Reddit Ads Fall 2021 Updates

Key Takeaways

reddit ads is another paid media platform that we love to use for our clients we don't talk about it much because updates in the channel happen few and far between well that changed within the past few months reddit has announced three new features that advertisers can start using within the dashboard these features will either help you increase your reach or help you better optimize your current campaigns so let's get into it we're going to hop into the ads dashboard and we're going to show you what these new features are one of the recent changes this one was announced in september of 2021 has been the addition of another placement for your reddit ads in order to see where this exists i'll go and create a campaign head over and just name it really quick there we see the objectives i'm going to come back to this really soon because not all objectives are able to use this new ad placement and to get a better understanding of all the objectives you can check out the introduction to reddit ads video that we created right here but we have our funding already i'll click continue and as you go through the ad group setup eventually you will get to a section called placements as it says where our ads will be displayed now for the longest time the only option we had was the feed but the conversations option is the new portion that reddit recently added let me go over the difference and to do that i'm gonna head out of the ad platform and just go to reddit.com to show you some examples i'm in a particular subreddit and as i'm scrolling down eventually we're gonna get to an ad and here's one option for a video ad this is one example of a feed placement these ads can show on the home feed if a user is browsing the popular feeds or in this case on a particular community feed so that's one option but if i scroll back to the top i want to get into a particular discussion within the subreddit if i click on this one because i see a good amount of comments and now we are in a particular discussion people are already engaging on this particular question or topic it makes sense why this placement is called conversation placement because a discussion is already underway this ad placement appears right under the fixed placement of what started the thread and it'll always be above the first comment you can see that as i scroll down but i'm going to head back up this additional placement can have two benefits the first is going to be to expand your reach with the new placement we have more opportunities to connect with a particular audience second you could argue that this placement is going to reach a user with a deeper intent the home feed could be pretty generic if someone's on a popular feed they could just be browsing whenever is hot at the moment even if we are just browsing the overall feed like this running shoe geeks community someone could just browse through the feed realize this is not for them and leave but if someone's clicking deeper within that community looking at discussions engaging with discussions odds are they're more interested and more likely to engage with other users and content within those specific communities now i know in the intro to reddit advertising video i do say that community targeting or subreddit targeting is one of my favorite but not every subreddit that's created within reddit is a community targeting option but if you do find one that is perfect for your target audience you can now choose this more specific placement match it up with the community targeting and craft some very specific and focused ad copy to use let's jump back into the ads dashboard we see right here while i'm creating the campaign i'm actually in the ad group view and i want to note that for a reason because when we do go back down to placements this may give you the idea to split out your ad group by placement especially now that i mentioned that the intent of the user could be different and we do see our budgets are at the ad group level i can't really give a recommendation on how you should structure your accounts that's going to be completely depending on your overall budgets if you think segmenting the user based on the placement makes sense and so many other factors just note the default option will be feed but you can switch to conversations or if you want to target both placements within the same ad group you do have that option now bear with me because i'm going to be jumping around a little bit let's see if they let me go back to the objective screen okay they did if you want to use the conversation placement you can use all of the objectives except for video views if you're running a video views campaign conversation placement will not be an option now if i hop back into that particular community we looked at before you may have noticed that's a video within that ad yes you can have video ads and other campaign objectives beyond just the video views campaign objective hopefully that's not too confusing but to clarify let's say you chose a traffic objective within that traffic objective still trying to get as many people as possible to your landing page you could still run a video ad hopefully that makes sense after you have your targeting selected within your ad group you will be instructed to create the ad you can see we can choose previous posts which is fine or you can go over and create a new post for conversation placements image and videos are going to be the main post types that you can use a gallery or carousel post is currently not eligible for a conversation placement and while you're creating a new post you'll have to keep in mind what placement targeting options you are using feed placements and conversation placements have different specs and character limits let me show you i'm going to paste the rules within the headline and these are coming directly from reddit help for conversation placements desktops can accept headlines up to 250 characters unlike the 300 characters for the feed placement so if you do have an ad group that's targeting both placements you will want to make sure you're still keeping within the 250 character limit second thing you'll want to know in terms of character limits mobile versions of your ad can accept headlines up to 100 characters the default device option when creating an ad group within reddit will be all devices this is another option for you to consider if you want to really segment out your targeting if you're keeping everything together then you may want to keep your mobile and desktop headlines to 100 characters or less next as i pull the next spec below the headline you see the card image yes i understand this headline is too long but whatever we can read it reddit is recommending using a 400 by 300 thumbnail image for your card because the typical 1200x628 doesn't look well in this compact space let me jump into the community one more time i have my desktop blown up to about 150 percent and yes it's video but look how small that thumbnail preview image is now imagine that even smaller on a mobile device that is why having a clear 400 by 300 image is recommended and the last thing i wanted to share if you are running both placements within the same ad group is that if you are using a video as you're creative it will auto play in the feed placement but not in the conversations placement so you remember the first ad example i showed you in the feed whatever video game that was it just started auto playing when i was in the subreddit or community i would have to click on the video to see it and then one more thing about conversations placements i'm going to head back to the main dashboard this is our demo account we don't use it for any actual campaigns but once you launch a campaign in reddit let's say you're running all placements if you want to view the stats by placement you can go down to breakdown and then review your campaigns by placement there's no data in this demo account but underneath the name of your campaign ad group whatever you will see the difference between feed and conversation so that was the first of the new features we were discussing for reddit ads for the second one i'm going to jump within this campaign and then just look to edit this particular ad group the second new feature is a bid recommendation tool and we see it lives under the audience size projection over to the right i'm going to scroll down first because your budget and bids are towards the bottom of your ad group we see in this example i'm bidding one dollar and based upon my other targeting options pretty much the main thing i have set up here and the main targeting option i have selected for this ad group is for the horror entertainment genre so again i am bidding one dollar and depending on my location targeting my device targeting the placements i have selected we can now go over here and see the typical range of what other users are bidding within the similar landscape so it looks like for what i have selected other accounts are bidding anywhere from a dollar fifty to five dollars and reddit is recommending four dollars and fifty cents now the way that they display this is pretty deceptive because four dollars and fifty cents is not the median between 150 and five dollars that number probably should be slid over here but we see what they're trying to do they want us to change our bid to go up to 450. still bid however you want to bid or what you think makes sense based upon a recent performance but the bidding landscape visual can still be helpful over the years we have seen reddit ads get more competitive as more people know and start using the channel so in a few of our client accounts we're running reddit ads for a long time they have seen impression volume decrease as competition has gone up we've realized we've had to raise our bids just to get the visibility that we used to have so this gives us a better understanding of if it's worth bidding high enough what other accounts are using for their bids so then we can make a better decision of is this still a viable option for us so it's fairly easy to compare similar targeting options on all the other channels and actually can help you see if you want to still continue reddit ads or test out a different channel instead so in this case if most people are bidding at least a dollar fifty i may wanna go back down get a little bit above that range but not necessarily go to the full four dollars and fifty cents that they're recommending and then save this bid and then the last update that i'm going to talk about lives within the dashboard and that is going to be updates to the bulk feature so we want to select bulk import because now within bulk import it is easier to edit your bids and budgets across multiple ad groups at once i'm not going to dive deep into the bulk import feature because there is a lot there and if you see this link right here with bulk import guide reddit has a good list of recommendations on how you can exactly use this feature but quickly we can just download a template in this demo account we only have one campaign created but however many campaigns you have you can select whichever campaigns you want to change the budgets and the bids if you want to start from scratch you can use a blank template that's where it gets into a lot of manual work so i do not recommend doing that especially if you're just editing current campaigns so just select the ones that you want click export campaign there we see on the screen it downloaded the template for me so i'm going to click on this excel doc here's what it looks like within microsoft excel you see it's kind of messy but it has all the components of the one campaign we have set up within this account all the way over to the one carousel ad i created when we made the video about the new carousel add feature you can watch that one here but we did talk earlier about potentially creating different ad groups and segmenting out by placement potentially by device a combination of all those let alone all the different types of audiences you could target if you have a lot of ad groups it's easy to go over to the bid value which is the two dollar bid we just updated when checking out the new bid recommendation tool and say okay this ad group is working for us i want to jump it up to four and for budget i'm going to increase it to 100. you can update all your bid values for all your different ad groups update the budget for all your different ad groups however many you have i'm going to save this head back into the bulk import tool within reddit ads and then i can add my new import choose my file and then click on import it's going to show you what changes i made i can x out of this it says the status is successful so i'm going to head back up to my menu go to my main dashboard check out the ad group and then i'm going to edit the ad group as i'm scrolling down there we see the new budget and the new bid clearly not too helpful if you just have the one campaign and ad group in it like we do in this demo account but if you have many different ad groups manually doing it is such a pain in the butt it takes a couple minutes just to export all of your ad groups change your bids and budgets and just upload it back into the system and that is a pretty high level run of some of the newer features available within reddit ads as i said in the intro this is a channel that doesn't update things frequently so when they do we like to cover them and make sure that you are aware of these changes a few of our clients love reddit ads besides retargeting that you can do within the channel which you can watch how to set that up here there are a few of our clients where some of the community or subreddit targeting is perfect so specific to who our clients want to target if you're seeing success in reddit ads or you have any questions on the new features that we talked about today let us know in the comments below thanks for watching our video if you found it useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to see more from the paid media pros channel be sure to subscribe you