Reddit Ads Targeting: Compare Communities, Interests and Results With AI

Separate audience selection from placement

An interest category describes a topic associated with people’s activity. A community selection describes people associated with particular subreddits. Keyword targeting concerns relevant content. Placement describes where the ad appears, such as a feed or comments page. These settings and reports answer different questions.

Reddit’s audience-targeting overview explains the audience types and the role of automated targeting. Inspect the saved ad-group configuration and its current platform controls before assuming the selected audience is an exclusive boundary.

For a campaign aimed at a professional audience, review the offer and the communities’ actual subjects before choosing them. A large community with a loosely related name can be less useful than a smaller one where the product’s problem is discussed directly. Community size alone does not quantify likely customers.

SourcetoMCP does not provide a verified universal catalogue lookup for every Reddit interest or community value in this workflow. Reuse the exact returned targeting values or confirm them in Ads Manager. Do not invent IDs or assume every subreddit can be selected for advertising.

Read the current ad-group settings before proposing a change

List ad groups with their campaign IDs, names, statuses, bids, budgets and targeting. The connector can return communities, excluded communities, interests, keywords, geolocations and the raw targeting object. Save a baseline for the exact ad group you intend to review.

Use the account-info operation to identify the billing currency. The audience-performance response itself leaves currency and timezone metadata unset. Its current report query uses UTC day boundaries. Keep that reporting basis explicit when comparing with exports or another analytics product.

Where a setting is absent from the normalised fields, inspect raw targeting or the native interface. An unread setting should remain an open check rather than silently being treated as off.

Request breakdowns with their real scope

Retrieve community, interest, keyword or placement results in separate requests. The audience operation supports one breakdown dimension per call, so it cannot answer “which interest performed best inside this community in this ad group” by combining the returned tables.

The current audience-report input contains the account connection, period, dimension and metrics. It does not accept a campaign or ad-group filter. A weak account-wide community row can be a useful investigation candidate while still combining several campaigns, offers and groups.

Use a suitably scoped Ads Manager report or export when an ad-group-specific targeting change depends on that detail. Reddit’s reporting guide describes report breakdowns and exports. Preserve the scope of the evidence when attaching it to a proposed edit.

Retain pagination warnings. The current operation requests a page of up to 1,000 report rows and flags additional pages. A partial response should remain labelled as a sample. Do not add community totals to interest totals as though they represent separate audiences.

Compare spend with qualified outcomes

The following hypothetical table describes a reviewed campaign sample supplied as an export with an established scope. The community names are placeholders. Qualified leads are a separate business summary supplied by the advertiser, with no claim that the connector automatically retrieves CRM qualification.

Community A has a qualified-lead cost of AUD 50, while B has AUD 75. B’s recorded CPA is twice A’s, but the difference in qualified cost is smaller. Keep the business definition visible rather than ranking rows by one convenient metric.

The reviewed sample totals AUD 1,500 spend, 30 recorded leads and 20 qualified leads. Its aggregate recorded CPA is AUD 50 and qualified-lead cost is AUD 75. Community C’s zero conversions make CPA undefined. They do not establish an infinite future cost or justify an exclusion without considering the observation period.

Review attribution windows and click-through versus view-through results. Reddit’s attribution guidance explains why a reported conversion need not correspond to a same-day click. Keep platform-attributed outcomes separate from a claim about additional sales caused by advertising.

Ask AI for an evidence-led targeting review

Review targeting in Reddit account [ID] and ad groups [IDs] for [complete period]. Make no changes. Read account currency and ad-group targeting, then retrieve supported community and interest reports separately and relevant ad-group performance. Label the audience breakdowns as account-wide. Keep UTC boundaries, conversion definitions and pagination warnings. Use this scoped export and qualified-outcome summary if supplied: [evidence]. Identify three investigations, missing expansion or placement checks, and the exact evidence needed before an ad-group exclusion.

Ask the assistant to retain the source of each recommendation: saved setting, account-wide report, ad-group result or supplied export. That makes it possible to see when the recommendation depends on information the connector has not retrieved.

Use the Reddit Ads cost guide for the relationship between spend, clicks, CPM and CPA. A cheap click and a qualified conversion are different outcomes.

Approve the complete targeting array and verify the saved result

The connector supports selected ad-group targeting writes, including communities, interests, keywords, geography and excluded communities. It reads current targeting and merges the supplied fields before updating the group. That protects unrelated fields, but a supplied array replaces that field’s previous array.

If you want to add one exclusion, first read the current exclusion array, then show the complete proposed array containing the retained entries and the addition. Approve the exact ad-group ID and values. Ask the assistant to read the saved settings again after the write.

Community exclusions concern the relevant community auction or placement rules. They should not be described as removing every person associated with that community from all Reddit advertising. Use Ads Manager for an automated-targeting or placement control the current operation cannot change.

Keep budget, creative and targeting changes separate where practical. Record the baseline, approved edit and review period, then compare qualified outcomes after attribution has had time to mature. If the sample is too small to support a conclusion, retain that result and gather more evidence.