Nowadays, there are more platforms than ever that marketers and advertisers can use to boost brand awareness and promote their products/services.

Reddit and Quora are two mediums that have great potential for online advertising but are not talked about enough.

Bannersnack (online banner maker) ran an experiment to see what results they would get when running paid ads on Reddit and Quora.  

To make it easier for you to find the information you’re looking for, here are the main chapters of this case study:

Key Takeaways

•  Reddit and Quora are great for targeting niche communities. 
•  The competition and costs are lower on both platforms so they should definitely be tested out. 
•  In terms of conversion rate, the best results came from desktop and not mobile. 
• According to Google Analytics, for Quora, the majority of impressions and clicks came from mobile.
•  Reddit brought the highest amount of sales. 
• Separate the ad sets and campaigns for better analysis of the performance.

What Is Reddit?

Reddit is one of those scary platforms that marketers are not really taking advantage of when it comes to online advertising.

Reddit is an online platform with more than 130.000 sub-forums called subreddits, which are individual threads that pertain to a specific topic.

The platform attracted over 1.5 billion visitors in April 2019 alone, from both desktop and mobile devices, which makes it one of the most popular sites in the world at the moment.

 Due to the fact that most marketers ignore the power of Reddit, it has turned into one of the best platforms you can advertise on because of the low competition and costs and tremendous opportunity to stand out. 

Why Advertise On Reddit

• Lower costs. Because this online forum is not as competitive as other social media sites, the cost of online advertising is not as high.
• Audience targeting. Reddit allows advertisers the unique opportunity to target niche communities of people who share particular interests. In these subreddits, you’ll often find engaged and influential members.  
• Community engagement. Since it’s a platform where people share and discuss ideas, when you run an ad campaign, users will be able to upvote, downvote, or comment on your ad. This can be extremely valuable in terms of receiving feedback and knowing whether your ad is of interest or not.  

Methodology Used For The Reddit Ads

In February 2019, Reddit announced the debut of cost-per-click (CPC) ads on the platform, which means that brands have now more options when advertising here.

Previously, advertisers and marketers were able to use only cost-per-impression (CPM) and cost-per-view (CPV) ads. CPC is the first performance-driven ad type available on Reddit, and it comes with four campaign objectives:

• Reach
• Video views
• Traffic
• Conversions

Bannersnack’s campaign objective for both platforms was conversions.

They created two main ad groups:

• Banner Generator
• Animated Banners

There were two targeting options here: based on interests (targeting users who recently interacted with content around particular interests) and subreddits.

They went for subreddits, meaning users that have recently interacted with or are subscribed to a subreddit. Subreddits that do not appear on the list from the screenshot below are too small to target.

Then, they could also allow Reddit to expand the targeting to maximize the results, but they didn’t choose that option.

During research, Bannersnack identified two main subreddits that they wanted to target:

• Digital marketing
• PPC

When making the ad, there were two options. To create a:

• Link post, which will direct users to a URL of choice when someone clicks on it;
• Video post in an MP4 or MOV format that has a length of maximum 15 minutes.

In both cases, you can allow people to comment on the Reddit post, and choose a call-to-action.

Here’s how the two ads looked like on the platform.

Ad 1.

Ad 2. 

What Is Quora?

Quora is one of the most prominent Q&A platforms on the internet, where people can upvote or comment on other people’s questions and answers.

According to their site, they now have more than 300 million monthly unique visitors, and it has become in many ways, a more mature version of Yahoo Answers.

Quora’s self-serve ad platform recently had its second anniversary, so it’s a relatively new addition and possibly untapped advertising channel for many marketers.

People usually don’t explicitly go to Quora to search for answers to their questions. Instead, they go to Google and see links to the platform in the organic search results and go from there. That’s because a lot of the platform’s pages rank on the first page of Google.

This means that plenty of people get exposed to Quora even if they don’t actively use the platform.

 Quora is the ideal platform to advertise on if you want to reach people during their research phase, meaning when they’re evaluating your company or products/services similar to yours.  It’s also an excellent opportunity for you to influence people during the consideration phase of the buying process.

Why Advertise On Quora

• Better targeting. On Quora, you can target people not just based on demographics (like you can on Facebook) but also those who are looking for a specific answer. For maximum effectiveness, you can combine these two strategies when doing an ad campaign.
• Quality organic traffic. Quora has a Domain Authority of 93, which means that in the eyes of Google, it’s a big, established brand. Due to the enormous amount of content available on the platform, a lot of pages rank on the first page of Google for many terms. That being said, a good tip would be to advertise on pages that rank well for specific target keywords, so do some research in advance on this.
• Lower competition. Similar to Reddit, Quora is still an untapped online advertising channel, which means that it can be easier for you to stand out and boost your brand awareness.

Methodology Used For Quora Ads

When creating the ad group, there are several options:

• Topic targeting. The ads will appear next to content associated with specific topics across Quora or in placements without content specific context such as in Quora’s feed.
• Question targeting. The ads will appear near questions of your choice. You can target the ad to show up on specific question pages on Quora, tailoring your message to that content.
• Audience targeting. This allows you to target users who have previously visited your website. The ads will target members of an audience that you previously specified.
• Interest targeting. Thanks to this option, you can target users on Quora who recently engaged (read questions/answers, upvoted, etc.) with specific topics.
• Keyword targeting. The ads will appear across Quora next to questions with broad or phrase matches to the keywords you provide.
• Broad targeting. The ads will target the broadest possible audience of Quora users.
• Email targeting. Email targeting is a setting available in case of all targeting types (topic, question, audience, interest, keyword, broad). In case you want your ads to appear in Quora’s digest email sent to registered users, when you create an ad set, you just have to select the checkbox regarding the digest emails.

Bannersnack targeted people based on topics, questions, keywords, and audience.

There’s also something really useful that Quora offers and that is the option to Exclude Questions. You can choose one or more questions to exclude from targeting with the ad set.

The other option is to Exclude Audiences, which means choosing a saved audience you would like to exclude from targeting with the ad set.

Setting the bid

Here you have a few options as well:

• Optimize for clicks. This allows optimizing the ad delivery for traffic to the website or a landing page.
• Optimize for impressions. This helps the ad delivery so that the ad is shown to as many people as possible.
• Optimize for “Purchase” conversions. This is useful when you want to maximize user conversions.

Ad creation

There are three main ad formats to choose from:

• Image ad – an ad that contains text, an image, and the company logo.
• Text ad – an ad that contains text and no images.
• Promote an Answer – an ad that promotes an existing answer so that it appears more prominently for users on Quora.

Here’s how the two ads looked like on Quora.

Ad 1.

Ad 2.

Reddit Ads vs. Quora Ads – The Results

In terms of impressions, Reddit is the clear winner. For example, the Banner Generator had 7x more impressions than the ad that ran on Quora.

However,  in terms of clicks, Quora wins.   Even if the CTR in the case of Reddit is very low in comparison to Quora, in terms of sales, Reddit is the winner platform. 

Reddit And Quora Ad Specifications

In case you are considering doing paid advertising on Quora and Reddit, you will find this chart quite useful.

We put together the most important specs that you need to keep in mind when creating your ad, whether it’s visual or just text-based, like in the case of Reddit.

Ad specifications

	Reddit Link Post	Reddit Video Post	Quora Image Ad
Business Name	not available	not available	max 40 characters
Headline	max 300 characters	max 300 characters	max 65 characters
Body Text	not available	not available	max 105 characters
Landing Page URL	Must be HTTPS, no character limit	Must be HTTPS, no character limit	max 1024 characters
Display URL	no character limit	no character limit	max 30 characters
Call to Action	select from CTA button selection	select from CTA button selection	select from CTA button selection
Company logo	not available	not available	500 x 500 px
Text on image	no text on images	–	No more than 20% of text on an image
Image file format accepted	PNG, JPG	–	PNG, JPG
Video file format accepted	–	.MOV [ProRes NOT accepted] or .MP4	–
Video max file size	–	1GB	–
Video suggested Aspect Ratio	–	1.91:1	–
Reddit Card Image Specifications	1200×628 pixels (JPG, PNG; 1MB Max File Size, Aspect Ratio of 1.91:1)	–	–
Reddit Thumbnail Image Specifications	400×300 pixels (JPG, PNG; 500KB Max File Size, Aspect Ratio of 4:3)	–	–
Quora Desktop imag Specifications	–	–	1080 x 576 pixels (minimum: 540 x 288), Aspect Ratio: 1.91:1
Quora Mobile image Specifications	–	–	900 x 628 pixels, Aspect Ratio 1:1

Targeting options

Reddit	Quora
Interests	Interest Targeting
Subreddits	–
–	Topic Targeting
–	Question Targeting
–	Audience Targeting
–	Keywords Targeting
–	Broad Targeting

Ideas For Optimizing Reddit Advertising Campaigns

After running this experiment, Bannersnack came up with a few conclusions or best practices when it comes to optimizing the ads for these two platforms.

For Reddit:

• Try to create headlines that have less than 120 characters;
• Use one (or more) of these popular headline phrases: how do you, what are the, what are some, are the best, social media marketing, what are your, I have a, to get a, of the best, to make your;
• Do not run advertising campaigns with your personal Reddit account. Use a new username because it allows you to keep the business and personal profiles separate. Reddit users can click on your username to see what you’ve been viewing and upvoting while logged in, plus you’ll be using that username to respond to any comments that people leave on your ad;
• Change the creative images every 3-4 weeks;
• Use Reddit acronyms;
• Avoid copy/pasting the headlines and using them on other platforms. It’s essential to create copy that is specific to Reddit and the users you’re targeting.

Ideas for Optimizing Quora Advertising Campaigns

• Separate campaigns for better analysis of the performance (e.g., targeting types, conversion events, separating budgets);
• Separate ad sets for better analysis of the performance (e.g., mobile/desktop split, location split);
• Try phrasing the headlines in the form of a question instead of a statement;
• When it comes to the landing page optimization, do not use more than one or two CTAs. It’s essential to have as few steps as possible between the landing page and conversion to reduce friction. It’s best to use just a few elements so that the page is rather short than long;
• Increasing the bids and improving your creative may help you be more competitive in the auction and win more of the auctions entered.

Major Differences Between Reddit and Quora

Major Differences	Reddit	Quora
Monthly Active Users (millions)	330	300
More bidding strategies to choose from	No	Yes
Video Ads	Yes	No
Possibility to create Audience Campaigns	No	Yes
Auction Insights	No	Yes
GTM Default Tag Type	No	Yes
Possibility to exclude audiences	No	Yes

For Audience Campaigns, you have three options:

• Website Traffic. Create an audience based on the traffic that you have on your website;
• Lookalike. Create an audience based on an existing audience;
• List Match. Create an audience based on an existing list of contacts. You can upload a CSV that contains the list with email addresses.

For Auction Insights, you have data regarding:

• Impression share %. The percentage of auctions that the ad set entered and was one of the winners;
• Absolute impression share %. The percentage of auctions which the ad set entered and won the top available slot;
• Auction lost to competition %. The percentage of auctions which the ad set entered and was the best ad set in the account for the auction but did not win an available slot.

If you are satisfied with the ROI of your ad set and want to optimize for more delivery, there are a few things you can do:

• Increasing the bid;
• Improving the creative;
• Expanding the targeting.

In terms of reporting, both platforms have disadvantages compared to Facebook’s Reporting.

There are some data about the delivery on Facebook that you can’t find in Reddit, nor Quora, such as Age, Gender, Country, Region, Placement, Device.

Conclusion

Despite Reddit’s controversial reputation and not so pretty interface, it turned out to be the channel that worked best for Bannersnack’s experiment.

Moreover, Reddit plans to release more tools that focus on performance and help advertisers and marketers optimize ad placement.

Quora is also the place to be if you want to find an engaged community that’s already in the process of consideration and searching for answers.

Reddit Ads vs. Quora Ads – The $2.500 Experiment

PS. A few years ago Facebook ads seemed to be expensive. Compared to what they are today, it was a steal. It pays to get onto the platform early, when there’s less competition. Especially when the platform has 300m+ users, like Reddit and Quora.