To advertise on Reddit, create a free Reddit Ads account, install the Reddit Pixel and Conversions API, choose a campaign objective, target interests, communities or keywords, set a daily or lifetime budget, then build your ad and submit it for review, which Reddit says can take up to 48 business hours. Before you publish, decide whether to allow comments and plan to leave the campaign alone for its first two weeks, because Reddit says to wait that long before judging your targeting.
Treat your first campaign as a 7 to 14-day test with a fixed budget. Whether it teaches you anything depends on choices you make before launch: tracking, audience setup, budget type, and whether someone is ready to answer people beneath the ad.
Before you start: what Reddit Ads need
You need a Reddit account, a payment method, a working landing page, and a plan for measuring the action you want people to take. Creating a Reddit Ads account is free, and you can use a new or existing Reddit account. Karma doesn't affect ad performance, but an account marked NSFW can't run ads.
Have these details ready before you register:
- Your business's legal name, country, and currency. Reddit shows the business name on ads and billing receipts, and country and currency can't be changed after account creation.
- A username you're happy to show if you use that account as an ad posting profile. Reddit says the username can't be changed later.
- A credit or debit card. Reddit won't review or serve ads until you select a payment method.
- Access to your website code, Google Tag Manager, Shopify, or a developer who can set up server-side tracking.
- A landing page that matches the ad, uses HTTPS when collecting details, and includes privacy, terms, and contact or about links.
- Creative that fits the ad format you plan to run.
For a Standard self-serve campaign, you choose your maximum spend and pay for the billable action through a live auction. Reddit's Standard-campaign guidance does not state a universal minimum daily or lifetime budget. Reddit Max campaigns do have a $20 daily or $620 lifetime minimum. Read the separate breakdown of Reddit Ads cost before deciding what you can afford to test.
If you plan to spend $10,000 or more a quarter, or advertise in a sensitive category such as finance, alcohol, or gambling, you're eligible to work with Reddit's managed sales team. Ads for alcohol, gambling, and pharmaceuticals must be pre-approved and managed by a Reddit sales representative.
How to advertise on Reddit, step by step
Work through Ads Manager in seven steps: account, tracking, objective, targeting, budget, format, and review. Settings live at three levels: the campaign holds your goal, the ad group holds targeting, placements, schedule, and budget, and the ad holds the creative, destination, and comment setting.
Create your Reddit Ads account
Create the account carefully: its country, currency, and username follow you into every later campaign. Follow Reddit's Ads account setup guide as you register. Add your payment method, choose an inventory type, and add an account avatar if you have one.
Inventory type is an account-wide brand-safety setting, so it applies to every campaign you run from that account. Reddit recommends Expanded inventory for most advertisers. Standard inventory is more limited, while Limited inventory is available only to managed accounts.
If you create ads for another company, tick Reddit's “I work with an advertising agency” option during setup.
Install the Reddit Pixel and Conversions API
Install both the Reddit Pixel and Conversions API before launching a sales or lead campaign. The Pixel tracks actions people take on your site after seeing or clicking an ad, while the Conversions API sends conversion events from your server to Reddit.
Reddit recommends using both because browser-based tracking can lose signals. When you use both, you must deduplicate events so one purchase, signup, or lead isn't counted twice.
Choose the setup route that matches your site:
- Shopify stores can connect Reddit Ads with Shopify to install the Pixel and sync a product catalog.
- Teams already using Google Tag Manager can use GTM for Pixel setup and server-side CAPI tagging.
- Custom sites can install the Pixel manually and use a developer for a direct CAPI integration.
- Supported partner integrations can reduce implementation work where they fit your stack.
Use Reddit's Pixel guide to create events, then confirm they fire in Pixel Helper and Events Manager. The event setup tool can configure Pixel events without additional coding. For CAPI, Reddit recommends sharing the click ID and IP address, with email address and user agent also useful where available. Its Conversions API guide covers the server-side setup.
Without a Pixel or CAPI signal, sales and lead campaigns can optimize only for clicks. That may bring traffic, but it can't tell Reddit which visitors became customers.
Choose your campaign objective
Pick the objective for the action you can actually track. If your Pixel isn't firing yet, a sales campaign can only optimize for clicks anyway. Reddit offers awareness and consideration, traffic, sales, lead generation, and app promotion objectives.
Use awareness and consideration when you want impressions or video views. Use traffic when the immediate goal is a visit to your website or a Reddit post. Use sales when you can measure actions such as purchases, signups, leads, or page visits. Use app promotion for installs and in-app events.
Lead generation is labeled beta in Reddit's help center. Its setup guide supports self-serve creation and offers Lead, SignUp, or Clicks as goals. Check the current Lead Generation Ads Terms and policy before using it, especially in a regulated category. If it is not a fit, the sales objective can also optimize for a Lead or SignUp event.
You also choose between Standard and Max campaigns:
- Standard campaigns give you control over targeting, delivery, placements, and creative. For a first campaign, this is the better choice when you want to compare two audience ideas in separate ad groups.
- Max campaigns use automation to adjust bidding and creative selection. Reddit's help center labels them beta. They support traffic, app promotion, sales, and lead objectives, but only image and video ads. Max campaigns also require at least three headlines.
Pick Max if you'd rather let Reddit choose bids and creative than compare audiences yourself, and you only need image or video ads. You'll still need the Pixel or CAPI for a sales or leads objective, and you can't preview a Max ad with a test URL.
Reddit's campaign objectives guide shows which optimization and payment options each objective supports. Keep your first test simple: one objective, one landing-page action, and two ad groups that answer a real targeting question.
Pick communities, keywords, and interests
Start broader than your instincts may suggest. Reddit recommends interest targeting for first campaigns, or at least 15 communities in an ad group if you use community targeting.
Interest targeting reaches people based on topics they have recently interacted with. Community targeting reaches people who subscribed to, viewed, or visited selected communities in the previous 28 days. It doesn't confine your ads to those communities. Reddit may show the ad to those users anywhere they browse on Reddit.
Keyword targeting uses the context of words you define to place ads where they are relevant. It supports English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. For SaaS teams, Reddit marketing for SaaS explains how category and competitor language can shape a useful keyword list.
Build your first ad groups around one audience logic at a time. For example, use one interest-based group and one community-based group. That gives you a clearer comparison than mixing every targeting method into one audience.
Watch three settings closely:
- Automated targeting is on by default and can show your ad beyond the audiences you suggest, though it always respects location, language, device, carrier, and your exclusions. Reddit's recommended test setup keeps it on. Reddit lets you keep it off if your budget is limited or you want precise targeting, so turn it off only when each ad group must reach exactly the audience you chose.
- Community and keyword exclusions protect against unwanted contexts. You can exclude up to 1,000 communities and up to 2,000 keywords, although subscribers of an excluded community may still see ads in their home feed.
- Targeting estimates are directional. They forecast possible audience, auction, and traffic conditions, not guaranteed delivery.
Choose both feed and conversation placements unless you have a specific reason not to. Feed ads appear in Home, Popular, and Community feeds. Conversation placement puts ads on comment pages between the post and first comment. That is where Reddit conversation ads live: they are a placement available to any ad type, not a separate creative format.
Use Reddit's audience targeting documentation to build the audience, and keep the targeting policy in mind. Reddit prohibits targeting based on sensitive categories and limits available tools for housing, employment, and credit advertisers.
Set your budget and bid
Choose your budget type carefully because Reddit doesn't let you change it after saving the ad group. A lifetime budget is the maximum you want to spend across a defined campaign period. A daily budget is the maximum you want to spend each day an ad group runs.
Reddit recommends a lifetime budget if yours is small, and a daily budget if you want to reduce the risk of under-delivery. Whichever you pick, an ad group can overspend its budget by up to 20%, because delivery runs through a live auction.
Lowest cost is Reddit's default bid strategy and needs no manual bid. It's the sensible place to start when you have little conversion history. Target cost requires enough recent events, including at least 200 events in the previous 28 days for sales and lead objectives.
Reddit does not state one universal test budget. Its current Standard-campaign guidance suggests running for 7 to 14 days before evaluating early performance and, for Purchase optimization, using at least $100 a day. Set a budget you can sustain, and use a campaign spend cap to set a firm maximum.
Choose an ad format
Pick the simplest format that explains your offer and makes the next click obvious. Image ads are the best starting point when you have one clear message. Video works when movement or demonstration adds information. Carousel ads work when you need to show several products, features, or steps. Free-form ads suit offers that need a longer explanation.
Reddit's main ad formats are:
- Image ads: one image and a destination URL.
- Video ads: one video and a destination URL.
- Carousel ads: two to six images and a destination URL.
- Free-form ads: up to 20 images, five videos, and 40,000 characters of rich body text.
Keep headlines short. Reddit recommends limiting them to 100 characters, or 80 characters where truncation is a concern. Free-form ads support awareness and consideration or traffic objectives only. If you use one, put the main answer or TL;DR at the beginning, break up longer copy with headings and media, and make the next step clear with an inline link.
Reddit also markets product ads and sponsored AMA sessions. Premium takeovers are bought through managed sales. Start with the format you can produce well instead of forcing a more elaborate one into a small test.
At the ad level, choose the posting profile, set the destination URL, select a CTA button, and decide whether to allow comments. Your display URL must match the destination domain unless you use a click tracker. Reddit's ad unit specifications cover the supported formats and requirements.
Submit your ad for review and launch
Preview the ad with a test URL, then submit it at least 48 hours before your intended start date. Reddit says review normally takes up to 48 business hours, although many reviews finish within a day. Ads submitted over a weekend wait until Monday for review.
Review checks your ad copy, media, landing page, and targeting. Before publishing, look for common avoidable issues: a landing page that doesn't match the ad, missing policy or contact links, excessive capitalization, a headline with an unnecessary URL, or a download that isn't clearly disclosed.
Reddit sends most copy, destination URL, budget, creative, and targeting edits back through review. Bid and schedule changes don't send the ad back to review. If Reddit rejects the ad, it sends a reason so you can amend and resubmit it. Read the ad review process and Advertising Policy overview before launch rather than after a rejection.
Ad creative that fits Reddit
Reddit creative should make a clear promise, show the product or offer, and give people a reason to act. Reddit's headline guidance favors short, engaging copy, brand mentions, speaking to users directly, a clear CTA, clear prices where relevant, and variety across headlines.
Your ad doesn't need to sound casual, but it does need to match the page it sends people to. If your headline promises a comparison, trial, or product benefit, the landing page should deliver that thing without making people hunt for it.
Use Reddit's headline guidance as a prompt for testing, not as a formula. Test a distinct message or visual at a time, and keep the landing page consistent enough that you can tell why one version won.
Look for Redditor Highlights before you publish an image or video ad. It's on by default for most accounts and attaches three to five real, positive posts from Reddit users about your brand, plus an AI summary. You can't edit those posts, only regenerate them, and editing your ad can swap them, so preview what Reddit picked. If a selected post doesn't represent your product well, regenerate the set before you publish. The feature appears only in feed placement.
Each of these Reddit case studies matches a format, feature, or placement to one clear job. Pull-Ups used free-form ads for parent education in Canada in 2026. Reddit reports an 80% higher CTR and 184% more time spent than its benchmark.
Vitamix used Redditor Highlights from September 1 through December 7, 2025. Reddit reports a 19% CTR increase with Redditor Highlights.
Bitly used feed and conversation placement with community and keyword targeting. Reddit reports 25% more clicks to site.
Those are selected campaign results, not typical outcomes. A breakdown of more Reddit case studies explains how to tell a lift study from an Ads Manager result or a comparison against a campaign goal.
Ad comments: turn them on or off
Leave comments off unless someone can own the thread for the campaign's full run. Comments are optional when you create an ad, so make that choice deliberately.
Comments can give people a place to ask about product fit, price, or support before visiting your site. They can also expose an unanswered question to every later reader. Turn comments on only when a person with accurate product and support information can check the thread every day.
An administrator can reply, approve comments, remove a distracting comment, pin one brand reply, lock comments, and mark spam. Reddit's comments management guide explains how to open the ad post from Ads Manager and use those tools.
If the same question keeps coming up, pin one reply that answers it. Editing the ad instead sends it back to review.
What to check in your first two weeks
Confirm tracking on day one, review performance weekly, and wait two weeks before deciding that an audience is good or bad. New ad groups need around 20 optimization events before they leave the learning phase, so the numbers in week one mostly show Reddit still learning.
For sales and app-promotion campaigns, Reddit shows a Learning status while an ad group gathers optimization signals. If a sales or app-promotion ad group hasn't exited after seven days, Reddit labels it Learning Limited.
Avoid frequent edits during that period. Budget or bid changes above 20%, bid-strategy changes, targeting updates, placement changes, creative changes, and pausing for seven days or more can extend or restart learning. Reddit also advises against turning off underperforming assets because the system can reduce their delivery automatically. Its learning-phase guidance explains the status and which edits reset it.
Use a simple weekly check:
- Confirm that your key events appear in Events Manager.
- Check delivery, spend, clicks, and the action tied to your chosen objective.
- Check which communities appear in your report, but don't read them as a list of where your ad ran: Reddit says a community in the report doesn't mean your ad appeared there.
- Compare creative at the ad level, but group changes after learning rather than changing every variable at once.
CTR is not your final success metric if you're paying for leads or sales. Use Reddit analytics to understand attribution windows and why Ads Manager and GA4 can report different numbers.
Running ads yourself stops making sense when nobody on your team can own tracking, creative, and targeting at the same time. ReddiReach's Reddit Ads management covers campaign strategy and setup, audience and subreddit targeting, native-feeling ad creative, and Pixel and conversion tracking with ongoing bid, budget, and creative optimization. ReddiReach publishes a $1,500 monthly minimum ad spend. It does not publish a management fee, so ask for that quote separately.
If you'd rather weigh several partners first, compare Reddit Ads agencies. To talk through the fit for your team, book a free call.
How we checked this
Last checked: November 12, 2026.
Sources: Reddit's Ads Help Center, its Reddit for Business site and published advertiser case studies, and ReddiReach's own advertising service page.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a Reddit account cost?
Nothing. A Reddit account and Reddit Ads account are free to create. You pay once ads begin delivering, using the valid credit or debit card attached to your ad account. Reddit charges your card once a day when your balance is over a billing threshold, which starts small and rises as you pay, and at the end of each month for anything left over.
Can you advertise on Reddit for free?
No. Setting up an account is free, but ad delivery is paid. Reddit Ads run through an auction, and you pay for the billable action associated with your campaign objective, such as impressions, video views, or clicks. Reddit's Standard-campaign guidance does not state a universal minimum, while Max campaigns require at least $20 a day or $620 lifetime.
What ad formats does Reddit offer?
Reddit offers image, video, carousel, and free-form ads. Carousel ads can include two to six images, while free-form ads can combine long-form text with images and videos. Reddit also offers product ads and sponsored AMA opportunities. Conversation ads aren't a separate creative type: they are a placement available to all ad types.
How long does Reddit take to approve an ad?
Reddit says ad review can take up to 48 business hours, though reviews are often completed within one day. Weekend submissions are reviewed the following Monday. Changes to copy, destination URL, budget, creative, or targeting usually send an approved ad back for review, so avoid last-minute edits before a planned launch.
