I tested Reddit for B2B 🍊

Season 11, Issue 6: Is it worth it?

📬In this issue:

• A Reddit primer for non-redditors

• Setting up Reddit ads and “first impressions” results

• Long term performance and conversion 🌟and some ad examples!🌟

• Organic Reddit strategies and performance

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Hola Mehketeer,

I was pretty excited when a client told me they were up for trying Reddit ads. Clients who are open to experiments (read: potentially zero results) are rare to come by, so this was a real ‘let me at it’ moment.

They’re a B2B, product-led-growth product with a very easy self-signup process and a free tier, so it was pretty ideal to test on Reddit. This is the complete record of how that went!

What actually IS product-led growth?

A Reddit primer for non-redditors

(If you use Reddit, you can skip this section)

For non-redditors, Reddit is set up like forums basically. Anyone can create a subreddit for any topic (usually written as r/subreddit name.) If a sub is big enough, it’ll have multiple moderators (mostly volunteers), its own posting rules, and its own culture.

Some subs are very toxic and have given Reddit its not-so-great reputation, while others are actually really wholesome and there are also a lot of professional or work-focussed subs too. If you target a large profession (e.g. lawyers, electricians, doctors, etc.) you are not only going to find r/lawyers, r/electricians, r/doctors, but you’ll also find r/AusLegal, r/AusElectricians, r/ausjdocs (and in the US, it can even go down to the state level.)

So not only is there a community of your target audience, they’re already segmented too. As a user, Reddit is 100% what you make of it. It can be super toxic, or it can be super welcoming and nice.

Setting up Reddit ads

The UI and overall ads platform isn’t great. It’s very basic, they have very limited reporting, and the campaign structure can be truly awful if you don’t set it up right.

The general consensus of how to set up your ads:

• Only target one subreddit per campaign, otherwise you really can’t tell where results are coming from

• Name your campaign the name of the subreddit

• Even if you target a specific regional subreddit, create an exclusion list based on location

• Install the Reddit pixel on your site for reporting and retargeting (keeping in mind Reddit’s attribution is pretty crap, so you’ll want to also be doing UTMs and whatever other tracking/reporting you have)

• ⚠️ALWAYS TURN OFF COMMENTS⚠️

• Don’t discount smaller subs, check how active it is. Sometimes bigger subs are inactive because they got too broad, and multiple smaller, more niche subs broke out of it

• Try a variety of ad types, including the organic style text posts — these often trick me into clicking on them (see some examples below)

I’d also recommend actually using Reddit for a while from a personal account to get a feel for it. There’s some unique nuances to every corner of it which you can only truly understand once you’ve been a user. You don’t have to post, lurking is totally a-ok.

Results and ad examples!

A quick recap of the ad types we tested:

1. Square image with headline (this was the highest performing)

2. Re-purposed a blog post as an organic-style Reddit text post

3. Video which was a very simple creative but high performing on Meta

We ran this channel experiment for eight months in total. Initial results were promising, just check out these numbers:

When was the last time you saw costs this low?! High impressions, high clicks, low costs. Our thinking at first was almost ‘who cares if it performs poorly, we’ll get results through sheer volume and it’ll still be cheaper than Meta/Google!’

Ah, how misleading this was. Maybe you’re not surprised.

We gave it a month to ramp up, experiment, and see which ad types and which subreddits performed well. We tweaked, reduced the number of targeted subs, switched up budgets and tightened exclusions. We went wider with targeting, changed creatives, and kept an eye on the numbers.

If all you looked at was Reddit’s reporting, we were doing incredible. Hundreds of thousands of clicks, traffic galore, more impressions than any other channel.

There was just one problem.

We couldn’t, no matter how much we tried, see these results anywhere but in Reddit’s reporting. Google Analytics wasn’t reporting traffic from Reddit, sign ups weren’t attributing Reddit as a source, customers would mention our Meta ads every now and then in conversation, but Reddit was just this invisible anomaly?

Just crickets.

I also asked Chris Chow (Head of Growth Marketing, Smokeball) about his experience with Reddit as we were experimenting at the same time.

We decided to test Reddit advertising after identifying several subreddits where our ICP, lawyers in small and medium law firms, were active. We ran three campaigns: a video ad, an image ad, and a text ad.

The main challenge was the lack of reliable conversion tracking. We were not able to confidently demonstrate incremental pipeline, demos booked, or revenue from Reddit ads.

For the video campaign, the cost per view (CPV) was very low at $0.02. However, I was not confident that the view counts were accurate. The image ad campaign appeared to have a similar issue.

The text ad campaign was unusual. From what I could tell, Reddit appeared to count clicks that simply opened the ad as clicks, rather than clicks through to the landing page, which skewed the results.

Reddit’s advertising interface and reporting are very clunky and not intuitive at all. It was even worse than Meta. In addition, their accounts team was very unresponsive. My account manager replied several months after I first contacted them, and the $500 promotion I was supposed to receive never eventuated.

Until conversion tracking is fixed and the interface improves, I would not recommend Reddit advertising for B2B marketers.

Mehketeer, I tried my best to find someone who’s using Reddit ads and their story didn’t end with “but we turned it off.” Take that however you’d like.

If, despite these sad, sad, stories, you’re still keen to test Reddit (everyone should be open to experiments even if it didn’t work for someone else tbh), here’s some sample ad creatives:

Creative examples

Reddit does have an “inspiration” library, which they claim is a curation of top performing ads. What is interesting is you can search ads by budget (low, medium, and high, with no definitions though) and by objective.

Knowing which objective to pick, and which objectives are “secret hacks” for better results is always a hot topic in paid media, so this is quite cool. The library is pretty difficult to search though, and often just shows you whatever it wants instead of what you’re looking for.

Here’s some ads I’ve personally collected, not from the Inspiration library:

I like this Attio ad as it really does dip into the ‘Reddit aesthetic’ of more tech-literate people. I also love a stylistic logo switch up!

Here’s what that same in-feed format looks like when you click into a post. It’s displayed after the body of the post but above the comments. In this kind of placement, it’s really small, so simple, bold creatives are much easier to see and read.

Organic looking text posts on Reddit can take a lot of formats. Major subreddits often have rules about what the headline of a post should be, for example. Things like [TIL] (today I learned), [Megathread] (meaning that too many posts have been made about the same topic, and they’re being replaced with this megathread), or [ELI5] (explain like I’m 5) are common tropes to use on ads:

Using a text format from other platforms can be a huge giveaway that you’re not a redditor. For example, POV (point of view) is not a common format on Reddit, it’s more a TikTok/IG thing:

Meme formats are super popular as a creative. I’d say there’s two things to watch out for if you’re going to test them:

1. Image crops: Even if the meme format doesn’t get cropped when it’s an organic post, the ad format may crop it and cut your punchline out which is a huge miss. Example:

   

2. Missing the humour: If you make a meme, you better be funny! Nothing worse than an ad that misses the point of the meme, it’s just cringe.

Organic Reddit strategies

A better use of your time could be casually dropping into relevant posts on Reddit. Some subs will have rules about no links or selling, but there’s ways to offer genuine value.

If you’re an expert in your area, or have team members who are technical experts etc, then once a month just keyword search reddit for some of your terms and see what threads come up. I’ve done this for my clients, and occasionally you will straight up find a thread where someone is saying “has anyone used X software? I’m tossing up between that and Y”

Put a disclaimer that you’re associated, mention the brand name (or link if it’s allowed) and move on. Don’t be sales-y.

I showed how one of the staff at Sublime do this from their personal account in this previous Mehdeeka:

A deep dive on the growth efficacy of founder conviction

Here’s an example of a good company account. A lot of their comments don’t spruik their company or product at all, they’re just helpfully answering questions, but their username is obviously the name of their product, which might prompt people to look them up.

They’re building authority without asking for anything in return, which leads to goodwill with individual users but also the moderators of the sub, who might turn a blind eye to the odd sales-y comment or product link as a result.

I’ve definitely seen more traffic come from commenting on 1-2 month old threads than ads at least. From memory (this may have changed?) you can comment and upvote/downvote threads for up to 6 months from the posting date, so don’t be too scared of going back a couple months.

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Did you TIL?

I’m a seasoned redditor so it always surprises me when I meet people who don’t use it at all, but there are many who don’t! My biggest advice before you spend money is to spend time on the platform. Lurk, post, sit on a username, whatever capcity it is, it won’t be time wasted. Just stay away from the toxic subs, they are truly cesspits.

Alrighty, buh-bye now!

Kayla