Advertising Your Podcast on Reddit

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

Alright, getting started. If you're already on Reddit, it's really easy. Just click on the little megaphone icon in the menu. And then you click Create campaign and you my friend are off and running. One thing I will say is if you accidentally click a back button, yeah, got to start all over. It doesn't save your progress, which is annoying. And it happened to me a number of times even just putting together this episode. Once you gotta go and you're gonna want to set your objective for the campaign, you can choose from brand awareness and reach. That's a cost per 1000 style of billing. You can set your objective to be web traffic, which is cost per click, you can set it to conversions as the goal. That's also a cost per click BILLING setup. And finally, you can either do cost per video view, or app installs, which is another per click objective. So again, you have the options of brand awareness and reach, driving web traffic, getting conversions on your website, cost per video, or app installs.

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

Once you've selected that you can set your budget I ran two different campaigns. The first was $10 a day for seven days. The second I thought was $10 a day for seven days. But I forgot to set the end dates and ended up going 16 days. But it's okay, I have an LLC, and I'll write it off next time I do taxes for 2023.

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

Once you've got all that created, then you submit your ad for approval and you're off and running. Now one thing I ran into in both campaigns was I wanted to do an A B tests between a number of different ads but I could not for the life of me find out how to add new ads to a campaign. Then while I was putting this episode together, I found how you do it. You go to your ad group and there's a completely unintuitive little three dots in the spreadsheet style layout. You click the three dots and then it says new add. It's pretty simple. Once you know where it is, there documentation, however, is garbage. So here is how I ran both of my ad campaigns for Good Morning Podcasters. First of all, for both sets, I only ran my ads in the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Canada. And I only ran the ads in the subreddits, our podcasters, our podcast, our podcasts, podcasting, podcast guests, and the podcast, guests exchange subreddits. Again, my campaigns were set to $10 a day and the first one, I just ran in the feed, I set it to maximize clicks, and I put $1 per click cap on the cost per click, the ads ran December 13. Through the 19th, I spent a total of $60.80. That got me 89 clicks at a rate of 68 cents per click. My effective cost per 1000 impressions was $1.41, which is really good. And the first campaign had 43,205 impressions. So it was okay. The cost per click I felt was a little high. But it was lower than that dollar per click cap.

Fuzz Martin 6:13

So then when I went to experiment with the second campaign, I also set it to maximize clicks. But I put a 50 cent cost per click cap on that campaign. And again, I forgot to change the end date. So it ran for 16 days, I spent a total of $158.62 on that campaign. But it had 243,791 impressions. It had an effective cost per 1000 of 65 cents compared to the dollar 41. CPM that I had the first campaign, I had 586 clicks, and I dropped my cost per click down to 27 cents per click again, greatly improved over the first campaign. I will say it is more expensive than some Facebook and Instagram campaigns that I've run, but not by much. Was it worth it. The first campaign underperformed because it was my first time, I didn't quite optimize the creative sizes or styles. And I only chose to run in feed instead of also in conversation.

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