Notes on reaching niche audiences using Reddit ads

seriousgamesjobs.com is a growing community of talent centred around the niche area of Serious Games and using game development skills beyond entertainment. The flagship product is a weekly newsletter service with featured relevant job opportunities, and I'm trialling many different ways to find subscribers from within this very specific audience.

One of the methods I've been exploring is Reddit Ads. I've learned a few counterintuitive things about the Reddit advertising platform. I'll be posting a more comprehensive rundown of results and numbers soon, but for now here's a few unexpected findings and tips from experience using Reddit ads to reach a niche audience.

A few basic things- the hierarchy of Reddit ads involves Campaigns, which set the payment method and goal (conversions, views, web traffic etc.). Each Campaign in turn contains Ad Groups, which each define a timeline, audience targets and budget (at least $5.00/day). An Ad Group is, indeed, a group of ads. Individual ads can be toggled on and off within the group without stopping deliver of the entire group.

On with the less basic notes:

Subreddit selection
As you'd imagine, you can select to advertise only within certain communities within Reddit, and I've had a great experience targeting only three at a time. However, be aware that not every subreddit is manually targetable. As an example, r/WallStreetBets is a very popular subreddit (for better or worse!), but is absent from the available targeting options.

Approval
All ads need to be manually approved, meaning that any experiments you want to run should take in to account the turnaround time to have your ad reviewed and your links checked. All my ads have been approved within 24-36 hours, though I'm not sure Reddit makes a public guarantee about turnaround times (please correct me if I missed this!).

Editing
Ads can't be edited on the fly- they can only be duplicated and swapped within an already running or new ad group, and the duplicated ads required re-approval in my case.

Scheduling
Compounding the latency issues with ad approval and editing, you can't just send your ad in to field for a new ad group immediately. You need to set the start time of the corresponding ad group, and new ad groups must occur some time in the future- the fastest I've ever been able to kick off a new ad group is 16 hours.

One workaround you can try to use to launch faster is to re-use an old ad group by editing the end time, however the requirement to budget at least $5.00/day still applies to every day the ad was 'scheduled' for, so you could end up with a maximum which is far higher than you expected to pay for a repeat of a small experiment. Considering everything above, I've found it's best to plan your advertising experiments carefully several days in advance.

Support
Reddit appears to offer support to advertisers primarily through their own special subreddit, r/redditads. Not a problem, just found it unique! You can search for ideas, FAQs and guides there.

The ad auction
Reddit's interface doesn't seem to tell you if you're winning the ad auction or not with your bid. Reddit allows you to bid as low as $0.10, and depending on where you're pitching to you can get significant volume out of $0.10-$0.20 bids, however don't count on any kind of consistency in when your ads are shown if you only have a few communities selected.

If your ads are marked as 'active', you're within the scheduled time for delivery and you just see clicks, CPM count etc appear as dashes, you're probably losing the ad auction. If you're looking for cost-effectiveness over speed, I'd advise you to wait 24 hours and see if you do start to win auction changes over time before increasing your bid.

That's it for now- to recap, advertising on Reddit to a very small group of subreddits is something I'd absolutely encourage experimenting with, but plan well in advance, expect to spend several days before your ad copy is first shown to a user and keep an eye on the impression count to make sure your ads are being delivered.

Hope this helps someone get their feet wet with digital advertising- let me know if you think I've missed anything, or you have questions or notes in the comments!