Reddit Has Beefed up Conversation Ads - Here's How to Leverage Them

Reddit made some revisions to its conversation page ads featuring a larger, more premium ad that will appear between comments on threads.

Here’s what they look like (courtesy of Search Engine Land):

This is a good move for both Reddit and advertisers, who stand to gain engagement; almost half of Reddit screen views occur on its conversation pages (making it prime real estate that we previously missed out on).

According to Reddit, advertisers leveraging both conversation and feed placements saw 83% higher brand awareness, with action intent more than double what they were getting with feed-only placements.

If you’re in SaaS, I’d say you should put these on your radar immediately; we’ve helped SaaS clients achieve great numbers on Reddit by engaging users who tend to go down rabbit holes to solve their challenges.

A few tips for how to incorporate these to maximum effect in your overall strategy:

Don’t stop at “action intent”

Especially for brands with longer sales cycles, I recommend building a retargeting list on ad engagers from this campaign to retarget them with perhaps a gated case study or webinar link – anything that provides value on the topic they’re engaged in and helps you get their first-party data for lower-funnel campaigns.

Get Reddit-y with your tone

Reddit users tend to enjoy humor - try to use witty copy and creative to get your ad to stand out amongst user comments. Remember, people are in these comments digging for information, so you’ve gotta really try to stand out to make them pull away from what they’re looking for. 

Start narrow

These ads are an exciting step forward for Reddit, but contain your enthusiasm for super-narrow targeting out of the gate to see how they work before expanding. For example, if you’re testing these ads for an ICP of mobile engineers, stick to mobile engineering subreddits so that your ads pop in relevant comments. If you establish a high-performance bar and want to turn the dial on volume, expand from there.

We’re excited to test these for our SaaS clients – stay tuned to the JDM blog to see our findings on early tests!