How To Advertise on Reddit
How To Advertise on Reddit
Key Takeaways:
Understand Reddit’s communities and audience personas to ensure your campaigns fit naturally within the right conversations.
Use Reddit Ads Manager strategically, leveraging contextual targeting and creative formats that suit each community.
An integrated agency like One Day can manage planning, creative, and buying across Reddit and beyond, ensuring your campaigns blend authenticity with measurable impact.
Reddit is one of the most influential yet misunderstood platforms in digital marketing. With millions of active users and countless communities built around every interest imaginable, it offers an untapped opportunity for brands to connect with real people, not just demographics. In this guide, we explore how to advertise on Reddit effectively with One Day, from targeting and creative strategy to media buying and campaign optimisation.
Understanding Reddit as a Marketing Channel
Reddit is built around communities known as “subreddits,” each dedicated to a specific topic or interest — from r/technology and r/marketing to r/cats or r/finance. What makes Reddit unique compared to other platforms is that users are not there to scroll aimlessly; they’re there to engage, debate, and contribute to communities they care about.
This community-driven nature shapes how brands should advertise. Redditors value transparency and authenticity. Overly polished or overly “salesy” messages are often ignored, or worse, criticised. However, when brands contribute meaningfully — through helpful content, genuine engagement, or humour that fits the subreddit’s culture — the results can be remarkable.
For marketers, this means that understanding the platform’s culture is the first step. Reddit rewards relevance and punishes insincerity. Campaigns that align with a subreddit’s interests can drive strong engagement, word-of-mouth visibility, and brand loyalty.
Defining Your Audience Persona
Reddit’s power lies in its diversity. With over 100,000 active communities, advertisers can reach incredibly specific audience segments. But to do so effectively, you need to define your audience personas clearly.
Ask yourself:
What interests, hobbies, or needs does my ideal customer have?
Which subreddits are they most likely to participate in?
What tone of communication resonates with them — conversational, informative, or ironic?
Reddit’s ad platform allows for interest-based, community-based, and keyword targeting, enabling precision that few platforms can match. For example, a fitness brand might target users in r/Fitness and r/Running, while a fintech app could reach r/PersonalFinance and r/CryptoCurrency.
You can also combine targeting layers — such as location, device, or behaviour — to refine your reach.
Understanding your persona also helps inform creative tone. Reddit users appreciate content that feels tailored to their community. Ads that mimic the voice and visual style of organic posts tend to perform best.
Using Reddit Ads Manager
Reddit Ads Manager provides an accessible way for marketers to build, monitor, and optimise campaigns. It offers several campaign objectives including awareness, traffic, conversions, and app installs — similar to other major platforms but with Reddit’s unique contextual advantage.
Campaign Types and Formats
Promoted Posts: Appear within subreddit feeds and mimic organic posts. These can include text, images, or videos.
Conversation Ads: Encourage replies and engagement, allowing brands to participate in ongoing discussions.
Takeover Ads: Offer maximum exposure through placements on Reddit’s homepage or trending subreddits.
Reddit also provides strong analytics tools for measuring impressions, clicks, upvotes, and engagement rates. By monitoring these, marketers can adapt creatives and targeting based on performance insights.
However, the key is not to rely solely on data — combine it with qualitative observation. Read through the comments. Observe how users react. Real-time feedback from Redditors often reveals more about brand perception than any metric.
Crafting Ads that Fit Reddit’s Culture
Reddit’s culture thrives on honesty and shared interests. Unlike other social platforms, where sleek design dominates, Reddit’s visual environment is simple and discussion-first. Successful ads respect that simplicity and fit seamlessly into user feeds.
Here’s what works best:
Sound like a Redditor. Write copy that sounds conversational, not corporate. Avoid jargon and self-promotion.
Embrace humour or helpfulness. Reddit users respond well to wit, authenticity, and information that adds value.
Join the conversation. Consider engaging in comments where appropriate. Authentic participation can enhance credibility.
Test creative variations. Subtle changes in tone or imagery can dramatically affect engagement.
For instance, when brands like Pringles and Duolingo advertised on Reddit, they succeeded by adapting their humour and using platform-specific references that resonated with Reddit’s culture.
Integrating Reddit into Your Broader Media Mix
Reddit should not exist in isolation. When combined with other channels such as Meta, TikTok, or programmatic display, it becomes a powerful part of a full-funnel strategy. Its strength lies in building trust and advocacy among niche communities, which can then influence awareness and conversion across your broader marketing ecosystem.
At One Day Agency, we help brands identify where Reddit fits within their wider plan — whether as a testing ground for messaging, a platform for audience discovery, or a brand-building tool among highly engaged users.
Our integrated approach connects Reddit campaigns to other paid and organic touchpoints. For example, insights gathered from Reddit comments can inform social copy elsewhere, or performance data from Reddit Ads can refine audience targeting in Meta and Google Ads.
We handle everything from audience strategy and creative adaptation to media buying and reporting, ensuring Reddit complements your full digital mix.
Measuring Success
Reddit offers both quantitative and qualitative signals of success. Beyond metrics like click-through rates and conversions, pay attention to engagement sentiment. How are users responding in comments? Are they tagging friends, upvoting, or resharing?
Reddit’s analytics dashboard lets you track:
Engagement Rate: Upvotes, comments, and clicks per impression.
CTR and Conversion Metrics: Based on campaign objectives.
Community Interaction: Qualitative engagement that reflects brand affinity.
Success on Reddit often looks different from traditional paid media. Instead of sheer reach, it’s about relevance and authenticity. A single highly engaged conversation can be more valuable than thousands of passive impressions.
Final Thoughts
Advertising on Reddit is about understanding people — not just placements. It’s a platform built on curiosity, community, and honest conversation. To succeed, brands must embrace that culture and build campaigns that add value rather than interrupt.
At One Day Agency, we help brands navigate Reddit’s unique environment with tailored strategies that merge data insight, cultural understanding, and creative innovation. Whether you’re exploring Reddit for the first time or scaling performance campaigns, our integrated planning and buying approach ensures your message finds its place within the right communities.
To learn more about how we can support your Reddit advertising strategy, visit One Day Agency or explore our Digital Media Services.
Read more about digital advertising and Reddit, and other ways of advertising such as Paid Social!
