How Reddit Ads work, who they suits, and what it does differently

Reddit spent a decade as the platform media buyers talked about and nobody bought. Now, Reddit's advertising revenue has hit US$762 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 64% year on year, with active advertisers up more than 70% and conversion volume up more than 100%. It is no longer an experimental line item on the media plan.

We’ve put together a guide for anyone that is considering adding Reddit to their advertising mix. We cover who is actually on Reddit, how the ad platform is built, what carries across from Google and Meta, and the handful of things that genuinely work differently. If you run paid media and you have been putting off a proper look at Reddit Ads, start here.

Who is on Reddit?

Reddit reported 130.3 million daily active uniques and 514.6 million weekly active uniques globally in Q2 2026. Take those numbers in carefully, because they’re not counted the way Meta and Google counts them. Reddit's figure includes logged-out visitors, and roughly 60% of daily uniques are logged out. That group is largely search traffic landing on a thread from Google. The logged-in core sits at 52.6 million daily.

In Australia, Reddit puts the audience at 17 million monthly users, describes Australia as a top-five global market, and has roughly doubled its local commercial and measurement team in the past year. But, treat the monthly figure the same way you would treat any platform's self-reported reach: directionally useful, not a census.

Demographically the platform skews male, 18 to 49 years, and mobile. Reddit states 76% of users are on mobile. The more useful framing is behavioural rather than demographic. People are on Reddit to research, compare, complain, and validate. Reddit's Australian sales lead put the current positioning plainly: AI has been great for getting answers fast, and people come to Reddit to check whether those answers are true.

Who should be advertising on Reddit?

Reddit works hardest when the buying decision involves research, and when a real community already exists around the problem you solve.

Strong fits:

• Considered B2C purchases. Mattresses, bikes, cameras, skincare, appliances. Anything people research for weeks.
• Software and B2B with a technical or practitioner audience. Developer tools, SaaS, cybersecurity, IT services. Communities of practice are dense on Reddit and cheap to reach relative to LinkedIn.
• Gaming, hobbies, and enthusiast categories, where sub Reddits are large, active, and product-obsessed.
• ECommerce with a defensible product story. Reddit reports Dynamic Product Ads revenue more than doubling year on year.
• Brands with a credibility problem. Reddit is where the objection lives, so it is also where the objection gets answered.

Weaker fits:

• Impulse and low-consideration retail where visual discovery does the work. Meta and TikTok are still better.
• Anything relying on life-event or relationship targeting. Reddit does not have that data.
• Local service businesses with tight catchments and low search volume. Google is still the answer.
• Regulated verticals planning to lean on product feeds. Reddit prohibits Dynamic Product Ads outright for alcohol, dating, financial and crypto products, gambling, healthcare products, political advertising, and recreational drugs. Those categories can still run standard ads, subject to policy.

How does Reddit Ads actually work?

If you have used Meta Ads Manager, the structure will be immediately familiar. Reddit Ads Manager runs campaign, then ad group, then ad. The campaign holds the objective and an optional spend cap. The ad group holds targeting, budget, bid, schedule, and placement. The ad holds the creative. Above all of it, Business Manager handles users, permissions, ad accounts, billing, and the profile name your ads run under.

There are seven campaign objectives:

Two placements matter. Feed puts your ad in the Home, Popular, and Community feeds. Conversations puts your ad on comment pages, between the post and the first comment. There is no off-platform audience network, so every dollar buys Reddit inventory. That makes attribution cleaner than a Meta or Google buy where display and network inventory quietly absorb budget.

One note on launch timing to add. Reddit reviews every ad, and approval can take up to 48 business hours. Build that into client launch dates.

Reddit Ads targeting: what you can actually buy

Reddit's targeting is behavioural and contextual rather than identity-based. There is no social graph, no declared employer, no relationship status.

Community targeting reaches people who subscribed to or visited specific subreddits in the last 28 days. The 28-day visit window is the part most people miss. You are not limited to subscribers.

Interest targeting uses IAB standard categories built from topics people recently interacted with.

Keyword targeting matches the content of the post or conversation your ad appears in. It is contextual, not query-based, and English only. Paired with the conversation placement, it lets you sit inside a discussion about the exact problem your product solves.

Custom audiences cover website retargeting via pixel or Conversions API, customer list uploads (hashed or unhashed emails, or mobile ad IDs, minimum 1,000 rows), lookalikes, and engagement retargeting reaching anyone who interacted with your ads in the last six months.

Delivery controls include location down to region and postcode, gender, language, device, carrier, OS version for app campaigns, and time-of-day scheduling with a timezone selector. Brand safety runs on community and keyword blocklists at ad group level, plus verification through DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science.

There is also an automated targeting toggle, and a newer AI-driven campaign type, Reddit Max, which automates targeting, creative selection, placement and budget allocation across Traffic, Conversions and App Installs. Its useful wrinkle compared to Performance Max or Advantage+ is Top Audience Personas, which names the clusters the system found rather than hiding them.

Reddit ad formats and creative specs

Five formats do most of the work.

Image ads. JPG, PNG or GIF, up to 3MB. Mobile ratios 1:1 (1080x1080), 3:4 (1080x1440), 4:5 (1080x1350), 4:3 (1440x1080), 16:9 (1920x1080).

Video ads. MP4 or MOV, up to 1GB, maximum 30fps. Length runs from 2 seconds to 15 minutes, with 5 to 30 seconds recommended. Same ratio set as image.

Carousel ads. Two to six cards, each with its own destination URL and optional 50-character caption. GIFs up to 3MB, other formats up to 20MB.

Free-form ads. Reddit's native long-form unit. Up to 20 images, 5 videos, and 40,000 characters of rich text with headings, lists, links, block quotes, and spoiler blocks. Clicking opens the full post rather than sending traffic straight off-platform. Available for Traffic and Brand Awareness objectives only. No other platform has an equivalent, and it is badly underused.

Dynamic Product Ads. Requires a catalogue with matching product IDs, pixel or CAPI installed, and AddToCart, ViewContent and Purchase events firing with those IDs. Physical products only.

Headlines have a 300-character hard limit, but Reddit recommends staying under 100 because longer text truncates across devices. Display URLs cap at 100 characters and must match the destination domain.

What creative actually works on Reddit

Reddit studied more than 100,000 of its own ads and published what moved the numbers. The findings are unusually specific:

• Put your brand name in the headline. It lifted conversion rate 6.5% and improved CPA. More than half of the ads measured did not do it.
• Write in second person. People are on Reddit for personalised advice, so "you" and "yours" outperform.
• Back claims with stats or specs. This is the most Reddit-specific instruction in the whole guide. Vague benefit language dies on this platform.
• Lead with a question, name a timeframe, show the price.
• Refresh headlines every three to four weeks.
• Logo top left, brand in the first three seconds of video, captions on.

The most common misread is that Reddit creative should look organic. Reddit's own guidance says the opposite. Redditors reject ads that feel sneaky. Be polished, be specific, and be obviously branded. The ads that get flamed in comments are the ones pretending to be user posts.

Which brings us to comments.

Do Reddit ads have comments, and can you turn them off?

Comments are off by default. Every new ad ships with comments disabled unless you tick the box to allow them. You can toggle them on or off after launch, and you get full moderation tools on your own ad post. You can approve, delete, mark as spam, lock individual comments, pin a comment to the top, and reply directly.

So the agency folklore that you cannot control comments on Reddit is wrong. The real risk runs the other way. Most advertisers leave comments off, then wonder why the format feels like an expensive display buy. The comment thread is frequently where the conversion argument is won, and Reddit's newer creative products, like Redditor Highlights, are built entirely on surfacing community commentary inside the ad unit.

If you turn comments on, resource it. Someone needs to answer questions in a human voice within hours, not days.

Reddit Ads vs Google and Meta

What is the same?

Enough carries over that a competent Meta or Google buyer will be productive on Reddit inside a week.

• Campaign, ad group, ad hierarchy with targeting and budget at the ad group.
• Auction buying with lowest cost (auto-bid), cost cap (a target, not a hard ceiling), and manual bidding.
• Daily and lifetime budgets, plus a campaign-level spend cap.
• A pixel, a Conversions API, standard events, advanced matching, and event deduplication.
• Custom audiences, lookalikes, and retargeting.
• Creative testing logic, naming conventions and account structure discipline all transfer directly.

What is different?

No identity graph. Targeting is built on what someone visited, what topics they engaged with, and what is on the page. That means lower customer list match rates than Meta and thinner lookalike signal. It also means community membership is a deliberate, self-selected interest signal, which is closer to a Google keyword than a Meta interest cluster.

Contextual keyword targeting is a third category. Google matches a search query. Meta matches an inferred profile. Reddit matches the conversation your ad lands in.

The conversation placement has no equivalent. No other platform puts a paid unit inside a threaded discussion someone deliberately opened to read other people's opinions.

Comments are a feature, not a liability.

No audience network. Nothing spills onto third-party sites.

Operational constraints are tighter. Three worth knowing before you build: conversion goals cannot be changed once saved, so you rebuild the ad group to change them. Custom events cannot be used as optimisation goals. Budget changes take up to an hour to take effect, and ad groups can overspend budget by up to 20% because of auction dynamics.

Attribution defaults are longer. This is the big one.

Reddit conversion tracking and reporting

Install the Reddit Pixel via code, Google Tag Manager, the direct Shopify integration, or a partner integration. Then add the Conversions API. Reddit says outright that pixel-only coverage is limited by browser signal loss and recommends running both with event deduplication. Supported partners include Google Tag Manager, Segment, Tealium, RudderStack, Hightouch, mParticle, Adobe, Elevar, and WooCommerce.

There are eight standard events: PageVisit, ViewContent, Search, AddToCart, AddToWishlist, Purchase, Lead and SignUp. Custom events can be passed as well, though they cannot be used as an optimisation goal. Selectable conversion goals are Purchase, Lead, SignUp, Add to Cart, Page Visit, and Clicks. Without pixel or CAPI in place, Clicks is the only optimisation available.

Now the attribution point. Reddit's default click-through window is 28 days. Its recommended setting is 28-day click plus 1-day view. Meta's default is 7-day click plus 1-day view.

That difference matters more than any benchmark you will read. Reddit will report more conversions than Meta for identical activity, purely because the window is four times longer. Any Reddit versus Meta CPA or ROAS comparison that does not normalise attribution windows first is not a comparison, it is an artefact. Set Reddit to 7-day click when you benchmark, then decide separately whether the longer window better reflects how your customers actually buy. For considered purchases, it often does, and that is precisely why Reddit chose it.

For app campaigns, use a mobile measurement partner. SKAdNetwork is supported on iOS. Managed advertisers in Australia can also access Reddit Brand Lift and Conversion Lift studies, which are the only genuinely first-party read on incrementality available on the platform.

What do Reddit ads cost?

Reddit does not publish benchmark cost data, and neither does anyone else with a disclosed methodology. Treat every average Reddit CPC figure you find online with suspicion, including the ones in tidy comparison tables.

Reddit CPMs are materially cheaper than LinkedIn and generally cheaper than Meta, and Reddit CPCs sit in a similar band to Meta and well below Google Search on competitive commercial terms. Beyond that, cost depends on category, targeting breadth, objective and creative quality, exactly as it does everywhere else.

The useful budgeting question is whether you have enough volume to exit the learning phase on a conversion objective within a fortnight. If you cannot, start on Traffic, build an engagement and retargeting pool, and move to Conversions once the pixel has real data behind it.

Getting started on Reddit Ads

Reddit rewards being run as its own channel and punishes being run as a copy of your Meta account. The setup decisions that matter get made before launch. Whether your first ad groups are split by community, interest or keyword so you can tell which signal is actually working, whether pixel and CAPI are both in place before a dollar is spent, whether the conversion goal is right the first time given it cannot be changed later, and whether the attribution window has been normalised before anyone compares Reddit to Meta.

That is the work we do for clients. Refuel can build and manage Reddit Ads accounts as part of our paid media offering, including tracking setup, creative built for the platform rather than repurposed from elsewhere, and reporting that holds up next to your other channels.

If Reddit looks like a fit for your audience, get in touch. We will tell you honestly whether your category has the community depth to make it work before you commit any budget.