How To Set Up Reddit Ads Campaigns and Ad Groups
Reddit is the 7th most visited website in the world and the go-to destination for people to join niche communities, share honest opinions, and research before they buy.
For businesses, that makes Reddit an essential channel to reach high-intent users at CPCs far lower than Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google. Success, however, depends on how well your campaigns are built. If you don’t set things up correctly, then you could risk pulling in low-quality traffic.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the exact steps and settings we use to create highly effective Reddit Ads campaigns and ad groups. It’s the same approach that has helped our clients scale revenue and earned InterTeam recognition as a Certified Reddit Ads Agency Partner.
Setting Up Your Reddit Ads Account: Tracking, Safety, and Audiences
Before setting up your campaign, there are a few settings you’ll want to confirm.
- Start by setting up your events. Make sure your attribution windows are set to their maximum settings for optimal conversion tracking.
- Next, head into Brand Safety and exclude all low-intent communities, then set your inventory type to Standard.
- Finally, go into the Audience Manager and build the audiences you want to use, along with those you want to exclude.
If you need help, check out this video on how to create audiences on Reddit:
Setting Up Reddit Ads Campaigns
With your account properly set up, the next step is to create your campaign. Reddit gives you a variety of settings to work with, but the best results often come from how you configure them. Here are the steps we take to ensure each of our campaigns is optimized for success.
Create a Campaign
First, you need to create a campaign. Once you click the “Create Campaign” button, you’ll have two options for creating methods: Simple Create and Advanced Create. We recommend using Advanced Create as it unlocks full control over objectives and targeting.
With Simple Create, you’re much more limited in how you can customize your campaign.
Name Your Campaign
In Advanced Create, the first thing you need to do is give it a clear name. This is especially important if you are managing multiple campaigns, as it helps you navigate them efficiently without having to click through each one.
The best practice is to use consistent naming conventions. At InterTeam, we name all of our campaigns in a standard format that includes the campaign type, the date, and the brand. An example would look like this:
RTG | Lead Generation | 08/28/2025 | IT
Using this format allows us to quickly tell the campaign type, goal, and when it was launched without having to open the campaign and inspect ourselves. This makes it much easier to find later for tracking and reporting.
Choose Your Campaign Objective
The next thing you need to do is choose a campaign objective. Reddit offers seven types of campaign objectives:
- Brand Awareness & Reach - Best for maximizing audience reach and visibility.
- Traffic - Best for maximizing website traffic.
- Conversions - Best for setting up custom conversions and website lead generation.
- Video Views - Best for brand awareness video campaigns.
- App Installs - Best for promoting app installs by opening directly in the App Store.
- Catalog Sales - Allows you to use ads with native purchasing capabilities.
- Lead Generation - Allows you to use ads featuring a native lead form instead of landing pages.
We recommend using Conversions as your objective. This is the action you want your audience to take, so it makes sense to optimize your ads for it. Brand Awareness & Reach or Traffic can work as alternatives if you don’t have conversion tracking set up.
Keep in mind that some Reddit ad formats, like Free Form Ads, are only available with certain objectives. If you have specific creative or messaging in mind, be sure to choose an objective that supports it.
Set Up Billing and Campaign Spend Cap
The next step is filling in your billing info. This is straightforward. Simply add your credit card information to activate the account and set a campaign spend cap.
The spend cap is optional but helps control your ad spend by limiting your total budget across all ad groups.
Configuring Your Ad Groups Step by Step
With your campaign settings optimized, the next step is to set up your ad groups. This is critical to ensuring your ads are reaching the right audiences and can be completed in eight easy steps:
Step 1: Name Your Ad Groups
The first thing you want to do is give your ad group a clear name. As with campaigns, this is important later on when you want to compare how your ads are performing across different ad groups.
InterTeam uses a standard naming procedure for ad groups that includes the campaign type, audience, devices, and launch date. It looks like this:
RTG | 90 Day Visitors | All Devices | 08/28/2025
Step 2: Add Communities, Keywords, or Interests to Target
After you name your ad group, you’ll then want to set up targeting. There are several Reddit targeting strategies you can use, including:
- Keyword Targeting
- Community Targeting
- Broad Interest Category Targeting
- Retargeting
- Lookalike Audiences
We’ve had the most success with community targeting for cold campaigns and retargeting for lower-funnel conversions. However, each targeting method has its advantages, and you can check out our Reddit Ads Targeting Guide for a full breakdown.
Reddit also offers Automated Targeting. This setting expands outside of your targeting by 10%. We recommend avoiding this setting at first. Instead, only layer in Automated Targeting if you are using community or keyword targeting that’s performing well, but you’re struggling with volume.
Step 3: Add and Exclude Custom Audiences
Once targeting is set, the next task is setting your custom audiences. These are the demographics you want to reach and should have been configured within your Audience Manager as part of your account setup.
You can target the following audiences on Reddit:
- Website retargeting audiences
- Lookalike audiences
- Customer Lists
- Ad Engagement audiences
Along with adding the audiences you want to include, you also want to set up exclusion audiences. Here are some common types of audiences that we usually exclude:
- Employees
- Current customers
- Competitor employees
This step is critical for making sure you don’t waste ad spend on unqualified traffic.
Step 4: Configure Location and Demographic Filters
Reddit also lets you narrow your audience further by applying location and demographic filters. We suggest starting with country-level targeting, followed by a bulk upload of state lists. This ensures complete regional coverage for your ideal area.
From there, you can add any exclusions you like, whether that’s low-income zip codes or specific regions you want to avoid.
You can also target based on gender, but we suggest keeping this set to “All Genders.” Many Reddit users don’t set a gender, so you run the risk of limiting your reach if you apply this filter.
Step 5: Choose Device Targeting
The next setting you need to configure is your device targeting. Reddit lets you choose between desktop, IOS, or Android targeting.
From there, you can narrow it down even further based on the types of devices and models.
For most industries, selecting “All Devices” offers the best reach, but we find desktop targeting often brings in the highest converting and highest quality traffic. The downside is that there’s significantly more mobile traffic.
You can also target based on specific types of mobile and desktop devices.
Step 6: Select Your Conversion Goal & Bid Strategy
The next thing you need to decide is where you want your ads to appear. Reddit provides two placement options:
- Conversation placements: Ads are displayed within specific conversation threads.
- Feed placements: Ads are displayed within users’ feeds, either in their home feed or community feeds.
At InterTeam, we tend to see the best results from conversation placements. Our theory on this is that the quality of traffic on conversation placements is higher because conversations are the direct entry point for some of the highest quality traffic on Reddit, aka organic search traffic and AI referral traffic.
However, this is not always the case. Feed placements can be strong as well, so it’s important to test both to see which placement performs best for your campaigns.
Step 7: Set Your Daily Budget & Scheduling
Before launching your campaign, you need to set your daily budget for your ad group.
We recommend starting with a budget of $30/day. This gives Reddit’s algorithm enough room to optimize distribution without overspending and allows you to test your ads before scaling spend.
At this point, you also have the option to set an ad schedule. We suggest sticking with Reddit’s default “All Day Delivery” to start, but you should definitely monitor performance by time of day.
For B2B campaigns, a good starting point is testing 6 am–9 pm, since many users check Reddit before and after work.
Step 8: Select Your Conversion Goal & Bid Strategy
The final field you need to complete for your ad group is your bidding and optimization. Start by selecting your conversion goal. You cannot optimize for custom conversions, so you must optimize for one of the 5 default conversion types that Reddit gives you:
- Lead
- Sign Up
- Page Visit
- Purchase
- Add To Cart
We tend to focus on leads, but the best practice is to select whichever outcome you are trying to produce. Just make sure you’ve set up conversion tracking for the conversion you choose.
From there, you can select your bidding strategy. There are three options available:
- Lowest Cost: Focuses on generating as many conversions as possible for your budget.
- Cost Cap: Lets you set an average cost per click for the campaign to optimize for.
- Manual Bid: Lets you set a hard CPC cap for more controlled budgeting.
A Lowest Cost bidding strategy tends to be the best performing when it comes to conversion volume. But if you do choose to use Cost Cap or Manual Bids, it’s important to monitor your bidding to make sure you hit your budgets.
To avoid capping yourself out of qualified clicks, we recommend setting your Cost Cap a little higher than the suggested value, with $5 to $6 being an average target range. Check out the video below if you’d like to learn more about setting your bids and budgets.
Video Link: How to Review Bids and Budgets In Reddit Ads
With these fields complete, you are ready to start creating your ads. For next steps, check out our Guide to Setting Up Reddit Ads.
Examples Of Successful Reddit Ads Campaigns
As a Certified Reddit Ads Agency Partner, we have worked on hundreds of Reddit Ads campaigns and have even been asked to host a Reddit Ads AMA to help other users scale their efforts. If you still need proof of just how effective our campaign optimizations are, check out some of the results from our case studies below:
- Rise Vision Case Study – A Reddit advertising case study that generated a 6x increase in ROAS, a 63% lower cost per sign-up, and a 77% lower cost per lead (CPL) through Reddit Ads.
- CoDev Case Study – A multichannel performance marketing case study that experienced a 7x increase in leads, 87% lower cost per lead, and $100,000 generated in opportunities after testing ads on Reddit.
You can find even more helpful insights for optimizing your campaigns in our Reddit Ads Best Practices Guide.
Work With A Reddit Ads Agency Partner
Interested in having us set up your Reddit ads campaigns?
Book a free Reddit Ads strategy call and let us optimize your Reddit Ads campaigns for success.
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