9 Lessons I Learned after Running Reddit Ads for my SaaS
Points I covered:
- Choose an organically successful post as an Ad
- Create ads that blend In
- Start small with your budget
- Be careful with “Broadcast the Ad”
- Audience Device Type is important
- Weekends were slow
- Target the right countries
- Setup Reddit Pixel
- Setup Web Analytics on the Website
While developing my SaaS, SiteBehaviour, I decided to run Reddit ads to build up our waitlist. Initially, I didn’t fully understand the platform and selected inefficient settings for my campaign. For the ad, I shared a Figma design of our dashboard with a simple caption: “I just made a web analytics tool. Please roast it.” I launched the campaign with a $10 daily budget and then left it running.
Surprisingly, this strategy worked well, helping us reach a waitlist of 600. Our cost per click was around $0.20 - $0.30, which was relatively cheap at the time due to the downturn in ad revenue across the industry.
With the launch of sitebehaviour.com, we started new campaigns, some of which were successful while others were not. Through trial and error, we learned several valuable lessons about running effective Reddit campaigns for SaaS products. Following is my advice and lessons I learned throughout the grind.
1. Choose your organically successful post as an ad
Use your best-performing organic social media post as an ad to maximize its impact. In our case, we took our most successful Twitter post and used it to run a Reddit ad, which brought us 5 signups in a single day at one point.
2. Create ads that blend In
Avoid making your ad look like a traditional advertisement as if it's for a newspaper and do not write a GPT style caption "Unlocking....xyz, Next Generation....xyz" and instead keep it very direct and ensure it blends with the platform’s content style to appear more organic. Also, make sure to not use stock images or some graphical image that makes it instantly recognizable to the eyes as an ad.
3. Start small with your budget
Don’t begin with a full budget. Start with $10 a day for five days, evaluate the performance, and adjust accordingly to find the sweet spot for above-average conversions. If you can, run a few different variants of your ad with a slightly tweaked target audience and settings and see what works out after a week.
4. Be careful with “Broadcast the Ad”
The Reddit Ads portal can be confusing. Avoid the “Broadcast” option, which spreads your ad to users with various interests. Instead, target specific subreddits and keywords where your ideal customers are active.
5. Audience Device Type is important
After running our campaign for a while and noticing it was becoming less successful, we took a deeper dive using our web analytics tool. We discovered that most of our Reddit ad visitors were on mobile devices. For our SaaS, and B2B SaaS in general, mobile signups are uncommon; users typically prefer to sign up using a desktop. We found a hidden setting to show the ad only to desktop users, which significantly improved our results.
6. Weekends were slow
Weekends can be slow depending on your industry. For SiteBehaviour, which targets marketing professionals, weekends were less effective.
7. Target the right countries
Don’t select all countries for your ad targeting. Understand where your ideal customers are located and which ones can pay for your service. Optimize for paid signups. Our effective regions included the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, and Norway. SiteBehaviour helped us identify high bounce rate countries, which we then excluded from our campaigns.
8. Setup Reddit Pixel
Reddit Pixel is a snippet of JavaScript code that allows you to track actions that visitors take after seeing or clicking, and conversion events your ad on Reddit. Reddit ads default to optimizing for clicks/website visits. Set your ad goal (e.g., “SignUp”) and send this event programmatically when a visitor converts. This helps Reddit optimize for audiences who actually convert.
9. Setup Web Analytics on the Website
Use a web analytics tool to track bounce rates, traffic conversions, and visitor behaviours by country. SiteBehaviour, was battle-tested during our Reddit ad campaign. It offers session replays and heatmaps to help you identify areas where visitors encounter resistance and really helped us optimize our ad just like we mentioned in the above points.
We are trying and testing various paid advertisement methods and will mention our findings here in future blogs. I'll keep everyone updated on my Twitter account @developer_jass.
