This post is a follow-up to How to Advertise your Kickstarter.
Reddit launched their new ad platform about a month before my Maximum Apocalypse Kickstarter. I was a fan of their last self-serve system, but their new one is just as good if not better. For this ad platform, I created ads based on the best performing facebook ads. These ads had a CTR of 0.607%. Here is what they looked like on Reddit:
ICYMI: My ROI on my reddit ads was absolutely INSANE! I spent around $40 to get $689 in pledges. There are a few caveats to these numbers though. First, I advertised in reddit primarily in the final week of the campaign.
I also had the benefit of using the best performing copy and graphics from our Facebook advertising. Finally, I advertised on very focused demographics and subreddits.
The Good
Reddit’s new advertising platform gives you more control over your campaign and you don’t have to prepay anymore. Their new system also allows you to advertise on smaller subreddits that wouldn’t have met the $20 prepay threshold before because they simply didn’t have the impressions. Their new system also allows you to create campaigns instead of singular ads. This means you can have multiple creatives, copy and include/exclude reddits all in one campaign. The new system is better and I was a big fan of their old one too. Since the system was so new, I went hyper targeted and set my bid CPC to $0.25 and targeted the subreddit r/boardgames. This yielded an awesome ROI, got me over 190k impressions, had a low CPC and cost me only $39.90.
The Bad
My daily budget for these ads was $20 which I never came close to hitting that so there wasn’t much I could do to amplify these results. Increasing my bid may have increased my clicks and impressions but it would have increased my CPC as well. I’m not sure how many more unique people I would have gotten in front of in this subreddit either. I’m sure going broader with the ads would have increased my spend and visibility but then it wouldn’t have been as hyper focused and conversion and ROI may have suffered. I also made more in pledges ($817) posting comments/links on reddit for free organically than I did from their new ad platform.
Conclusion
Reddit has fantastic traffic and is a quality website, but it’s also the wild west of the internet. The community and people vary drastically from subreddit to subreddit and figuring it out can be time consuming. The new ad platform has amazing potential to hyper-focus on these groups and demographics. There’s nothing better than a massive website giving you the ability to target people age 18+ that love board games because that’s what you’re selling! I’ve just started scratching the surface, but as you can see from the results, Reddit is definitely worth your time and focus. You should absolutely spend time on there leading up to your Kickstarter and I think their ad platform is worth throwing $100 at.
Carl
Thank you very much, extremely valuable information.