Subreddit advertising: a $30 postmortem

We're doing another round next week, so it'll be interesting to see the download/sign up conversion.

For example, I followed the link to /r/selfserve and saw someone complaining: "$100 for 13,000 impressions is a rip off. I've been advertising for years online and this is lowest I've seen by a mile" and following up with a comment saying "$100 buys 150k impressions anywhere else". At that price you're going to be getting low quality impressions wherever you buy, and if he's never seen a CPM rate like that before he's got a very limited experience in his years of advertising. In my world, as long as clicks are well targeted I have no problem hitting an eCPC of $1, and I spend a hell of a lot of advertising money getting those clicks.

No doubt people who actually work in advertising and know what they're doing aren't talking about it online, whereas the people we hear from are those who spend a tiny amount (normally $30, much too little to judge on) and don't necessarily understand too much about what they're doing.

That said, I don't know enough about it to have any decent thoughts on the subject, I've spent a few bucks just to see how the booking system works but never put any effort into getting results from it - I didn't like the system too much and wasn't optimistic that it could give good results. So on the one hand, this comment is just uninformed complaining about others, but on the other, I've probably spent more than most people who complain about Reddit advertising yet I know I don't know enough to judge it.

Note to OP: Most of this comment was about the overall situation not you. That said, I do think that spending $30 and coming to any conclusion stronger than "it's not worth my effort to try and find out if Reddit advertising can help me" is based on too little information.

Edit: To add some more general feedback about Reddit advertising, my feeling is that right now they're the worst of both worlds (self-serve and account managers). Most platforms buy me lunch to ask what I want to do with them, some, like Facebook, make me book in manually, but with that manual work comes the added value of the options they give - with Reddit you have to do it all yourself while getting hardly any flexibility. (And even with Facebook, I still have an account manager, an account strategist and a technical account manager, all three of whom are reachable on mobile any time they're needed even outside office hours.) I get that Reddit self-serve is still young, and I've heard talk of improvements on the way (such as paying CPM rates), but right now it just feels far too amateur to keep my attention - from the selling all the way through to the reporting - despite the fact that I use Reddit myself.

That's what it came down to for me, I'm not optimistic that I'll ever get great results spending $30 a day advertising a $2 app to Redditors.

But yes, the $30 / 1 day data isn't large enough to draw any real conclusions.

I don't mean to be harsh, but your results don't really say anything about the merits of advertising on Reddit. Ads can impact purchases long in advance, but more importantly you can't expect single touch ads to work! Most users ignore an ad until they've seen it multiple times. I suggest you read more about effective frequency/advertising frequency.

From personal experience, I can tell you that even good products with good ads usually start off as losers, then increase their return as they reach their full audience multiple times. Once you've achieved saturation in that channel, your ROI levels off and then begins to decline.

Honestly - and I say this for the benefit of anyone who thinks this test is meaningful - that $30 would be better spent on a textbook about the basics of online advertising.