you think segmenting the user based on the placement makes sense, and so many other factors. Just note the default option will be feed, but you can switch to conversations, or if you want to target both placements within the same ad group, you do have that option.

Now bear with me, because I’m going to be jumping around a little bit, let’s see if they let me go back to the objective screen, okay, they did. If you want to use the conversation placement, you can use all of the objectives except for video views. If you’re running a video views campaign, conversation placement will not be an option.

Now, if I hop back into that particular community we looked at before, you may have noticed that’s a video within that ad. Yes, you can have video ads and other campaign objectives beyond just the video views campaign objective. Hopefully, that’s not too confusing.

But to clarify, let’s say you chose a traffic objective. Within that traffic objective, still trying to get as many people as possible to your landing page, you could still run a video ad, hopefully, that makes sense. After you have your targeting selected within your ad group, you will be instructed to create the ad. You can see we can choose previous posts which is fine, or you can go over and create a new post.

For conversation placements, image and videos are going to be the main post types that you can use. A gallery or carousel post is currently not eligible for a conversation placement. While you’re creating a new post, you’ll have to keep in mind what placement targeting options you are using. Feed placements, and conversation placements have different specs and character limits, let me show you.

I’m going to paste the rules within the headline, and these are coming directly from Reddit help. For conversation placements, desktops can accept headlines up to 250 characters, unlike the 300 characters for the feed placement. So if you do have an ad group that’s targeting both placements, you will want to make sure you’re still keeping within the 250 character limit.

Second thing you’ll want to know in terms of character limits, mobile versions of your ad can accept headlines up to 100 characters. The default device option when creating an ad group within Reddit will be all devices. This is another option for you to consider if you want to really segment out your targeting. If you’re keeping everything together, then you may want to keep your mobile and desktop headlines to 100 characters or less.

Next, as I pull the next spec, below the headline you see the card image. Yes, I understand this headline is too long, but whatever, we can read it. Reddit is recommending using a 400 by 300 thumbnail image for your card, because the typical 1200×628 doesn’t look well in this compact space, let me jump into the community one more time.

I have my desktop blown up to about 150 percent, and yes it’s video, but look how small that thumbnail preview image is. Now imagine that even smaller on a mobile device, that is why having a clear 400 by 300 image is recommended. The last thing I wanted to share if you are running both placements within the same ad group is that if you are using a video as you’re creative, it will autoplay in the feed placement but not in the conversation’s placement.

So you remember the first ad example I showed you in the feed, whatever video game that was it just started auto-playing. When I was in the sub-Reddit or community, I would have to click on the video to see it.

Then one more thing about conversations placements, I’m going to head back to the main dashboard. This is our demo account, we don’t use it for any actual campaigns. But once you launch a campaign in Reddit, let’s say you’re running all placements. If you want to view the stats by placement you can go down to breakdown, and then review your campaigns by placement.

There’s no data in this demo account, but underneath the name of your campaign, ad group, whatever, you will see the difference between feed and conversation. So that was the first of the new features we were discussing for Reddit ads, for the second one, I’m going to jump within this campaign and then just look to edit this particular ad group. The second new feature is a bid recommendation tool, and we see it lives under the audience size projection over to the right.

I’m going to scroll down first, because your budget and bids are towards the bottom of your ad group. We see in this example I’m bidding one dollar, and based upon my other targeting options, pretty much the main thing I have set up here, and the main targeting option I have selected for this ad group is for the horror entertainment genre. So again, I am bidding one dollar, and depending on my location targeting, my device targeting, the placements I have selected, we can now go over here and see the typical range of what other users are bidding within the similar landscape.

So it looks like for what I have selected, other accounts are bidding anywhere from a dollar fifty to five dollars, and Reddit is recommending four dollars and fifty cents. Now, the way that they display this is pretty deceptive, because four dollars and fifty cents is not the median between 150 and five dollars, that number probably should be slid over here.

But we see what they’re trying to do, they want us to change our bid to go up to 450. Still bid however you want to bid or what you think makes sense based upon a recent performance, but the bidding landscape visual can still be helpful.

Over the years, we have seen Reddit ads get more competitive as more people know and start using the channel. So in a few of our client accounts, we’re running Reddit ads for a long time, they have seen impression volume decrease.

As competition has gone up, we’ve realized we’ve had to raise our bids just to get the visibility that we used to have. So this gives us a better understanding of if it’s worth bidding high enough, what other accounts are using for their bids, so then we can make a better decision of is this still a viable option for us.

So it’s fairly easy to compare similar targeting options on all the other channels, and actually can help you see if you want to still continue Reddit ads or test out a different channel instead. So in this case, if most people are bidding at least a dollar fifty. I may want to go back down, get a little bit above that range. But not necessarily go to the full four dollars and fifty cents that they’re recommending and then save this bid.

Then the last update that I’m going to talk about lives within the dashboard, and that is going to be updates to the bulk feature. So we want to select bulk import. Because now within bulk import, it is easier to edit your bids and budgets across multiple ad groups at once. I’m not going to dive deep into the bulk import feature, because there is a lot there.

If you see this link right here with bulk import guide, Reddit has a good list of recommendations on how you can exactly use this feature. But quickly, we can just download a template, in this demo account, we only have one campaign created. But however, many campaigns you have, you can select whichever campaigns you want to change the budgets and the bids. If you want to start from scratch, you can use a blank template, that’s where it gets into a lot of manual work, so I do not recommend doing that, especially if you’re just editing current campaigns.

So just select the ones that you want, click export campaign, there we see on the screen it downloaded the template for me, so I’m going to click on this excel doc, here’s what it looks like within Microsoft excel. You see, it’s kind of messy, but it has all the components of the one campaign we have set up within this account.

All the way over to the one carousel ad I created when we made the video about the new carousel add feature, you can watch that one here. But we did talk earlier about potentially creating different ad groups and segmenting out by placement, potentially by device, a combination of all those. Let alone all the different types of audiences you could target if you have a lot of ad groups.

It’s easy to go over to the bid value, which is the two-dollar bid we just updated when checking out the new bid recommendation tool, and say okay, this ad group is working for us, I want to jump it up to four. For budget, I’m going to increase it to 100. You can update all your bid values for all your different ad groups, update the budget for all your different ad groups, however many you have.

I’m going to save this, head back into the bulk import tool within Reddit ads, and then I can add my new import, choose my file and then click on import. It’s going to show you what changes I made, I can x out of this, it says the status is successful.

So I’m going to head back up to my menu, go to my main dashboard, check out the ad group, and then I’m going to edit the ad group. As I’m scrolling down, there we see the new budget and the new bid. Clearly not too helpful if you just have the one campaign and ad group in it like we do in this demo account.

But if you have many different ad groups manually doing it is such a pain in the butt. It takes a couple of minutes just to export all of your ad groups, change your bids and budgets and just upload it back into the system. That is a pretty high-level run-through of some of the newer features available within Reddit ads.

As I said in the intro, this is a channel that doesn’t update things frequently. So when they do, we like to cover them and make sure that you are aware of these changes. A few of our clients love Reddit ads, besides retargeting that you can do within the channel, which you can watch how to set that up here. There are a few of our clients where some of the community or sub-Reddit targeting is perfect. So specific to who our clients want to target.

If you’re seeing success in Reddit ads, or you have any questions on the new features that we talked about today, let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez