Do not buy your first Reddit ads until your team has answered buyers in the subreddits where they ask, from accounts with a history there. Then aim the ads at those same subreddits. Working in the threads teaches a team where its buyers gather and how they describe the problem, and no ad budget can buy that on its first day.
That holds for a B2B software team that does not yet know where its buyers talk on Reddit. If you already have the list, from your own community or from customers who told you, or if your buyers’ main subreddits ban vendors outright, you can test paid this week.
Empact Partners, the go-to-market consultancy behind this verdict, runs Reddit programs for B2B software partners in its Generative Engine Optimization work: getting their products named in the threads that buyers and AI engines read. So presence is work we sell, and a team with the list does not need us for its first ad.
Two October Reddit Ad Tests Show Cheap Clicks And Leave The Cause Open
Two founders decided this October that Reddit ads do not work, and they had numbers to show for it. One ran six days of ads for a consumer productivity app: a 3.428% click-through rate, 17 cents a click, $106 spent and two users. A second founder in the same thread said he had run the same test, and brought a comparison.
“Got around 150 clicks, and from that, I got 2 signups to my landing page. From analytics, it seems most users spent exactly 0 seconds on the landing page, didn’t even scroll. Tried the same thing on Meta and got 35 signups for the same spend.” — u/DataSnaek, r/RedditforBusiness, Oct 2026
Each number is one founder’s self-report from a consumer app, posted by the person who paid for the clicks. Neither is a benchmark for B2B software, and nobody should size a budget on them. Read for what they count, they cannot carry the verdict the thread gave them.
| Report | What it counted | What it cannot tell you |
|---|---|---|
| Founder one, a consumer productivity app | 6 days, 3.428% CTR, $0.17 a click, $106, 2 users; 772 visitors averaging 13 seconds | Whether the visitors were buyers, and what a longer campaign would have shown |
| Founder two, the same kind of test | About 150 clicks, 2 signups, most visitors at 0 seconds; 35 signups on Meta for the same spend | Whether the Meta test had the same page, audience and dates, and how many visits were taps by accident |
The thread offered explanations by the handful. One commenter said Reddit puts ads directly under posts and comments, so a tap meant for the comments opens the ad. Two ads practitioners said six days was too short to read anything. The first founder paused the ads to work on his landing page and app. Reddit’s own ads support replied too:
“However, some users may click your ad but abandon your landing page before it fully loads. They may have accidentally clicked your ad or may be experiencing trouble loading the page.” — Reddit’s ads support, r/RedditforBusiness, Oct 2026
Accidental taps, a slow page, a weak page, a campaign still learning and the wrong audience all fit the same numbers, and neither test held anything constant to tell them apart. They show cheap clicks that did not become signups. They cannot show why, or whether the people who saw the ads would ever have bought.
.png)
Our programs settle it by being in the threads before anything is spent.
The Subreddits Worth Paying For Are Found By Working In The Threads
A specialist insurance brokerage shows what Reddit returns while the communities are still a guess. Its first five posts were informative pieces in large, general subreddits, and they drew nearly 100,000 views and no leads. That is the October ad test in organic form, with no invoice attached: reach in broad communities, aimed at nobody in particular.
The rebuild went smaller. It found the 8 to 12 subreddits where the brokerage’s buyers spend their time (daycare owners, preschool directors, nonprofit administrators) and titled each post the way they search. About six weeks later came nearly 40 qualified leads in one month, and buyers told the CEO which thread had sent them.
.png)
Our Reddit programs start by building that list, and the order is published in our case studies. For KKday, we started with fieldwork: we mapped the questions American travelers were asking about Japan on Reddit and in AI assistants, and read hundreds of threads across r/JapanTravel, r/JapanTravelTips and r/Travel before a single post went up.
Then came original threads from accounts with a posting history (the case study calls them aged accounts with karma), about twenty a month, with a weekly report. The case study counts reach, not bookings: in three months the threads collected 3,208,973 views, named KKday outright more than 60 times, and now rank in Google.
The list is longer, and harder to guess, than a category label suggests. When we built our own software to watch Reddit in October, its watch list ran from 82 to 638 subreddits per partner. Between 5 and 28 October, 259 of the 345 organic mentions it read were comments, and 205 of those sat under a post whose title never named the brand at all.
Buyers recommend tools in replies, so the communities are found by reading replies, and a brand earns a place in them by writing useful ones. A Reddit program with us follows that order: a named senior consultant owns it, fieldwork fills the first weeks, the answers come from accounts with a history there, and the partner gets a weekly report.
A program like that is measured in months. The brokerage’s leads came about six weeks after the rebuild, and KKday’s program ran for three months. That is a long wait for a team that wants results this week, and it is the strongest case against the order.
Ads Start This Week, And Answering Threads Never Scales
Both halves of that are true at the start. An ad account can be live this afternoon, while a presence program puts nothing on a dashboard for weeks. A founder answering threads in the evenings does not scale past what one founder can type, and the founders’ threads say so plainly.
“I’m a bit sick of the grow on reddit by participating narrative…. I haven’t yet found anybody that could scale a business like that.” — u/KitKatKut-0_0, r/SaaS, Mar 2026
Starting is not the same as learning anything, though. In the October thread, Reddit’s ads support told the first founder to run campaigns for about twelve weeks for meaningful data, and one practitioner advised fourteen days at the least. On the platform’s own advice, an ad test needs about a quarter of paid running before anyone can read it.
Participation scales once it is a program rather than a founder’s evenings: KKday’s ran at about twenty new threads a month, with a team on the comments. And scaling is the job the ads are for. Once answering has shown which communities hold the buyers, paid reach into those communities is how a team gets more of them, faster.
“If you’re trying to scale fast, the middle ground is probably running paid into those specific communities you found instead of the broad ones, since you’ve already validated where your actual customers hang out.” — u/deivan22, r/SaaS, Mar 2026
Reddit’s ads support also told the first founder to target broadly, since narrow targeting can leave a budget unspent. That is fair: eight to twelve small subreddits may not spend much. Treat the list as the campaign’s core rather than its fence. Start there, widen with interest targeting, and compare against a result you know.
Aim The First Ad At A Subreddit Where Your Answers Already Found A Buyer
A team holding a disappointing first test has a better question than whether Reddit ads work: what is the next ad aimed at, and can anyone on the team say why it is aimed there?
That order costs six weeks to a quarter before the first ad, about the time Reddit’s own ads support says an ad test needs to mean anything. What it buys is an ad result with one explanation already ruled out, because the communities it runs in have produced buyers before a dollar was spent there.
If your team wants buyers from Reddit and needs someone to find their subreddits and answer there before any ad budget goes in, book a call with me so we can see whether there is a fit.
