Reddit's Ad Changes Reduce Your ROI
Hey bold_panda, I'm the Group PM for Monetization and Growth @ Reddit. I'm really sorry to hear you're experiencing worse CPMs from this targeting change. We definitely did not make this change to intentionally deceive you. You, the advertiser, are our the customer of our ads product. We certainly don't intend to reduce advertiser ROI, because at the end of the day if you are unhappy with your ad performance and leave that doesn't boost our ad revenue at all.To clarify what happened here, around the time we released our new ads platform - 6 months ago - we made some changes to targeting. Specifically, we modified subreddit targeting so that recent visitors to a subreddit or a post from a subreddit could also qualify to see ads targeted to that subreddit. We did not make any changes to how users who subscribe to a subreddit see ads (subreddit subscribers have been eligible to see ads targeted to a subreddit as long as they are visiting safe for work content since this commit ~2 years ago: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/commit/f6a37b64c17579b82e22...)The release of our new ads platform also coincided with a re-release of our help center docs, which detail how subreddit targeting works. You can see the specific page here: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/advertising/targeti...As noted there: "Targeting a subreddit means you are targeting the subscribers and recent visitors of that subreddit. Subscribers can see your ad while visiting the targeted subreddit and on other subreddits if they recently visited that targeted subreddit."We made this change in response to advertiser feedback that they would like to see an increase in targeted inventory, the idea being that if you're interested in jerky when you're on /r/jerky you're also interested in jerky when you're not on /r/jerky. This change has helped a good number of our advertisers successfully expand budgets while still meeting their return on ad spend goals, specifically for advertisers that target smaller subreddits regularly. We of course also limit the subreddits your ads can show on outside of the targeted subreddit to ones that are similarly "brand safe" to the ones you are targeting. (e.g. if you are explicitly targeting only NSFW subs your ad will show up on other NSFW subs, but if you're not targeting NSFW subs your ad will never show up on a NSFW sub)While we haven't done any sort of official analysis of CPM changes here, the expected effect of this change was that advertisers would be able to spend significantly more budget (a specific request of many of our advertisers). An expected side effect is that CPMs might possibly increase due to more bids on a per-impression basis, but since you're bidding on a wider range of inventory I would expect that you would be able to reduce your CPMs and still spend the same budget you were spending before, with similar performance.If there's something I can do to help please don't hesitate to email me directly (jamie@reddit.com). In the future for ads problems we also hang out on https://www.reddit.com/r/redditads