Rachel Andrea Go

B2B eCommerce Content Marketing and Strategy

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Testing Reddit Ads for a B2B eCommerce Logistics Company

Testing paid ads on Reddit was one of my 2024 experiments for MyFBAPrep. I had started building up our account by commenting and contributing to relevant subreddits, and by Q4 we decided we could start investing in a paid ads experiment. I set aside $3,000 from our marketing budget to test the channel and review the results.

Here’s how I tested, validated, and decided whether or not to add Reddit to our acquisition channels.

Table of Contents

Initial Reddit ads set-up

Initially, I wanted to work with an expert as I had never managed paid acquisition before, but the UI was surprisingly easy to work with.

To begin, I dove in and created an ad account with our existing profile, then selected the simple account creation flow.

After that, I filled in a title/headline, chose a photo, and added a CTA.

Next was targeting and delivery, and I chose the relevant interests and subreddits to target.

I added subreddits I knew our audience was on, focusing on a specific channel we specialized in (Amazon).

Then I entered our payment details.

I also went into the other settings and opted for the lowest cost per click for our budget.

After getting everything set up, including audience and creatives, I set up a call with the Reddit team to review our settings. After they confirmed everything was set up well, I left the ads running for a few weeks to test.

Here are the most important things I did during the initial setup:

  • Opted for subreddits I knew were relevant to our target audiences
  • Added source parameter for all links, so it would append ?utm_source=reddit
  • Un-checked dynamic audience expansion, at least for the testing period

I did not add keywords, because I wasn’t confident I wouldn’t capture the wrong audience with some of them (ex. if I added “Amazon” I might get r/antiwork views since Amazon announced a return-to-office announcement).

Reddit Campaigns vs Ad Groups vs Ads

I also learned that Reddit ads can “nest” into each other. Reddit has campaigns, ad groups, and individual ads.

Campaigns

Campaigns are the largest “bucket” for your ads, and can consist of multiple ads or ad groups. Historically, campaigns are where you can set goals and budgets for everything nested under it.

These were the different campaign objectives and their explanations. Since I used the “Simple Create” setup for our first campaigns, I didn’t specify this initially.

Ad groups

Ad Groups are bundles of similar ads that you can set up specific parameters for, such as your audience, placements, timeline, and bidding. In Reddit, you can also set up budgets and goals within an ad group. You must have a campaign to create an ad group.

Ads

Ads are the individual ads on Reddit. These ads can be part of an ad group or under a campaign, and they are single units that can have different headlines, CTAs, and other parameters. An ad must be added to an ad group.

Initial testing and adjusting

On October, 14, 2024, I set up three different ads to start with.

  1. A Q4 ad with a focus on peak. This ad had a CTA to “Learn More” that led to a bottom-of-the-funnel blog post on the topic. We tested an AI-generated image for this.
  2. A generic ad with a focus on our services. This ad had a CTA to “Contact Us” that led to our contact form. It had a cute duck.
  3. A brand ad with a designed image of our logo and brand colors, with a CTA to “Sign Up” for our newsletter.

Although there was an initial bump in contact form submissions, it flattened out after the first week. We also didn’t see any contact form submissions directly tied to the Reddit UTM, but that may not tell the whole story, becaue when I see an ad I’m interested in I look up the brand instead.

Within this period, we were assigned a great account manager who was really informative and sent bi-weekly analysis and suggestions. He also did the initial check of our ads to confirm everything was set up as they should be.

Two-week check-in (Oct 31, 2024)

After two weeks, our account manager sent the following;

  • Compared to benchmarks for your vertical of .33% CTR, you are performing above average!
  • Your meme with the duck has a CTR of .58%! That’s great to see and personally it makes sense, that meme really conveys the story you are trying to give. Would recommend maybe trying out some AB testing and using this creative only and testing out different headlines to see what they respond too.

At this point, the cute duck ad was doing better than the other two so I turned those off and replaced them with;

All of the new ads had “Contact Us” as the CTA and were nested under our Q4 ad group.

This is also when I set up events in the Reddit Pixel.

Setting up Events with the Reddit Pixel

This was yet another step of the process that was easier than I expected. First, I added the Reddit Pixel to our Google Tag Manager using the community template.

Then I tested that it was working with the Reddit Pixel Helper (a Chrome extension).

To set up the events we wanted to track, I went into the Events Manager > Event configuration > Set Up Events

From there, I could add the URL of our contact form to select the event I wanted to track.

It brought up the page, and I was able to demonstrate the action I wanted to track to register it as an event.

This is what the URL keywords selection looks like:

I selected web element, since I wanted to track a button click. Here’s what the web element form looks like:

This is where I could set the event type, then use “Select trigger element” to interact with the event on the webpage.

In the case below, I linked clicking the “Submit” button to the event.

Contact form submissions, AKA leads, was our North star metric and the only KPI that would really justify this channel.

Four-week check-in

After another two weeks, I did a check-in with our account manager to get an overview of how we were doing, and next steps.

As of November 14, 2024, the duck meme was still on top with a 0.827% click-through rate (others settled at around 0.3x%) and $0.71 cost per click (others hovered around $0.9x).

I shut off all the other ads, turned on a retargeting campaign, and tested the duck meme with a different headline.

I selected the Conversions objective for our retargeting campaign. Reminder: When I created our original campaigns, I used the “Simple Create” campaign creation flow and didn’t specifiy this.

I created the audience for the campaign under Audience Manager > New Audience > Custom Audience > Website Retargeting (wanted to target redditors who had visited our website).

Under custom audiences, there were also options to upload a customer list, target similar Redditors, and retarget redditors who previously interacted with our ads.

On our account manager’s suggestion, we set retargeting to page views with a 90-day lookback period.

Below are the other pixel events we could have chosen.

Without a significant bump in contact form submissions, this would be our last Reddit test until Q1.

Final results from our Reddit ads test

After another week and a half on November 23, 2024, I decided to retain our best-performing ad alongside a retargeting ad using the same creative indefinitely.

The main reasons were:

1) Our clickthrough rate was up and clicks were down, which meant less spend for a more relevant audience.

2) Our contact form submissions had started to climb once again, rivaling the initial bump we saw, with less spend.

3) Digging deeper, the number of “good” (non-spam, in our ICP) leads have remained steady since the retargeting ad launch on the 14th. On the 21st, we received an inquiry that our co-founder shared as an example of our ideal ICP.

Key lessons from testing Reddit ads

My biggest takeaways for this Reddit ads experiment were;

  • It takes as much or as little time as you’re willing to put in. I was worried it would be too time-consuming to start, but a quick daily check was enough to keep us on track and help me get a feel of which ads were performing (and which weren’t).
  • Your creative is everything, which our account manager confirmed as well. He mentioned he used our duck meme as an example in another call of what good content looked like for the community (proud moment for us!)
  • Due to the nature of how Redditors view ads, it’s hard to definitively track results. Instead, I had to look at correlations and monitor everything else what was happening in marketing to make an educated guess about Reddit’s contribution to our pageviews and leads.
  • Since it’s a relatively new platform, it didn’t have the bloat and complexities that platforms like Google and Meta did. It was less intimidating and I wasn’t worried about missing a legacy toggle nested three pages deep that would be make/break everything.

After a few weeks of testing Reddit and reviewing our budget, we decided to leave our duck meme ad and one retargeting ad on until Q1. I set spend limits so even if we only check back in Q1, we won’t go over budget.

All-in-all, I’m glad Reddit was my first foray into the world of paid ads. I was able to learn some of the basics and observe what our account manager highlighted as most critical to watch, to take as lessons for other channels.

Next, I plan to start testing LinkedIn (higher cost-per-acquisition) and Meta in the new year. Stay tuned!

Update: Closing out our Reddit ads experiment

January 29, 2025 update

Now that we’ve almost hit our budget for this experiment, I’ve decided to shut off Reddit ads and divert the spend to other paid channels with better attribution and direct lead forms. Here are some of the highlights from that decision.

On Reddit, with the Pixel installed, we saw one result (contact form submission) for $591.83 from our retargeting ad.

Otherwise, we saw 3,114 clicks for $2,913.33 (about $0.94/click). Our best performing ad got 1,552 clicks for $1,372.74 ($0.88/click).

I tried uploading a target audience list of emails, which is what boosted our success on other platforms, but Reddit was unable to match enough emails for a significant sample. This is to be expected from the anonymous nature of Reddit (they don’t have my email either, and definitely not any work emails).

Alternative paid channels

In comparison, we saw the following results from other paid ad channels over a shorter period of time.

Google search ads: 10 leads at $38.11 per lead. 184 clicks at $2.07 CPC.

I also recently set up a dedicated landing page and forms for the Google search ads to separate all the leads from this initiative. We’ll then be able to check emails against our CRM down the line to see total revenue that came from this channel.

I plan to leave our keyword campaigns up in some form or another as a permanent initiative, and add a brand campaign as well as a defensive strategy.

Meta ads: 19 leads across two campaigns at $24.44/lead (BOFU) and $50.85/lead (TOFU). These were native form submissions on the Facebook and Instagram platforms, and we confirmed three so far were ICP. We also saw a <$7 CPC with 129 clicks.

Each time we adjust the campaigns (refined our audience, added new ad creative, turned off ads that were getting a lot of spend with no conversions, built a native form, etc.) we saw results improve. I expect those numbers to improve further before it plateaus.

I expect Meta lead quality to eventually degrade as we reach most of our ICP on the platform. My hope is that when we reach our target audience we convert them to customers if they’re ready to move, or to our nurture channels (such as newsletter) if not. Then, once we notice leads are getting more expensive with worse quality, I’ll move ad spend to another platform, and only use Meta for timely ads (for example, get your BFCM inventory in).

LinkedIn ads: We saw 147 clicks at $16.78 CPC, and 118 “conversions” at $20.90/conversion. It’s important to note that early on, we defined conversion as a visit to the website.

To better track leads from LinkedIn, I launched a native LinkedIn lead generation form, which so far hasn’t gotten any form fills.

LinkedIn takes a longer time to generate leads, and the platform is notoriously expensive, so I plan to leave this running for a few more months (at least as long as our standard sales cycle) and then make a decision.

Podcast and newsletter sponsorships: We are just starting this experiment, and will have more results in the coming months.

Overall, we found that Reddit is good for pageviews and initially got us an indirect increase in contact form submissions. However, the lack of native lead capture forms for better attribution, and expensive cost per conversion (in the way we measure them) meant our ad budget would be better spent elsewhere.