I’m all the time looking out for price and time efficient ways in which I can market my software program merchandise. Beforehand, I’ve had numerous success with Google Adwords Pay Per Click on advertisements. Nonetheless, the regulation of shitty clickthroughs implies that promoting platforms typically get much less and fewer worthwhile (for the advertisers) over time. And Google Adwords is a case research of that regulation in motion. As Reddit is a much less mature promoting platform, I believed it would nonetheless provide alternatives for an honest return. So I made a decision to experiment with promoting my knowledge munging software program, Straightforward Knowledge Rework, on Reddit.
[By the way, I understand that nobody goes to Reddit because they want to see ads. But commercial products need to market themselves to survive, and Reddit probably wouldn’t exist without ads. Yay capitalism.]
Setup
The essential course of to get began with Reddit Advertisements is:
- Join a Reddit Advertisements account.
- Enter your particulars and bank card quantity.
- Create a marketing campaign.
- Create a number of advert teams in your marketing campaign. Select a bid for every advert group, which nations you need it proven in and who you need it proven to.
- Create a number of advertisements for every group.
- Add the Reddit monitoring pixel to each web page of your web site.
- Arrange conversion targets.
All fairly normal stuff for anybody who has used Google Adwords. The twist with Reddit is which you could promote to communities (sub-Reddits), relatively than based mostly on search key phrases. For instance, Straightforward Knowledge Rework is a a lot better software for many knowledge wrangling duties than Excel, so I can bid to indicate advertisements focused at Excel customers in communities similar to: reddit.com/r/excel/ and reddit.com/r/ExcelTips/.
Like Adwords, there are numerous methods to bid. I don’t need the promoting platform to set the bid costs for me (as a result of I’m not insane), so I opted for fastened value bids of between $0.20 and $0.40 per click on. A number of the advert teams steered a lot increased bids than that. For instance, the steered bid for my Excel advert group is $0.79 to $4.79 per click on!
Nonetheless, Straightforward Knowledge Rework is just a one time cost of $99. Paying greater than $0.40 per click on is unlikely to be worthwhile for me, particularly while you think about assist prices. So that’s the most I used to be ready to bid. Additionally, the steered bids are simply the advert platform attempting to push up the bid value. One thing that anybody who has used Google Adwords will likely be all too acquainted with. I used to be nonetheless in a position to get clicks, bidding considerably lower than the beneficial minimal.
I additionally set a every day most for every advert group, simply in case I had tousled and added a zero in a bid someplace.
I created a number of advertisements for every advert group, with a spread of various textual content and pictures particular to the communities focused. Listed below are among the ones I ran within the Excel advert group:
Clicking ‘Be taught extra’ takes you to https://www.easydatatransform.com/.
I didn’t attempt to use edgy photographs or memes, as a result of that isn’t actually my type. There may be an possibility to show feedback on under advertisements. As Reddit customers are typically not well-disposed to advertisements, I didn’t strive turning this on.
Primarily based on hard-won expertise with Google Adwords, I solely set my advertisements to run in rich nations. I additionally restricted my advertisements to individuals on desktop units as Straightforward Knowledge Rework solely runs on the desktop.
When Straightforward Knowledge Rework is put in, it opens a web page on my web site with some directions. So I used this to arrange the Reddit conversion monitoring to rely the variety of occasions a click on ended up with a profitable set up of both the Home windows or Mac model of Straightforward Knowledge Rework.
I monitored the efficiency of the advertisements and disabled those who has poor click on by means of or conversion charges and made variants of the extra profitable ones. Darwinian evolution for advertisements. I ended up creating 70 advertisements throughout 15 advert teams, focusing on 50 communities.
I wasted an hour attempting to get Reddit to acknowledge that I had put in their monitoring pixel. However, total, I discovered the Reddit Advertisements comparatively easy to setup and monitor. Particularly in comparison with the byzantine monstrosity that Google Adwords has turn out to be.
Reddit advertises a deal the place you may get $500 of free advertisements.
However the hyperlink was damaged once I clicked on it. Another person I spoke to mentioned that they had tried to seek out out extra, however gave up once they discovered you needed to have a cellphone name with a gross sales particular person at Reddit.
Outcomes
I ran my experiment from 08-Jul-2025 to 31-Jul-2025. These are the stats, in line with reddit.
| Spend | $851.04 |
| Impressions | 490,478 |
| Clicks | 3,585 |
| Home windows installs | 177 |
| Mac installs | 63 |
| Whole installs | 240 |
| Click on By Price | 0.73% |
| Value Per Click on | $0.24 |
| Click on to put in conversion price | 6.59% |
| Value Per Set up | $3.55 |
I typically reckon that someplace round 10% of people that set up are happening to purchase. So $3.55 per set up would imply round $35.50 price per sale, which is cheap for a $99 sale. So that each one appears to be like fairly encouraging.
However, evaluating the Reddit quantity to the numbers I get from Google Analytics and my net logs, I believe the Reddit numbers are doubtful. At greatest. In every week when Reddit says it despatched me 1174 clicks, Google Analytics says I acquired 590 referrals from Reddit and my net log says I acquired 639 referrals from Reddit. A number of the distinction could also be as a consequence of evaluating periods with clicks, time zones and many others. But it surely appears to be like fishy.
The discrepancy is even larger for those who take a look at conversions. The overall installs per week reported by Google Analytics and my net logs didn’t go up something such as you would count on from wanting on the Reddit conversion numbers. When you dig a bit additional, you discover that Reddit makes use of ‘modeled conversions‘ to:
“Acquire a extra full view of your advertisements efficiency with modeled conversions, which leverages machine studying to bridge attribution gaps attributable to sign loss.”
Uh huh. Sounds suspiciously like ‘making shit up’.
After which there are the gross sales. Or lack of. I don’t have detailed monitoring of precisely the place each sale comes from. However I estimate that my $851 outlay on advertisements resulted in between $0 and $400 in extra gross sales. Which isn’t good, provided that I don’t have VC cash to burn. Particularly while you issue within the time taken to run this experiment.
The highest 5 nations for spend had been:
- Italy
- Spain
- France
- Germany
- Singapore
The US solely accounted for 0.28% of impressions, 13 clicks and $3.81 in spend. Presumably as a result of the US market is extra aggressive, and I wasn’t bidding sufficient to get my advertisements proven.
You may take a look at varied breakdowns by nation, neighborhood, system and many others. That is useful. However among the breakdowns make no sense. For instance, it says that 41% of the press throughs from individuals studying Mac-related communities had been from Home windows PCs. That sounds most unlikely!
However the worst continues to be to return. Feast your eyes on this Google Analytics knowledge from my web site:
| Common engaged time per energetic consumer (seconds) | Engaged periods per energetic consumer | |
|---|---|---|
| Google / natural | 33 | 0.75 |
| Successfulsoftware.internet / referral | 31 | 0.74 |
| Youtube.com / referral | 27 | 0.86 |
| Chatgpt.com / referral | 24 | 0.69 |
| Google / CPC | 16 | 0.65 |
| Reddit / referral | 8 | 0.25 |
8 seconds! That’s the imply, not the median. Yikes. And 75% of the periods didn’t end in any significant engagement. This makes me marvel if nearly all of the Reddit clicks are unintended.
I had meant to spend $1000 on this experiment, however the outcomes had been sufficiently horrible that I ended earlier than then.
If I had spent numerous time tweaking the advert photographs and textual content, touchdown pages, communities and nations, then I may most likely have improved issues a bit. However I doubt I may ever get a worthwhile return on my money and time.
If the lifetime worth of a sale is much more than $99 for you, or your product is an effective match for Reddit, then Reddit Advertisements is perhaps value attempting. However make certain to not take any Reddit numbers at face worth.
