Reddit ads for ecommerce in Europe: what we know and what we don't

Reddit's help centre lists campaign objectives such as awareness and traffic, and pricing models that bill per thousand impressions, per click or per video view¹. The set of objectives available can change, so read the current list in your account.

The format most shops meet first is the free-form ad: a headline, body text and optional media². Reddit is a place where people read text. A free-form ad that reads like a banner will look out of place.

Reddit also offers Reddit Max campaigns, an automated campaign type where the advertiser supplies targeting and creative and Reddit's system sets bids and budget. Automation hands over control, so measure what it delivers against your margin like any other campaign.

One term to get straight: a subreddit is a community on Reddit. We call it a community (subreddit) here and a community from now on.

Reddit's audience documentation describes three kinds of targeting: interests, communities and keywords, plus automated targeting³. In detail:

• Community targeting. Reddit community targeting reaches people who subscribed to, viewed or visited the chosen communities in the last 28 days⁴. It selects people, not pages.
• Interest targeting. Reaches people by topics they have engaged with⁴.
• Keyword targeting. Places ads next to content containing chosen terms, and supports English terms only⁴.
• Automated targeting. Reddit strongly recommends switching it on, so that your ads also reach other relevant audiences beyond your selection⁴.

The point to take away: choosing a community defines an audience, and with automated targeting on, Reddit widens it. Reddit's documentation does not promise that your ad appears only inside the community you picked. Plan creative and landing pages for people who arrive from anywhere in that audience, not only from the community you had in mind.

For a shop, Reddit dynamic product ads are the closest thing to a standard format. Reddit's help centre says they are built from a product catalogue and cover physical products only⁵. Reddit chooses which products to show.

The catalogue needs to be mapped to your site events: product view, add to cart and purchase. That is why tracking comes before catalogue work. A catalogue without clean purchase events gives Reddit nothing to learn from, and you nothing to measure.

If you sell digital products, services or anything that is not a physical item, this format is not for you.

Three pieces cover tracking.

Reddit Pixel. A piece of JavaScript on your site that tracks what visitors do after seeing or clicking a Reddit ad. It can be installed by hand, through Google Tag Manager, through Shopify or through a partner.

Reddit Conversions API. A server-to-server connection that sends conversion events to Reddit without code on the page. Reddit's help centre describes it as server-to-server, and recommends using it together with the Pixel with events deduplicated, so one purchase is not counted twice⁶.

The Shopify app. Reddit has an official Shopify integration, which sets up the pixel without code and handles the catalogue⁷.

Whichever route you take, check the result against your shop's own orders, in the same way you would check any ad platform. Reddit's number is a platform number.

Reddit publishes an advertising policy with restricted categories, and can reject ads⁸. Read it before you build a catalogue or a creative plan, especially if your products are in a sensitive category.

Search for Reddit ad costs and you will find confident numbers. Cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM) are the usual ones. Agencies that sell Reddit publish cost guides with CPM, CPC and ROAS benchmarks for ecommerce⁹.

We do not repeat those numbers. Unless a guide says how its figures were gathered, you cannot tell what category, country, objective, creative or period they describe. A CPC from someone else's shop tells you little about yours.

Plan from your own margin instead. Our convention: measure break-even after contribution margin, not revenue.

Example (illustrative). A product sells for €60 and leaves €24 of contribution margin after product cost, delivery and payment charges. If 2 in every 100 clicks become orders, each click can cost up to €0.48 before the first order loses money. Repeat purchases may move that line, but start with the first order.

That is a break-even, not a target. It tells you what a test can afford, which is the useful question when published benchmarks cannot help.

Google Ads reaches people who are already searching. Meta puts ads in feeds. Reddit places ads around discussions on topics, and whether those readers buy is the thing to test.

We found no independent study of Reddit ad results for shops, and we have no results of our own to show you. So whether Reddit pays for your shop is a question for your own test, not for anyone's write-up, ours included.

Our view: Reddit is a channel to add after your core channels are measured, not instead of them. It needs its own test, a budget you can afford to lose, and a margin-based stopping rule. For the decision itself, see are Reddit ads worth it.

For ZFD: Reddit Ads is a channel service you can buy separately from our other channel work. We describe what Reddit documents, and we judge results on margin, not on a platform number.