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Reddit's Ad Changes Reduce Your ROI

376 points by bold_panda 9y ago

I'm a long time Reddit advertiser. I've also written the top ranked post on Google for "Reddit Ads." Reddit liked the post so much that they feature on a case study on their site. I used to be able to drive $10 CPAs from Reddit ads. It was a simple process. You pick a subreddit that fits well w/ your product and run an ad in that subreddit. It would only appear in that subreddit. For example, I run a jerky club, so I would advertise in the r/jerky subreddit and people would see my ad in r/jerky and sign up for a subscription. My ad would only appear in the r/jerky subreddit. It was perfect contextual advertising. Redditors see relevant ads, Reddit gets ad revenue, and the advertiser gets ROI. Now, Reddit has changed their system secretly so they can boost their ad revenue and reduce advertiser ROI. CPAs now cost me $100+ on their platform. Here's what they've done. Now when I tell Reddit that I want to run an ad in r/jerky, instead of ONLY running the ad in the r/jerky subreddit, they run the ad to any user who's ever visited r/jerky or subscribed to it. Of note, they don't tell the advertiser about this change anywhere on their new platform. So now my jerky club ad can appear on the front page for ANY Reddit user who's ever visited r/ jerky or subscribed to the subreddit. The ad can appear any place on Reddit totally out of context. This drastically reduces the ROI for the advertiser and it gives Reddit the ability to sell many more impressions. Total deception on the part of Reddit. Disappointed. Maybe someone from Reddit can chime in on this because it's very frustrating.

grepthisab 9y ago
This seems pretty annoying. Do/did they tell you anywhere that your ad would only appear on the specified subreddit previously, or was this just expected behavior? In any case, you should stop advertising with them if you don't like their business practices. Semi-unrelated, but I stopped using Reddit a bit ago, it became too much of a haven for racism, misogyny, and an endless stream of sockpuppets touting white supremacy views.
- jasondemeuse 9y ago
  Reddit is way more valuable if you subscribe to smaller discussion-based subs that have stricter rules. I haven't gone on r/all or any default subs in years but I still get a lot out of my front page since I try to be selective about which ones I subscribe to.
jedberg 9y ago
Did you talk to someone at Reddit about this? I'm sure they'd like to know how you feel. If you haven't, you should send them this feedback directly. BTW, it's clear as day that they do this on their help page: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeting-your-audience/targeting-subreddits https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeti...
- KGIII 9y ago
  This, and make some metaphorical noise. I'd also check for contract verbiage that allows them to make these changes without notice. And I'd document everything.
- bold_panda 9y ago
  I sent them a long email w/ all my suggestions for improving their platform. My current opinion of Reddit is that they DGAF about their advertisers.
  - raldi 9y ago
    How long ago did you send it?
adrr 9y ago
That would scare me as advertiser. I don't want my ads on certain sub-reddits.
- jamiequint 9y ago
  PM from Reddit here. We limit the subreddits your ads can show on outside of the targeted subreddit to ones that are similarly "brand safe" to the ones you are targeting. (e.g. if you are explicitly targeting only NSFW subs your ad will show up on other NSFW subs, but if you're not targeting NSFW subs your ad will never show up on a NSFW sub). You are also able to exclude any specific subreddits you don't want to show up on.
  - LyndsySimon 9y ago
    Who decides what is "brand safe"? If it's not the ad buyer, that seems like a huge problem. The whole point of marketing is to build an association between a context and a brand - if you can't control what context in which your ad appears then the platform becomes nearly useless. Worse than useless, actually, since you could be paying to build association with context you that damage your brand. I would be outraged if my ad for /r/luxury ran on /r/couponing, regardless of whether you consider it to be NSFW.
    - soared 9y ago
      Brand safety is about nsfw/extremist/gore/etc content. Brand safety is not the difference between r/luxury and r/couponing. I've never advertised on reddit, but many platforms allow categorical targeting, and categorical exclusions so you can explicitly exclude things that are outside the realm of brand safety, but would still hurt your brand.
      - jackgolding 9y ago
        I agree with soared, there are standards for this (generally around not getting penalised by the ad exchange you are running on.)
  - 9y ago
pryelluw 9y ago
Thanks for the heads up. I wasnt aware of the changes. Reddit had proven to be a good ad platform for my clients (I do media buys for others). Will have to reconsider using it.
nulagrithom 9y ago
EDIT: Found confirmation that this is how it works now. https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204584279-Targeting-Subreddits https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204584279-Targe... > Targeting a subreddit means you are targeting the subscribers and recent visitors of that subreddit. Subscribers can see your ad while visiting the targeted subreddit and on other subreddits if they recently visited that targeted subreddit. That's a bummer. I really liked the idea of highly targetted ads in subreddits... --- Looks like they've updated the Reddit ads page since I last looked, but it seems quite explicit: 'Interests' means shows the ads everywhere. 'Subreddits' means show it only on that subreddit. https://i.imgur.com/dm5DRO6.png https://i.imgur.com/dm5DRO6.png Now I noticed that it says the 'Potential Daily Impressions' are too low for that subreddit. Used to be that it wouldn't let you run the ad this way. Maybe now it automatically changes to run everywhere if this is the case? The FAQ states: > Why can’t I target a specific subreddit? > We only allow users to target the top 5k most trafficked subreddits, as other subreddits do not garner enough traffic for advertisers to hit their minimum budget. We will continue on-boarding subreddits as they grow in size! Maybe during the 'ad review' your particular ad was switched to target an interest in jerky instead of just the subreddit? Was there any sort of confirmation email about Reddit accepting your ad?
- bold_panda 9y ago
  Subreddit does not mean that it only shows in that subreddit. That's the problem I outlined in my OP. Their is no interest category for jerky specifically and Reddit certainly wouldn't be that proactive as to adjust my ad for me in my experience. It's an automated system...which is fine...but they swept this targeting change under the rug.
  - nulagrithom 9y ago
    The tooltip says "Targets users that are visting a particular subreddit." https://i.imgur.com/g6GlErJ.png https://i.imgur.com/g6GlErJ.png I feel like that's pretty unambiguous... Would be interesting to hear somebody from Reddit weigh in on this. (Also it looks like the system isn't automated: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/comments/6z144n/how_long_does_the_reviewing_process_take/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/comments/6z144n/how_long_...)
cm2012 9y ago
This has been true for years I thought.
CryoLogic 9y ago
I ran into the same issues. I had a niche (starwars) product I was advertising on the starwars subreddit during holidays which would pull in ~$1.5 per $1 spent on Reddit (lifesize wookie cardboard cutout). After new changes the tactic operates at a loss so I opted to stop advertising on Reddit all together.
- folli 9y ago
  Did you never run into any problems regarding trademarks?
jamiequint 9y ago
Hey bold_panda, I'm the Group PM for Monetization and Growth @ Reddit. I'm really sorry to hear you're experiencing worse CPMs from this targeting change. We definitely did not make this change to intentionally deceive you. You, the advertiser, are our the customer of our ads product. We certainly don't intend to reduce advertiser ROI, because at the end of the day if you are unhappy with your ad performance and leave that doesn't boost our ad revenue at all. To clarify what happened here, around the time we released our new ads platform - 6 months ago - we made some changes to targeting. Specifically, we modified subreddit targeting so that recent visitors to a subreddit or a post from a subreddit could also qualify to see ads targeted to that subreddit. We did not make any changes to how users who subscribe to a subreddit see ads (subreddit subscribers have been eligible to see ads targeted to a subreddit as long as they are visiting safe for work content since this commit ~2 years ago: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/f6a37b64c17579b82e22697b0e29dee50ebd2fd6 https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/f6a37b64c17579b82e22...) The release of our new ads platform also coincided with a re-release of our help center docs, which detail how subreddit targeting works. You can see the specific page here: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeting-your-audience/targeting-subreddits https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeti... As noted there: "Targeting a subreddit means you are targeting the subscribers and recent visitors of that subreddit. Subscribers can see your ad while visiting the targeted subreddit and on other subreddits if they recently visited that targeted subreddit." We made this change in response to advertiser feedback that they would like to see an increase in targeted inventory, the idea being that if you're interested in jerky when you're on /r/jerky you're also interested in jerky when you're not on /r/jerky. This change has helped a good number of our advertisers successfully expand budgets while still meeting their return on ad spend goals, specifically for advertisers that target smaller subreddits regularly. We of course also limit the subreddits your ads can show on outside of the targeted subreddit to ones that are similarly "brand safe" to the ones you are targeting. (e.g. if you are explicitly targeting only NSFW subs your ad will show up on other NSFW subs, but if you're not targeting NSFW subs your ad will never show up on a NSFW sub) While we haven't done any sort of official analysis of CPM changes here, the expected effect of this change was that advertisers would be able to spend significantly more budget (a specific request of many of our advertisers). An expected side effect is that CPMs might possibly increase due to more bids on a per-impression basis, but since you're bidding on a wider range of inventory I would expect that you would be able to reduce your CPMs and still spend the same budget you were spending before, with similar performance. If there's something I can do to help please don't hesitate to email me directly (jamie@reddit.com). In the future for ads problems we also hang out on https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads
IAmGraydon 9y ago
The fact that a $10 CPA was every considered acceptable is crazy, specially for the product you sell. Considering how cheap Reddit's impressions are, your conversion rate must be just a hair above zero. How do you know that your results aren't due to saturation and burnout? Once you've squeezed every bit of blood from a turnip, it becomes exponentially expensive to continue to do so. Maybe there just isn't a market for your product. IMO, if you have to show more than 1000 people your product to sell one, you have a product problem.
- zer00eyz 9y ago
  > The fact that a $10 CPA was every considered acceptable is crazy, I know plenty of industry where a $10 CPA would be a massive discount. $100 clicks aren't unheard of or uncommon for niche high value products. > IMO, if you have to show more than 1000 people your product to sell one, you have a product problem. This is how niche products work, you need to hit a lot of eyeballs before you find the RIGHT person who converts. If you have high customer satisfaction and a good retention program you can make a business out of numbers like this. Are you going to make a billon dollars on it, probably not but you can live comfortably off of it.
- soared 9y ago
  You can't really make accusations about someone's CPA without seeing the data. You've no way to tell if that $10 CPA is 0.5x ROAS or 15x ROAS, either of which would completely change the conversation.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
Agreed that they should make every change documented and explicit - if you didn't realize they made this change -> that's squarely on them. That being said, this is a welcome change because up until now the inventory has been so small on almost any individual subreddit as to make the time spent setting up and managing ads on the platform ROI negative.
hysan 9y ago
Anecdotally, as a user, I actually noticed this two weeks ago when certain ads started to feel like they were following me around in other subreddits. It creeped me out enough and was annoying enough (ex: I don't want to hear about tech jobs when I'm browsing my sports subreddits; it reminds me of work) that I finally unwhitelisted reddit. Prior to this, I had reddit as one of the very few whitelisted sites on my adblockers because I felt like the advertising was in good faith. That it was actually pretty relevant sometimes. It's sad to read that I wasn't just being paranoid.
leeoniya 9y ago
this problem is the same for other ad platforms. i only want to target people on those sites that have contextual meaning to my offerings and not creepily offer them a chevy truck when they're on a cosmetics page simply because they once searched for "chevy". these ad platforms maximize impressions and clicks, not conversions - metrics that are good for them but usually annoying, misleading and meaningless for real ROI. and there's not much you can do about it, by design.
- soared 9y ago
  Yeah, by design only experts are going to be super successful. The average small business owner will waste a lot of money on reddit, facebook, and google because missing a single checkbox will have massive impacts on your campaign.
  - leeoniya 9y ago
    this is 100% true. for example, using any kind of partial broad match and not having a large amount of negative keywords (which must be manually managed and maintained over time) will waste a lot of money.
    - soared 9y ago
      Exactly. Experienced users know to use mod-broad. Same with facebook - when building an audience the interface looks like you're using AND logic, but only a tiny checkbox will enable AND logic, by default is OR and presented a deceiving way. (They also enabled insta and fb by default, and used to do fb display network by default too).
jmarbach 9y ago
I was a long time and happy Reddit advertiser myself up until last month when their original ad system was deprecated. I experienced the exact same change in results as the OP describes: An effective 10x increase in CPA with the same ad copy and what I understood was the same targeting. When you think you're paying for the same thing but experience worse results by an order of magnitude, then you know something is up. The deceptive nature of this change is that their new ad platform does not explain any of details that their product manager has graciously offered here. It's too bad that it has taken a front-page HN post to get this information to light; this already undermines the trust of the ads product team at Reddit. Thank you to the OP for explaining the change in laymen's terms. Next, despite spending tens of thousands of dollars with Reddit, it's nearly impossible to be in contact with a competent person on their ads team. My support requests have gone routinely unanswered, or at best I receive a template response after days and days. After this most recent change I tried a last resort option of posting in the Reddit ads subreddit, which also received no response: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/comments/6wlyya/using_the_new_ads_center_is_like_going_back_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/comments/6wlyya/using_the... The only benefit I've seen in the new platform is conversion tracking, which is a basic feature that has existed on even the most rudimentary ad systems for more than a decade. The Reddit Ads platform is way behind the times, which is sad because they're sitting on some of the most valuable web traffic in the world.
- soared 9y ago
  If you spent $10k+ on facebook or google they'd assign you an account rep. That rep likely wouldn't be much help, but at least you have a name and an email for when something goes wrong.
- jamiequint 9y ago
  Hey jmarbach, we haven't made any changes to targeting in the last month. The changes described in this post were made 6+ months ago, which means any performance difference you're seeing over the last month are entirely coincidental. The deprecation of our old ads platform didn't involve any changes to the way ads were trafficked on the back-end, it simply turned off our outdated front-end interface for ad buying.
nla 9y ago
All they're doing is retargeting people, which is no different than what the rest of the online ad industry does.
redditadvthrow 9y ago
I work at a digital advertising agency as a media buyer. I buy ads for a living, and spend ~$5MM a year. Reddit is merely stepping into the big leagues. What reddit has done is switched from "Contextual Category" (cx cat) targeting to "Behavioral" (bt) targeting. Usuaully behavioral is much much better, which is likely why the change was made. But OP was doing contextual cat really well, so it was more successful than bt. Reddit made this switch because it will benefit the majority of advertisers, but hurt the ones who really know what they are doing. Reddit will earn more from the 80% that see improvement, and therefore spend more. The 20% like OP will spend less, but it won't matter. CX CAT = Companies like grapeshot and peer39 use NLP to identify keywords on a webpage and categorize it. Then advertisers can buy ads on any webpage that is in those categories. One of my favorite strategies is to buy ads on content that is predicted to go viral in a certain category (like fashion). These are ads that HN usually would like because the ad content is similair to the content of the website. They target a webpage, not a user. BT = Ads that target a specific user, no matter what website they're on. So once a user has visited r/jerky, they're tagged as liking beef jerky and could possibly see beef jerky ads on any site they visit. This is partially how you get ads that seems very out of place - beef jerky ads on a r/technology. If you spend time buying media, you know reddit's behavior isn't surprising. Facebook and Google both have default settings that will burn through your budget and provide shitty results. Only someone who intimately knows the platform will be successful. Reddit is merely stepping into the big leagues.
- kazinator 9y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with you here. "User is visiting r/foo now" is arguably a behavior! So posting an ad to a specific subreddit is arguably behavioral. "Once visited r/foo six months ago" is arguably not a behavior; it's not something the user is doing. If anything, that is contextual. Presenting the ad based on this amounts to targeting the user based on a pile of past context attached to their account, not based on their current behavior. And since behavioral works better than contextual, there we go: it explains why OP has reduced ROI!
- bold_panda 9y ago
  Thank you for shedding light on this. I suspected this was what was happening. They are letting the big advertisers empty their wallets.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Don't worry, reddit is hurting themselves too: Now about 50% of the time I go to reddit, I have a jarring, awkward experience that reminds me they're datamining my history instead of a mellow, nearly invisible on that made subreddits feel more like a community. I'm sure reddit 4: digg sum moar! will be a great production by the reddit team and look forward to all the change it'll bring.
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  Yup, I always appreciated how ads on reddit were tied to the subreddit I was on. Now it sounds like they're not and it's going to be the same shitstorm of irrelevant ads as on the internet at large. I look forward to seeing ads for products I already bought over and over again on every subreddit I visit.
- captaindiego 9y ago
  Jarring exactly the phrase I'd use to describe my experience the past few weeks noticing that ads are following me around and not related to the subreddit I'm in.
GigabyteCoin 9y ago
By targeting recent visitors to a subreddit... they are essentially no longer targeting anyone. I rarely browse the reddit homepage, but I know that most redditors do. And what's on the homepage that most everybody who looks at it clicks through to? Any and every random subreddit you could think of. I have seen /r/bitcoin on the homepage recently. I have seen /r/security on the homepage recently. I have seen /r/rtlsdr on the homepage recently. That's ridiculous. If I want to advertise a SDR to the "rtlsdr" crowd, I do not want to pay for impressions for every single user on reddit who has just recently viewed /r/rtlsdr because they had a quirky post which resonated with people.
- JorgeGT 9y ago
  To makes things worse, they have also changed the algorithm to promote lesser known subreddits to r/all (or r/popular) more easily [1]. Which is not always good, /r/rtlsdr was unusable for a few days after that... [1] "The algorithm change is fairly simple — as a community is represented more and more often in the listing, the hotness of its posts will be increasingly lessened. This results in more variety in r/all" https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4oedco/lets_all_have_a_town_hall_about_rall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4oedco/lets_...
fomojola 9y ago
According to @jamiequint, "You are also able to exclude any specific subreddits you don't want to show up on.". Would it help to simply exclude every subreddit except the one you want? You'd need a comprehensive list of subreddits, but the Reddit API at https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#GET_subreddits_default https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#GET_subreddits_default seems like it would give you that.
- Jeremy1026 9y ago
  But then you have to manually add the hundreds of thousands of individual subreddits to your exclusion list, and be prepared to add hundreds more each week.
Semaphor 9y ago
That explains why I've recently been seeing so many crap ads all over reddit. Guess it's time to re-enable my adblocker over there.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
apexalpha 9y ago
Reddit has ads? I thought the Reddit Gold funded them?
thenomad 9y ago
Thanks for posting this. I was considering an ad buy on Reddit next month to promote a niche product - I'll probably still do it, but I'll be a lot more ready to pause if the ROI isn't backing out, because now I know why. (/u/bored_panda - please consider reinstating the tight subreddit targeting option of the past!)
mod 9y ago
FWIW I saw a jerky club ad, probably yours, on my new account in the past day or two. I have never visited /r/jerky or anything else remotely related to jerky. Either the algo is wrong or you bought it wrong or it was someone else's ad. It was a terribly annoying ad, it read like "hey, i like jerky but it's so expensive, so i set up a club where you get jerky every month blah blah blah" Basically tried not to look like an ad.

376 points by bold_panda 9y ago

grepthisab 9y ago

This seems pretty annoying. Do/did they tell you anywhere that your ad would only appear on the specified subreddit previously, or was this just expected behavior? In any case, you should stop advertising with them if you don't like their business practices. Semi-unrelated, but I stopped using Reddit a bit ago, it became too much of a haven for racism, misogyny, and an endless stream of sockpuppets touting white supremacy views.

jasondemeuse 9y ago
Reddit is way more valuable if you subscribe to smaller discussion-based subs that have stricter rules. I haven't gone on r/all or any default subs in years but I still get a lot out of my front page since I try to be selective about which ones I subscribe to.

jedberg 9y ago

Did you talk to someone at Reddit about this? I'm sure they'd like to know how you feel. If you haven't, you should send them this feedback directly. BTW, it's clear as day that they do this on their help page: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeting-your-audience/targeting-subreddits https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeti...

KGIII 9y ago
This, and make some metaphorical noise. I'd also check for contract verbiage that allows them to make these changes without notice. And I'd document everything.
bold_panda 9y ago
I sent them a long email w/ all my suggestions for improving their platform. My current opinion of Reddit is that they DGAF about their advertisers.
- raldi 9y ago
  How long ago did you send it?

adrr 9y ago

That would scare me as advertiser. I don't want my ads on certain sub-reddits.

jamiequint 9y ago
PM from Reddit here. We limit the subreddits your ads can show on outside of the targeted subreddit to ones that are similarly "brand safe" to the ones you are targeting. (e.g. if you are explicitly targeting only NSFW subs your ad will show up on other NSFW subs, but if you're not targeting NSFW subs your ad will never show up on a NSFW sub). You are also able to exclude any specific subreddits you don't want to show up on.
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  Who decides what is "brand safe"? If it's not the ad buyer, that seems like a huge problem. The whole point of marketing is to build an association between a context and a brand - if you can't control what context in which your ad appears then the platform becomes nearly useless. Worse than useless, actually, since you could be paying to build association with context you that damage your brand. I would be outraged if my ad for /r/luxury ran on /r/couponing, regardless of whether you consider it to be NSFW.
  - soared 9y ago
    Brand safety is about nsfw/extremist/gore/etc content. Brand safety is not the difference between r/luxury and r/couponing. I've never advertised on reddit, but many platforms allow categorical targeting, and categorical exclusions so you can explicitly exclude things that are outside the realm of brand safety, but would still hurt your brand.
    - jackgolding 9y ago
      I agree with soared, there are standards for this (generally around not getting penalised by the ad exchange you are running on.)
- 9y ago

pryelluw 9y ago

Thanks for the heads up. I wasnt aware of the changes. Reddit had proven to be a good ad platform for my clients (I do media buys for others). Will have to reconsider using it.

nulagrithom 9y ago

EDIT: Found confirmation that this is how it works now. https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204584279-Targeting-Subreddits https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204584279-Targe... > Targeting a subreddit means you are targeting the subscribers and recent visitors of that subreddit. Subscribers can see your ad while visiting the targeted subreddit and on other subreddits if they recently visited that targeted subreddit. That's a bummer. I really liked the idea of highly targetted ads in subreddits... --- Looks like they've updated the Reddit ads page since I last looked, but it seems quite explicit: 'Interests' means shows the ads everywhere. 'Subreddits' means show it only on that subreddit. https://i.imgur.com/dm5DRO6.png https://i.imgur.com/dm5DRO6.png Now I noticed that it says the 'Potential Daily Impressions' are too low for that subreddit. Used to be that it wouldn't let you run the ad this way. Maybe now it automatically changes to run everywhere if this is the case? The FAQ states: > Why can’t I target a specific subreddit? > We only allow users to target the top 5k most trafficked subreddits, as other subreddits do not garner enough traffic for advertisers to hit their minimum budget. We will continue on-boarding subreddits as they grow in size! Maybe during the 'ad review' your particular ad was switched to target an interest in jerky instead of just the subreddit? Was there any sort of confirmation email about Reddit accepting your ad?

bold_panda 9y ago
Subreddit does not mean that it only shows in that subreddit. That's the problem I outlined in my OP. Their is no interest category for jerky specifically and Reddit certainly wouldn't be that proactive as to adjust my ad for me in my experience. It's an automated system...which is fine...but they swept this targeting change under the rug.
- nulagrithom 9y ago
  The tooltip says "Targets users that are visting a particular subreddit." https://i.imgur.com/g6GlErJ.png https://i.imgur.com/g6GlErJ.png I feel like that's pretty unambiguous... Would be interesting to hear somebody from Reddit weigh in on this. (Also it looks like the system isn't automated: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/comments/6z144n/how_long_does_the_reviewing_process_take/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/comments/6z144n/how_long_...)

cm2012 9y ago

This has been true for years I thought.

CryoLogic 9y ago

I ran into the same issues. I had a niche (starwars) product I was advertising on the starwars subreddit during holidays which would pull in ~$1.5 per $1 spent on Reddit (lifesize wookie cardboard cutout). After new changes the tactic operates at a loss so I opted to stop advertising on Reddit all together.

folli 9y ago
Did you never run into any problems regarding trademarks?

jamiequint 9y ago

Hey bold_panda, I'm the Group PM for Monetization and Growth @ Reddit. I'm really sorry to hear you're experiencing worse CPMs from this targeting change. We definitely did not make this change to intentionally deceive you. You, the advertiser, are our the customer of our ads product. We certainly don't intend to reduce advertiser ROI, because at the end of the day if you are unhappy with your ad performance and leave that doesn't boost our ad revenue at all. To clarify what happened here, around the time we released our new ads platform - 6 months ago - we made some changes to targeting. Specifically, we modified subreddit targeting so that recent visitors to a subreddit or a post from a subreddit could also qualify to see ads targeted to that subreddit. We did not make any changes to how users who subscribe to a subreddit see ads (subreddit subscribers have been eligible to see ads targeted to a subreddit as long as they are visiting safe for work content since this commit ~2 years ago: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/f6a37b64c17579b82e22697b0e29dee50ebd2fd6 https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/f6a37b64c17579b82e22...) The release of our new ads platform also coincided with a re-release of our help center docs, which detail how subreddit targeting works. You can see the specific page here: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeting-your-audience/targeting-subreddits https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeti... As noted there: "Targeting a subreddit means you are targeting the subscribers and recent visitors of that subreddit. Subscribers can see your ad while visiting the targeted subreddit and on other subreddits if they recently visited that targeted subreddit." We made this change in response to advertiser feedback that they would like to see an increase in targeted inventory, the idea being that if you're interested in jerky when you're on /r/jerky you're also interested in jerky when you're not on /r/jerky. This change has helped a good number of our advertisers successfully expand budgets while still meeting their return on ad spend goals, specifically for advertisers that target smaller subreddits regularly. We of course also limit the subreddits your ads can show on outside of the targeted subreddit to ones that are similarly "brand safe" to the ones you are targeting. (e.g. if you are explicitly targeting only NSFW subs your ad will show up on other NSFW subs, but if you're not targeting NSFW subs your ad will never show up on a NSFW sub) While we haven't done any sort of official analysis of CPM changes here, the expected effect of this change was that advertisers would be able to spend significantly more budget (a specific request of many of our advertisers). An expected side effect is that CPMs might possibly increase due to more bids on a per-impression basis, but since you're bidding on a wider range of inventory I would expect that you would be able to reduce your CPMs and still spend the same budget you were spending before, with similar performance. If there's something I can do to help please don't hesitate to email me directly (jamie@reddit.com). In the future for ads problems we also hang out on https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads

IAmGraydon 9y ago

The fact that a $10 CPA was every considered acceptable is crazy, specially for the product you sell. Considering how cheap Reddit's impressions are, your conversion rate must be just a hair above zero. How do you know that your results aren't due to saturation and burnout? Once you've squeezed every bit of blood from a turnip, it becomes exponentially expensive to continue to do so. Maybe there just isn't a market for your product. IMO, if you have to show more than 1000 people your product to sell one, you have a product problem.

zer00eyz 9y ago
> The fact that a $10 CPA was every considered acceptable is crazy, I know plenty of industry where a $10 CPA would be a massive discount. $100 clicks aren't unheard of or uncommon for niche high value products. > IMO, if you have to show more than 1000 people your product to sell one, you have a product problem. This is how niche products work, you need to hit a lot of eyeballs before you find the RIGHT person who converts. If you have high customer satisfaction and a good retention program you can make a business out of numbers like this. Are you going to make a billon dollars on it, probably not but you can live comfortably off of it.
soared 9y ago
You can't really make accusations about someone's CPA without seeing the data. You've no way to tell if that $10 CPA is 0.5x ROAS or 15x ROAS, either of which would completely change the conversation.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

Agreed that they should make every change documented and explicit - if you didn't realize they made this change -> that's squarely on them. That being said, this is a welcome change because up until now the inventory has been so small on almost any individual subreddit as to make the time spent setting up and managing ads on the platform ROI negative.

hysan 9y ago

Anecdotally, as a user, I actually noticed this two weeks ago when certain ads started to feel like they were following me around in other subreddits. It creeped me out enough and was annoying enough (ex: I don't want to hear about tech jobs when I'm browsing my sports subreddits; it reminds me of work) that I finally unwhitelisted reddit. Prior to this, I had reddit as one of the very few whitelisted sites on my adblockers because I felt like the advertising was in good faith. That it was actually pretty relevant sometimes. It's sad to read that I wasn't just being paranoid.

leeoniya 9y ago

this problem is the same for other ad platforms. i only want to target people on those sites that have contextual meaning to my offerings and not creepily offer them a chevy truck when they're on a cosmetics page simply because they once searched for "chevy". these ad platforms maximize impressions and clicks, not conversions - metrics that are good for them but usually annoying, misleading and meaningless for real ROI. and there's not much you can do about it, by design.

soared 9y ago
Yeah, by design only experts are going to be super successful. The average small business owner will waste a lot of money on reddit, facebook, and google because missing a single checkbox will have massive impacts on your campaign.
- leeoniya 9y ago
  this is 100% true. for example, using any kind of partial broad match and not having a large amount of negative keywords (which must be manually managed and maintained over time) will waste a lot of money.
  - soared 9y ago
    Exactly. Experienced users know to use mod-broad. Same with facebook - when building an audience the interface looks like you're using AND logic, but only a tiny checkbox will enable AND logic, by default is OR and presented a deceiving way. (They also enabled insta and fb by default, and used to do fb display network by default too).

jmarbach 9y ago

I was a long time and happy Reddit advertiser myself up until last month when their original ad system was deprecated. I experienced the exact same change in results as the OP describes: An effective 10x increase in CPA with the same ad copy and what I understood was the same targeting. When you think you're paying for the same thing but experience worse results by an order of magnitude, then you know something is up. The deceptive nature of this change is that their new ad platform does not explain any of details that their product manager has graciously offered here. It's too bad that it has taken a front-page HN post to get this information to light; this already undermines the trust of the ads product team at Reddit. Thank you to the OP for explaining the change in laymen's terms. Next, despite spending tens of thousands of dollars with Reddit, it's nearly impossible to be in contact with a competent person on their ads team. My support requests have gone routinely unanswered, or at best I receive a template response after days and days. After this most recent change I tried a last resort option of posting in the Reddit ads subreddit, which also received no response: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/comments/6wlyya/using_the_new_ads_center_is_like_going_back_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads/comments/6wlyya/using_the... The only benefit I've seen in the new platform is conversion tracking, which is a basic feature that has existed on even the most rudimentary ad systems for more than a decade. The Reddit Ads platform is way behind the times, which is sad because they're sitting on some of the most valuable web traffic in the world.

soared 9y ago
If you spent $10k+ on facebook or google they'd assign you an account rep. That rep likely wouldn't be much help, but at least you have a name and an email for when something goes wrong.
jamiequint 9y ago
Hey jmarbach, we haven't made any changes to targeting in the last month. The changes described in this post were made 6+ months ago, which means any performance difference you're seeing over the last month are entirely coincidental. The deprecation of our old ads platform didn't involve any changes to the way ads were trafficked on the back-end, it simply turned off our outdated front-end interface for ad buying.

nla 9y ago

All they're doing is retargeting people, which is no different than what the rest of the online ad industry does.

redditadvthrow 9y ago

I work at a digital advertising agency as a media buyer. I buy ads for a living, and spend ~$5MM a year. Reddit is merely stepping into the big leagues. What reddit has done is switched from "Contextual Category" (cx cat) targeting to "Behavioral" (bt) targeting. Usuaully behavioral is much much better, which is likely why the change was made. But OP was doing contextual cat really well, so it was more successful than bt. Reddit made this switch because it will benefit the majority of advertisers, but hurt the ones who really know what they are doing. Reddit will earn more from the 80% that see improvement, and therefore spend more. The 20% like OP will spend less, but it won't matter. CX CAT = Companies like grapeshot and peer39 use NLP to identify keywords on a webpage and categorize it. Then advertisers can buy ads on any webpage that is in those categories. One of my favorite strategies is to buy ads on content that is predicted to go viral in a certain category (like fashion). These are ads that HN usually would like because the ad content is similair to the content of the website. They target a webpage, not a user. BT = Ads that target a specific user, no matter what website they're on. So once a user has visited r/jerky, they're tagged as liking beef jerky and could possibly see beef jerky ads on any site they visit. This is partially how you get ads that seems very out of place - beef jerky ads on a r/technology. If you spend time buying media, you know reddit's behavior isn't surprising. Facebook and Google both have default settings that will burn through your budget and provide shitty results. Only someone who intimately knows the platform will be successful. Reddit is merely stepping into the big leagues.

kazinator 9y ago
I'm not sure I agree with you here. "User is visiting r/foo now" is arguably a behavior! So posting an ad to a specific subreddit is arguably behavioral. "Once visited r/foo six months ago" is arguably not a behavior; it's not something the user is doing. If anything, that is contextual. Presenting the ad based on this amounts to targeting the user based on a pile of past context attached to their account, not based on their current behavior. And since behavioral works better than contextual, there we go: it explains why OP has reduced ROI!
bold_panda 9y ago
Thank you for shedding light on this. I suspected this was what was happening. They are letting the big advertisers empty their wallets.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

Don't worry, reddit is hurting themselves too: Now about 50% of the time I go to reddit, I have a jarring, awkward experience that reminds me they're datamining my history instead of a mellow, nearly invisible on that made subreddits feel more like a community. I'm sure reddit 4: digg sum moar! will be a great production by the reddit team and look forward to all the change it'll bring.

AlexandrB 9y ago
Yup, I always appreciated how ads on reddit were tied to the subreddit I was on. Now it sounds like they're not and it's going to be the same shitstorm of irrelevant ads as on the internet at large. I look forward to seeing ads for products I already bought over and over again on every subreddit I visit.
captaindiego 9y ago
Jarring exactly the phrase I'd use to describe my experience the past few weeks noticing that ads are following me around and not related to the subreddit I'm in.

GigabyteCoin 9y ago

By targeting recent visitors to a subreddit... they are essentially no longer targeting anyone. I rarely browse the reddit homepage, but I know that most redditors do. And what's on the homepage that most everybody who looks at it clicks through to? Any and every random subreddit you could think of. I have seen /r/bitcoin on the homepage recently. I have seen /r/security on the homepage recently. I have seen /r/rtlsdr on the homepage recently. That's ridiculous. If I want to advertise a SDR to the "rtlsdr" crowd, I do not want to pay for impressions for every single user on reddit who has just recently viewed /r/rtlsdr because they had a quirky post which resonated with people.

JorgeGT 9y ago
To makes things worse, they have also changed the algorithm to promote lesser known subreddits to r/all (or r/popular) more easily [1]. Which is not always good, /r/rtlsdr was unusable for a few days after that... [1] "The algorithm change is fairly simple — as a community is represented more and more often in the listing, the hotness of its posts will be increasingly lessened. This results in more variety in r/all" https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4oedco/lets_all_have_a_town_hall_about_rall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4oedco/lets_...

fomojola 9y ago

According to @jamiequint, "You are also able to exclude any specific subreddits you don't want to show up on.". Would it help to simply exclude every subreddit except the one you want? You'd need a comprehensive list of subreddits, but the Reddit API at https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#GET_subreddits_default https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/#GET_subreddits_default seems like it would give you that.

Jeremy1026 9y ago
But then you have to manually add the hundreds of thousands of individual subreddits to your exclusion list, and be prepared to add hundreds more each week.

Semaphor 9y ago

That explains why I've recently been seeing so many crap ads all over reddit. Guess it's time to re-enable my adblocker over there.

deleted 9y ago

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apexalpha 9y ago

Reddit has ads? I thought the Reddit Gold funded them?

thenomad 9y ago

Thanks for posting this. I was considering an ad buy on Reddit next month to promote a niche product - I'll probably still do it, but I'll be a lot more ready to pause if the ROI isn't backing out, because now I know why. (/u/bored_panda - please consider reinstating the tight subreddit targeting option of the past!)

mod 9y ago

FWIW I saw a jerky club ad, probably yours, on my new account in the past day or two. I have never visited /r/jerky or anything else remotely related to jerky. Either the algo is wrong or you bought it wrong or it was someone else's ad. It was a terribly annoying ad, it read like "hey, i like jerky but it's so expensive, so i set up a club where you get jerky every month blah blah blah" Basically tried not to look like an ad.