Reddit as a Social Advertising Powerhouse?
Social media platform Reddit is providing advertisers more insights into who saw their ads and how many of those users visited their brand's website - even if they didn't actually interact (click) with a digital advertisement.
Reddit updated its self-serve ad-buying tool to now 1) provide performance data based on the target audience, and 2) conversion tracking (via the conversion pixel the platform released back in August 2017).
In addition to standard statistics such as a campaign's average CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and performance metrics like impressions and ad clicks, Reddit advertisers will also be able to see how many of their impressions were actually delivered to their target audience.
Reddit will list the number of impressions served to users and the clicks received from those audiences in each Subreddit, interest category and location that advertisers target and the amount spent on that segment. That's quite valuable in itself, but perhaps even more most interesting is that the updated dashboard will now also report how many upvotes or downvotes ads received and will break down that performance by audience segment too. That's likely to get a big upvote from marketers and advertisers worldwide.
The addition of the conversion tracking capabilities is also important to advertisers and makes the platform at least as competitive as others currently garnering social advertising spend including Facebook,Linkedin, Pinterest and Twitter.
The downside of the addition of conversion tracking at Reddit as it now stands, however, is that brands are not actually able to track separate conversion events. Instead, Reddit will essentially compile conversions across all the pages on a brand's site that include its conversion pixel and report it as a single data point for each campaign. That will make it difficult (impossible) of course for brands to see how many users registered after clicking an advertisement versus how many purchased a product after clicking an ad.
Enterprise marketers seeking a high level of granularity in their reporting might be dissuaded from promoting their products or services on Reddit due to the current limitations of conversion tracking, but there are ways around that (a more refined and detailed campaign setup for example). Hopefully, the performance reporting improvements the company made will be a viable enough reason on its own for advertisers to consider setting up a campaign or two on the network.
