Reddit Ads Targeting: How to Reach the Right Audiences
As of Q2 2025, Reddit has 110.4 million daily users which is almost double what it was in Q2 of 2024, 60.4 million. The audience is not only growing, but, unlike other platforms, it's also extremely high intent. Reddit user base is composed of either high intent search or AI referral traffic looking for answers and feedback or users that spend their time in niche communities related to their particular interests.
For advertisers, that’s a chance to reach high-intent buyers at CPCs well below LinkedIn or Google, but only if you target the right audiences. If you target too broadly, you’ll end up wasting budget on clicks that don’t convert.
After years of testing, running hundreds of campaigns, and even hosting a live AMA with Reddit for Business, we’ve learned exactly what works. Here’s our guide to targeting strategies built on that experience.
Why Targeting Matters on Reddit
Reddit’s 100,000+ communities create a home for just about every topic, industry, and interest. For advertisers, that’s both the opportunity and the risk.
Reddit users hate ads, and they’ll call them out the moment they feel off. That’s why targeting is so important.
When ads land in the wrong community, they look out of place and never convert. But when they’re aimed at the right conversations, they feel native, spark engagement, and build trust.
Across hundreds of campaigns, we’ve seen one pattern repeat: the biggest driver of qualified leads isn’t budget or creative, it’s how precise the targeting is before launch.
If you need help, check out this video on how to set up campaigns on Reddit:
Types of Audience Targeting in Reddit Ads
Reddit provides a variety of targeting methods. The most straightforward are its audience targeting strategies. These options allow you to reach people based on what they care about or the problems they are trying to solve and include community targeting, keyword targeting, and broader interest categories.
Community Targeting
Community targeting is one of the most effective targeting techniques, especially for cold campaigns. This strategy allows you to target specific communities that are already talking about the problems your product or service solves.
The only trick is in identifying high-intent communities. The right subreddit can deliver some of the most qualified clicks you’ll ever buy, but the wrong one will drain your budget without producing a single lead.
At InterTeam, we use three quick methods to find high-intent subreddits:
- Check the Ad Group interface for suggested related communities during setup.
- Search Google for “[your keyword] + reddit” to see which subreddits come up in real discussions.
- Target communities that have generated conversions during your retargeting campaigns.
Once you have a list of relevant communities, you need to identify which ones are worth targeting. It’s tempting to go after the largest subreddits, but the most important factor is always intent.
A smaller group of 500 active members can easily outperform one with 500,000 if the conversations are more closely tied to your offer. We suggest starting with audiences of at least 1,000 members, but don't be scared to test smaller communities that show stronger buying signals.
Remember, the more relevant the subreddit is to your offer, the easier it is to create a Reddit ad that fits into the existing conversations.
Keyword Targeting
Keyword targeting lets you target individual terms people are engaging with on Reddit, ensuring your ads are placed alongside relevant discussions.
According to Reddit, this targeting technique increases CTRs by 29.6% when compared to community or interest-based targeting. However, this largely depends on the keywords you choose.
The best practice is to start with the data you already have. Use Google Search Console or Google Ads to identify high-intent keywords and add them to your campaign.
From there, test segmenting your campaigns based on placements. Keyword targeting can be used in both feed and conversation placements, but we have seen the most success with conversation. They tend to bring in a lot of high-intent AI and organic search referral traffic.
As with all campaigns, keyword targeting requires regular oversight. Review your terms with keyword segmentation and cut anything that does not bring in qualified leads.
Interest-Based Targeting
The final audience targeting method is interest-based targeting. Reddit gives you several pre-set interest categories to choose from, each one grouping together a mix of subreddits under a broad theme, like technology, sports, or travel.
When you select an interest, your ads are fed to users who have shown engagement within these categories, whether it was participating in a conversation or joining a connected subreddit. Either way, your ads will appear across Reddit to anyone who fits the category.
If you are just starting with Reddit Ads, this form of targeting is the most convenient and easiest to use. But it comes with less control over where your ads appear.
Interest-based targeting is broad. For B2C products, it can work well to attract casual buyers. But for B2B, we find results are usually stronger when you tighten your focus with community or audience targeting, where intent is clearer.
Custom Audiences
Creating custom audiences is the second major targeting approach on Reddit. Instead of focusing on what someone is browsing, these strategies focus on who the user is.
Custom audiences include retargeting people who’ve already interacted with your brand, building lookalike audiences from conversion data, and uploading customer lists into Audience Manager.
Retargeting
Retargeting on Reddit is one of the most cost-efficient strategies you can run. Clicks usually land under $2 and rarely go above $5, compared to the $30+ you might pay on LinkedIn or Google.
You can create the following types of retargeting audiences in Reddit Ads:
- People who visited your website
- People who performed a certain event on your website
- People who have engaged with your ads
- People who have your ads
- People who have seen your ads
- People who have watched your videos.
For each type of audience, you can then add a “Lookback window” to stipulate how long ago they should have performed an action, up to 90 days or 180 days, depending on the type of audience. The more recent the audience, the higher the intent will be.
We recommend testing higher intent audiences first, such as people who visited a high intent page, like the pricing page, or setting custom events for people that have spent more than 30 seconds on your site. This helps you avoid targeting people who bounced on the site immediately.
Retargeting works best when you layer it with other audience targeting strategies. We tend to get the best results by combining it with community targeting, as it ensures your ads are presented to high-intent audiences while they are actively researching and participating in relevant conversations.
Retargeting also works well with keyword targeting, and you should always test both to see which brings in the highest-quality leads.
All of this, of course, is dependent on audience size, so you have to be sure your audiences are large enough to spend consistently.
Lookalikes
Lookalike audiences help you reach new redditors who resemble your best customers. They work by analyzing a seed audience, usually a website retargeting group or a customer list, and finding people with similar interests, ad engagements, and behaviors.
The key is starting with high-quality data. Stronger signals, like pricing-page visits or CRM lifecycle changes when a lead becomes an opportunity, give Reddit a clearer picture of who to model against. Launch lookalikes too early and you risk wasting budget on low-quality traffic.
To create them, you need at least 10,000 users in a website retargeting audience or 1,000 in a customer list audience. Once built, they are best used in traffic and conversion campaigns where scale is the priority.
Customer Lists
Customer lists let you bring your own first-party data into Reddit Ads. You can upload contacts from a CRM, an email list, or other customer data you already manage.
They’re especially useful when you want to:
- Re-engage warm leads who have gone quiet
- Upsell or cross-sell to existing customers
- Seed a lookalike audience with high-quality data
Lists can be added with a CSV upload, synced through the Custom Audience API, or connected through partner integrations. To be eligible, they need at least 1,000 matched users. The cleaner and more current your data, the better Reddit can match users and deliver consistent performance.
Best Practices For Reddit Ads Targeting
Getting targeting right on Reddit comes down to process. The platform gives you plenty of options, but campaigns only work if you know how to put those options together.
Based on our experience running campaigns and answering questions in the AMA, here are the rules that consistently make the difference:
- Segment campaigns by targeting strategies- Separate ad groups by targeting methods so you can clearly measure performance, cut waste, and double down on what works.
- Prioritize high-intent communities over size - A subreddit with 1,000-20,000 members often outperforms subreddits with 500,000 members. We start at 1,000+ members, but high-intent micro-subs are worth testing.
- Start with retargeting - Build retargeting audiences from pricing page visits, demo requests, and deep scroll events before expanding into lookalikes. Broader scaling only works when seeded with clean signals.
- Test branded keyword targeting - Reddit users actively look for product reviews. Adding branded keywords, aka keywords that include the brand name, allows you to show your ads on content related to your product. This strategy often delivers the best conversion rates of any targeting type.
- Test optimizing for specific devices and placements - Desktop and conversation ads bring in higher-intent clicks, while mobile feeds work better for reach. Test both.
- Monitor your audience reach - Retargeting clicks on Reddit often land under $2 and rarely exceed $5. If your CPCs are creeping past that, targeting needs adjustment.
- Always use exclusion lists – Exclude employees, current customers, and competitor employees to cut wasted spend and keep ads focused on qualified prospects.
- Don’t stack targeting options in one ad group – On Reddit, targeting methods compound instead of layering. Adding multiple options broadens your audience into one pool, which makes it harder to see what’s working. Keep targeting types in separate ad groups for cleaner performance data.
- Focus on high-intent placements – To avoid low-quality clicks, prioritize conversation placements, desktop targeting, and high-intent communities. These consistently deliver stronger traffic quality than broader feed or mobile campaigns.
Check out our Reddit Ads Best Practices Guide for more details on how to structure campaigns, test creative, and refine performance.
Real Campaign Results From Reddit Ads Targeting
We’ve tested every combination of targeting Reddit offers, and the results speak for themselves. When targeting is sharp, campaigns scale. When it’s not, spend disappears with nothing to show for it.
Here are a few examples of what happens when you get targeting right:
- Rise Vision Case Study – After restructuring campaigns around segmented retargeting and top-performing communities, Reddit delivered a 6× ROAS and cut CPL by 77% in four months.
- CoDev Case Study – Reddit Ads in niche subreddits gave us the winning creative and cut early CPL in half. Those insights carried into LinkedIn and Google, helping fuel the broader 87% CPL drop and 161 leads across all channels.
The throughline across each? Targeting wasn’t treated as a box to check. It was engineered into the campaign strategy from day one.
Get a Custom Audience Targeting Strategy From a Reddit Ads Agency Partner
Reddit’s targeting can be powerful, but only when it’s set up the right way. We’ve tested every option to see what drives qualified leads, and we know how to structure campaigns that keep CPL low while lifting conversion rates.
Having trouble finding a strong audience targeting strategy for your business?
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