Budgets and Bidding

In Reddit Ads, you can control the cost of your ads and choose your billable actions using campaign objectives, budgets, and bidding strategies. These factors affect who sees your ad and how your campaigns drive outcomes for you on Reddit.

Do you learn better by watching? Watch the next video or check out other tutorials on Ads Formula.

Overview

Budget types

Bidding strategies

Campaign objectives

A campaign objective defines how your ads are optimized based on your campaign's goal and determines how you'll be charged. It also affects the setup of your ad group, ad setup, and bidding strategy. For example, if you're running an app installs campaign, the billable action would be clicks, so you'll only be charged when someone clicks your link. Learn more about campaign objectives.

Campaign spend cap

The campaign spend cap is the maximum amount your campaign can spend over its lifetime. Campaigns are never billed more than this amount. You can always adjust this value after creating a campaign. Setting this field is optional.

This field doesn't affect pacing for ad groups. However, your budget and bid amounts should reflect this cap to optimize ad performance and achieve your desired campaign outcomes.

Ad groups budgets

Each ad group has a budget, the amount you're willing to spend on your ad group. A budget type defines how you'd like to spread out your budget, which can be one of these options:

• Lifetime budget: The maximum amount you'd like to spend over your ad group's lifetime.
• Daily budget: The maximum amount you'd like to spend every day your ad group runs.

Since Reddit Ads relies on real-time, live auctions to deliver ads to users, your ad group may overspend its budget by up to 20%. Changes to ad group budgets may take up to 60 minutes to take effect.

Bidding strategies

Auto-bidding for brand awareness and reach is currently in beta and available to select advertisers. Reach out to a Reddit Ads expert for more details.

You decide how you want to bid in ad auctions for each ad group. For traffic, conversions, app installs, catalog sales, and lead generation objectives, you can use automated bidding strategies, which are designed to help maximize your ad group's performance. You can choose from the following automated bidding strategies:

• Cost cap: Adjusts bids to help get as many results as possible within your budget and objective cost. Use this option if you want to control cost per action. This strategy is called maximize clicks for lead generation objectives.
  This strategy may not spend through your entire budget.

• Lowest cost: Adjusts bids to help get as many results as possible for your budget. You don’t need to enter an objective cost since Reddit will try to get as many results as possible at the lowest cost. Use this option if you want to maximize volume within your budget. When selected for an app installs campaign, optimized cost per mille (oCPM) can be selected.

You can also choose manual bidding for ad groups in any campaign objective, letting you set one bid amount for every auction. We recommend using automated bidding strategies where available.

Summary of automated bidding strategy by objective

Learn more about campaign objectives.

Objective	Cost control	Lowest cost
Brand awareness and reach (beta)	Get more impressions while keeping the average CPM at or below the cap.	Maximizes impressions for your budget.
Traffic	Get more clicks while keeping the average CPC at or below the cap.	Maximizes clicks for your budget.
Conversions	Get more conversions while keeping the average CPC at or below the cap.	Maximizes conversions for your budget.
App installs	Get more installs while keeping the average CPC at or below the cap.	Maximizes installs for your budget.
Catalog sales	Get more purchases while keeping the average CPC at or below the cap.	Maximizes purchases for your budget.
Lead generation (beta)	Get more clicks while keeping the average CPC at or below the cap.	Not available

Budget, bids, and delivery outcome

Your budget, bidding strategy, and cost caps should reflect the maximum amount you're willing to spend, but your spending is affected by factors like: 

• Auction performance: Reddit Ads is an auction-based ads platform where your ads compete against others to reach redditors. Factors like your bid, targeting choices, and ad creative determine your ad's auction performance.
• Campaign objective: Your campaign objective determines which user actions (like impressions or clicks) are billable. Actions that occur within two hours of the ad being placed will be billed. Learn more about what you’ll pay for based on your campaign objective.
• Delivery outcome: We don't guarantee your ad group will spend through its budget. Depending on your ad's auction performance, your ad group may under-deliver, spending less than its budget.

We recommend choosing a budget and bid that reflects your campaign spend cap to optimize ad performance and achieve your desired campaign outcomes.