9 Best Practices for Advertising on Reddit
Reddit isn't your typical social ad platform. Its users are opinionated, engaged, and often ignored by traditional marketers.
And that's exactly what makes it a great space for connecting with your target audience. However, you can't approach Reddit the same way as other ad platforms. The rules are different.
In this guide, we've outlined 9 best practices for Reddit advertising, including tips for audience targeting, creatives, bids and optimization. We've built out these best practices based on learnings taken from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the platform.
Take what we've learned and implement these practices and watch your ROAS boom!
1. Optimize Your Username and Profile
Reddit Ads display with a user and a profile image associated with the ad. Our best practice for Reddit Ads usernames is to use a branded username to reinforce the brand behind the ad. If the username is misaligned with the ad then it can be create confusion and hurt performance.
People can click on the profile icon in an ad and visit the Reddit profile associated with the ad, so we recommend optimizing the Reddit profile as well so that the experience is strong when this happens. Some of our common recommendations include:
- Adding a profile image with your logo in it
- Adding a profile description text
- Adding links to the profile
- Adding a banner to the page
- Pinning a post with a CTA
2. Pick The Right Campaign Goal
Start with your goals. Your campaign objectives need to match where your audience is in the funnel. Before doing anything else, you need to decide whether you are trying to drive website traffic, generate leads with native lead forms, drive website conversions, or build awareness.
We usually recommend using the Conversion optimization goal, assuming that you have conversion tracking set up correctly.
3. Choose the Right Bidding Strategy
Once things are moving, turn your focus to efficiency.
Reddit uses a second-price auction, which means you only pay slightly more than the next highest bidder. You don’t need to outspend everyone. You just need to be competitive.
I would suggest launching campaigns using "Lowest Cost" to start and switching to a strategy with a max CPC cap, like "Lowest Cost" or "Manual Bid" if you're not getting results and your CPCs are high. I'd also suggest using a conversion optimization window of "7 Day Click and 1 Day Views" for your attribution window to ensure you have more data to optimize with.
4. Optimize for Conversation Placements
We see significantly higher conversion rates from conversation ad placements vs. feed placements. This is in part due to the nature of Reddit, the conversation placements have higher interest intent compared to Feed where people are passively scrolling. Conversation placements also tend ot be the landing pages of a lot of AI and organic search traffic, which are very higher-intent.
We recommend trying to optimize your budget targeting conversation ad placements, especially for top of funnel.
The only caveat would be if you're trying to scale. Feed has higher reach, so it would be a necessary part of any larger budget Reddit strategy.
5. Target High-Intent Reddit Communities
As your campaign grows, your targeting needs to stay sharp.
Reddit gives you more control than most platforms and that matters. The best approach is to combine interest targeting with subreddits that are relevant to your niche.
It’s not about reaching everyone. It’s about showing up where your offer makes sense.
Tighten up your placements, use exclusion lists to remove low-intent users or past customers, and avoid wasting spend on clicks that won’t convert.
And if brand safety is a factor, you can control exactly where your ads appear. That kind of control is rare and worth using.
6. Retarget Website Visitors and Ad Interactors
Finally, once your campaign has momentum, it’s time to build out your retargeting and scaling strategy.
If you haven’t set up Reddit Pixel yet, make that your first move. It's essential for building website-based retargeting audience segments.
Once it’s running, build audience tiers based on how recently someone visited your landing page. Try 7-, 15-, 30-, 60-, and 90-day windows. This helps you tailor your message based on where someone is in the decision-making process.
Make sure to filter out anyone who’s already converted. You can do this with email lists or post-conversion URLs so you’re not wasting ad spend on current customers.
The key is alignment. People who visited yesterday likely need a clear next step, while colder leads might respond better to a softer re-engagement.
Retargeting is one of the places where Reddit really pays off, especially for high-consideration or B2B offers. One Reddit campaign we ran cut cost per signup by 63% and cost per lead by 77% just by dialing in retargeting.
7. Ensure Your Audiences are Large Enough to Spend
This may sound obvious, but Reddit's audience interface is notoriously inaccurate and often breaks altogether, so a lot of the time you may not have a clear idea of how large your audience is. This happens a lot when you're targeting smaller audiences and using bid caps.
As a result, we recommend you check whether your ads are delivering after you launch campaigns.
It’s easy to assume the creative is the problem, but most of the time, it’s something technical that’s blocking performance. Before making any big changes, here’s what to look at:
- Double-check your placement settings and schedule. Narrow targeting or limited devices can kill your reach without warning.
- Look at exclusions. If you’re filtering out users who logged in within the last 90 days, try shorter windows like 30, 15, or 7 days to open things up.
- Watch your pacing. If nothing’s spending, your bids may be too low, or your daily budget may be under Reddit’s minimum.
If performance is totally flat, pause and review these variables first. You’ll save yourself hours of rewriting ads that never had a chance to run.
8. Be Informative and Playful With Creatives
Reddit is primarily an informational channel. Users come to the platform to engage with like-minded people that are interested in similar subjects.
We find the best Reddit ads are informational as well. Test low friction content that's relevant to the industry like guides, articles and comparison posts.
Try to avoid being too aggressive with your calls to action in retargeting. Don't push for demos or sales calls or purchases unless you're retargeting high-intent visitors.
For copy, we find it's best to keep your headlines relatively short, 80-150 characters. We also find the copy that works best is either focused on pain points or playful. Redditors don't take themselves super seriously, so test being funny! We also recommend testing emojis. We've had some success with this as well.
9. A/B Test Creatives and Optimize for Highest Perfomers
Once your ads are delivering, the next move is to take a closer look at performance.
Sort each variation by CTR, CPC, ad spend, and conversions. If you don’t have much conversion data yet, lean on CTR and CPC to guide your decisions.
Pause any promoted posts that have high impressions but barely any clicks. That’s usually a sign something’s off, whether it’s the headline, visual, or overall message.
While you're at it, look for creative fatigue. Even successful campaigns can wear out over time if Reddit users keep seeing the same thing.
Use this step to find what’s falling flat. Then tweak your visuals, test new headlines, and refine your CTAs until something sticks.
But keep testing. Your best ads are probably still one variation away.
Check out the video below for more information on our approach to A/B testing in Reddit Ads.
Common Reddit Ads Mistakes to Avoid
Reddit ads can work really well. But only if you steer clear of a few common traps:
- Setting too many bid caps can keep your ads from delivering at all
- Not cycling through creatives quickly enough can lead to fatigue and lower engagement
- No exclusion lists? You’re probably wasting budget on people who’ve already converted
- Not excluding low-intent keywords and communities from the brand guidelines
- Ignoring subreddit tone makes your ad feel out of place in the thread
- Not checking placement settings can send your ad to the wrong feed
And finally, the most important thing to avoid with Reddit Ads is being too aggressive. It’s important to remember that a large portion of Reddit’s audience Don’t believe me? Just look at this SpyFu keyword data about how many people search Reddit for information about ad blockers!
Need Help With Reddit Ads?
Getting results on Reddit isn’t about luck or big budgets. It’s about matching the message to the moment, backed by the right targeting, pacing, and creative strategy.
Whether you're troubleshooting delivery issues or looking to scale what’s already working, the right adjustments can completely shift performance.
Want a second opinion on your ad performance? Book a free strategy call and we’ll check it out together!
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