Advertising Your Podcast on Reddit
Good Morning, Podcasters! We're all here trying to find new ways to increase our listenership. We want to find new ways to reach your audiences where they're at.
Reddit is a great place to find niche audiences because the audiences set up their own channels called, "subreddits."
For example, if you're trying to target people interested in Podcasting, there are some great subreddits like:
- r/podcasting
- r/podcasters
- r/podcast
- r/podcasts
- r/podcastguestexchange
- and some other audio-related subreddits
You can also target people who have an interest that is closely related to your show, set geographic targeting, and a number of other demographic features.
My Reddit Ad Campaign Experiments
Campaign 1:
My first campaign was optimized toward getting website clicks. I targeted users in the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland. My ads featured the Good Morning, Podcasters logo, ran only in the news feed, and I targeted users in the above subreddits. I set a cost per click cap at $1 and I ran it for 7 days.
Results:
- Impressions: 43,205
- eCPM (effective cost per thousand): $1.41
- Clicks: 89
- Cost Per Click: $0.68
- Click Thru Rate: 0.206%
- Amount Spent: $60.80
Campaign 2:
The second campaign was also optimized for website traffic, targeted users in the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland, and featured the Good Morning, Podcasters logo (albeit in a more optimized aspect ratio). I targeted users in the above subreddits. I set a cost per click cap at $0.50 and I ran it for 16 days. These ads ran in both the news feed and in conversations (comment threads).
Results:
- Impressions: 243,791
- eCPM (effective cost per thousand): $0.65
- Clicks: 586
- Cost Per Click: $0.27
- Click Thru Rate: 0.240%
- Amount Spent: $158.62
Overall, the campaigns would get an upvote from me. The second campaign obviously performed better - not just because of the extra spend, but because of running in-conversation and adding a more optimized, landscape aspect ratio on the ads.
If I run again, I will add another ad or two in order to A/B test the creative. I will also experiment with some of the other ad styles.
Wrapping it up
Reddit Ads are great because you can target very specific audiences whose interests are made very clear. The ad interface is clean and mostly straightforward with the exception of a couple of hidden important tools (like adding new ads to an ad group). It's much easier to navigate than Facebook's Ad Manager, LinkedIn's campaign creator, and Twitter's ad platform.
However, Facebook and Instagram give you many more ad options. I also feel like Reddit users are more skeptical about ads and less likely to click than they are on Facebook or Instagram, but that's just anecdotal... I've been a Reddit user for a long, long time.
If you have any questions about my experience, don't hesitate to email me or DM me.
Thanks for listening!
Transcript
Fuzz Martin 0:00
Good Morning Podcasters Are you looking to reach a new audience? Of course you are. That's why you're here. Let's talk about advertising your podcast on the front page of the internet's
Fuzz Martin 0:18
Hello, my friends, I am Fuzz Martin. And this is Good Morning Podcasters. We are only a dozen episodes away from 50. I guess that's still a fair number of episodes that we need to record to get to 50. But we're getting close. We hear a lot about advertising your podcast on Facebook, we hear a lot about promo swaps. We hear about advertising on Instagram and a number of different platforms. But we rarely hear about advertising on Reddit. So over the last couple of months, I experimented with paid Reddit ads, and I'm going to share that experience with you on this episode. Before getting into how it's done, I just have to say that I was blown away by the simplicity of the Reddit ads interface. Compared to Meta's ads manager, LinkedIn, Google and Twitter. The Reddit ads interface is very clean, sparse. However, it's also kind of hard to find a few things that are hidden. But it's still a lot easier to navigate than some of the other platforms.
Fuzz Martin 1:27
and reach. That's a cost per:Fuzz Martin 2:29
Once you've selected the one that you're going to choose, then you set your ad group. Here's where you select your audience you can either use the Reddit audience, pixel retargeting, which is where you retarget people who have visited your website, custom audiences, which allows you to upload an email list. And then it matches users against which emails they use to log into Reddit, or engagement retargeting, and that's for people who have interacted with your ads on Reddit. For the sake of this episode, we're going to just stick with the Reddit audience for our targeting. And once you have that selected, you can pick your interests of the audience that you're trying to target, they have a whole list of them.
Fuzz Martin 3:07
By the way, if you're looking for podcasts, people who like podcasts, go to entertainment, and scroll down. There's also a music and audio listing and they're not in alphabetical order. But I will assure you, if you scroll down, you will find the podcasts interest. You can also select specific subreddits to target and that's one of the things that I did for my ad sets for both of them. And you can choose whether you want your ads to show in the feed in the Reddit feed or in comments, strings of conversations, or in both.
Fuzz Martin 3:43
off next time I do taxes for:Fuzz Martin 4:05
Then on the next screen, you get to put in your ad creative you can choose a post that you have on your Reddit channel already. And you can sponsor that. Or you can upload a video and photo add your text add your link, you can create a carousel of a number of different images. Or you can just create a text ad (boring).
Fuzz Martin 4:26
click. My effective cost per:Fuzz Martin 6:13
It had an effective cost per:Fuzz Martin 7:25
The second campaign was much more successful. I have definitely seen an increase in traffic and listenership since running my Reddit ad campaign. Now I'm not seeing the growth that I saw when the campaign was running. So I can tell you that the ads were working, I would say it's fallen off by about an average of five to eight new listens per episode, since I turned off the Reddit ad campaign. So nothing significant. But it definitely was making an impression, so to speak. Both of these campaigns were targeted to a very narrow set of Reddit users into a very narrow set of sub Reddits.
Fuzz Martin 8:12
So I will say that given that very narrow audience, it did connect well, with the relatively low number of users that were available in the audience that I selected, will I run more campaigns. We'll see. I might try it next with Shanaze educational podcast, the tech tools for teachers podcast next. If you are looking to get started with Reddit ads, again, it's very, very easy to get started. Just have an idea of what interests you want to target and or which subreddits you want your ads to appear in. And also be sure to create multiple ads and test them against one another. That also includes the text that accompanies your ads in order to see what's performing best. And then after a couple of days, turn off the ad or ads that aren't performing as well. And just run with the higher performing creative you can just toggle off the switch for the ads that aren't running as well.
Fuzz Martin 9:06
Running Reddit ads is a lot easier than Facebook or Instagram ads. They're much cheaper than LinkedIn or Twitter ads. And overall, I kind of liked the experiment. Just remember to set your campaign and dates. That'll do it for today's episode of Good Morning Podcasters if you have additional questions about my Reddit ads experience, you can email me Fuzz at Good morning pod.com That is fu ZZ at Good morning pod.com You can email me any question that you have about podcasting or life in general. I'm happy to answer anything that I can.
Fuzz Martin 9:45
Also, over at goodmorningpod.com, you can leave a voice message for me and you might hear your question live on the air. Even though this is neither live nor on the air but you can hear your voice on a podcast. Alright, cool. New episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Oh, and join Jeff Thompson and me for a another bonus episode of podcasting sucks. Tomorrow morning that Saturday morning, right here in the Good Morning Podcasters feed. It's a really fun episode we're gonna talk about podcasting horror stories. With that, have yourself a great weekend and I'll talk to you real soon. Right here on Good Morning Podcasters
