Reddit Ads Manager Tutorial 2026: Full Setup Walkthrough

This is a walkthrough of Reddit's actual Ads Manager interface: the screens you'll click through in order, the settings each one asks for, and what to pick at each step. It's built from Reddit's own advertising help documentation, not a generic "here's what Reddit ads are" overview. If you've never opened Reddit Ads Manager before, or you opened it once and bailed at the targeting screen, this covers the full flow from account creation to your first report.

Reddit Ads Manager lives at ads.reddit.com and, once you're past account setup, breaks into three levels: campaign, ad group, and ad. Each level asks for a different kind of decision (objective, then targeting and budget, then creative), and the interface won't let you skip ahead until the level above it is filled in. That structure is the whole trick to not getting lost in it.

Setting up your Reddit Ads Manager account

Go to ads.reddit.com and log in with a Reddit account (a personal account works, you don't need a separate business login). The first time through, Reddit asks for advertiser-specific information: business name, country, currency, and billing details, according to Reddit's account setup documentation. This whole step takes five to ten minutes and you can start building a campaign immediately after.

Once the account exists, it sits inside Reddit's Business Manager, which is the layer above individual ad accounts. Business Manager is where you manage user roles (who on your team can edit vs. only view), connect multiple ad accounts under one business, and handle billing centrally, per Reddit's Business Manager docs. For a single-brand setup this layer barely matters, but if you're running ads for multiple clients or multiple product lines, set up Business Manager correctly on day one, because retrofitting user permissions after a team has been working directly in one ad account is a bigger cleanup than it sounds.

Creating a campaign in Reddit ads manager

Once billing is confirmed, Ads Manager drops you into the campaign builder. This is the part of the interface most tutorials gloss over, so here's the actual sequence.

Step 1: Choose a campaign objective

The first screen asks you to pick a Campaign Objective. This isn't cosmetic, it changes which post types are available further down the funnel and how Reddit's bidding algorithm optimizes delivery, per Reddit's campaign objectives documentation. The objectives map roughly to funnel stage: awareness objectives optimize for reach and impressions, consideration objectives (Traffic, App Install, Video Views) optimize for clicks or views, and Conversions optimizes toward a specific event you define later with the pixel.

Pick based on what you're actually trying to measure, not what sounds most ambitious. A B2B SaaS team running a small budget test should almost always start on Traffic or Conversions, not Awareness. Reddit's own guidance for campaign setup is at the Set up a Reddit Ads Campaign article, which also covers the difference between "Advanced Create" (the full-control flow) and "Simple Create," a faster guided flow with fewer manual settings, documented separately under Simple Create.

Step 2: Name and structure the campaign

Campaign names don't show to users, but they matter for reporting hygiene once you have more than three or four running. A workable convention: objective, target audience shorthand, and launch month (for example, "Conversions - SaaS-ICP - Jul26"). This gets more important the moment a second person on your team starts building campaigns in the same account.

Building the ad group: this is the reddit ads manager targeting layer

Underneath every campaign sits one or more ad groups, and this is where targeting, budget, and bidding actually live. Reddit's documentation frames ad groups as containers you use to segment a campaign into distinct targeting buckets so you can read performance separately across each one, per Reddit's campaign setup guide. In practice, this means don't cram five unrelated audiences into one ad group and expect clean data back.

Audience targeting options

Reddit's targeting menu, per its audience targeting overview, breaks into these categories:

• Interests. Broad, Reddit-defined interest categories (tech, business, fitness, and so on).
• Communities (subreddits). You can directly include specific subreddits, targeting people who are subscribed to or have recently interacted with them. This is the targeting option that makes Reddit different from every other ad platform, and most advertisers underuse it. If your ICP has an obvious set of subreddits they already hang out in, that's a tighter signal than any interest category will give you.
• Keywords. Reddit can match ads to conversations containing specific keywords, which is closer to search intent than most social platforms offer.
• Custom audiences. Curated lists that directly include or exclude redditors, built and managed in the Audience Manager, per Reddit's custom audiences documentation. You can upload a customer list, retarget site visitors via the pixel, or exclude existing customers from a top-of-funnel campaign.
• Lookalike audiences. Built from an existing audience (a customer list, pixel-based visitors, or engagers), Reddit's system finds redditors who share interests, ad engagement patterns, and conversion behavior with that seed group, per Reddit's lookalike documentation. One structural note worth knowing before you build: starting March 2026, Reddit requires automated targeting to be enabled on all lookalike audience campaigns to keep delivery and pacing stable.
• Demographics and device targeting. Location and gender under demographics targeting, plus device and carrier targeting for advertisers who care about mobile vs. desktop delivery specifically.

Reddit also offers Automated Targeting, a toggle that expands delivery beyond your manual selections once the algorithm has enough signal, documented at automated targeting. Reddit's own guidance recommends leaving it on for most campaigns, since it tends to widen reach without materially hurting relevance, but if you're running a narrow subreddit-based test specifically to read performance in a handful of communities, turn it off so the data isn't diluted by expansion traffic.

Budget and bidding

Every ad group sets its own budget and bid strategy. Reddit's minimum is $5 per day per campaign, with no minimum lifetime spend, which makes it realistic to run a real test on a small budget before committing more. You choose between daily and lifetime budgets, and then a bid strategy:

• Lowest Cost (sometimes called automatic bidding): Reddit spends your full budget to get as many conversions or results as possible, with no cap on individual bid amounts. This is generally the best-performing option for conversion volume, according to platform guidance, because it gives Reddit's delivery system the most room to find cheap inventory.
• Cost Cap: you set an average CPC or CPA target and Reddit optimizes around that ceiling rather than spending everything it can.
• Manual Bidding: you set a hard CPC (or CPM/CPV depending on objective), and Reddit won't exceed it, which trades some delivery volume for cost predictability.

New advertisers with unclear cost expectations should start on Lowest Cost with a capped daily budget, watch a week of data, then move to Cost Cap once there's a real CPA number to anchor around. For a fuller breakdown of what CPMs and CPCs actually look like on Reddit right now by objective and vertical, see Reddit ads cost data.

Placements and devices

Reddit ads can run across the main feed, community feeds, and conversation placements (inside comment threads), and the ad group settings let you include or exclude specific placements along with device type. Mobile carries the large majority of Reddit's traffic, so unless you have a specific reason to isolate desktop (a high-ticket B2B offer where desktop conversion rates are historically stronger, for example), leave both device types on and let the delivery data tell you where performance actually lands.

Uploading creative

Once targeting and budget are set at the ad group level, you move to the ad itself, where you pick a post type and upload creative. Depending on the campaign objective, Reddit supports Image, Video, and Carousel post types, with Video Views campaigns limited to Video only, per Reddit's ad unit specifications. There's also a Free-form ad type that doesn't strictly require an image (a placeholder card is generated if you skip one), documented under Free-form Ads, which is worth using when the strongest asset you have is copy, not visuals.

Exact dimensions, file size caps, and character limits for every ad type are covered in full in Reddit ad specs 2026, so this post won't repeat the numbers. The one production note worth stating here: Reddit's own creative best practices guidance is blunt that ads combining visual media with text outperform either alone, and that closed captions matter for video because most mobile redditors browse with sound off by default.

If you want inspiration before building creative from scratch, Reddit maintains an Ads Inspiration Library of live and past campaigns organized by objective and vertical.

Setting up conversion tracking (the Reddit Pixel)

If your campaign objective is Conversions, or you plan to build retargeting or lookalike audiences off site behavior, you need the Reddit Pixel installed before you can measure any of it properly. The pixel tracks actions visitors take after they see or click your ad, per Reddit's pixel documentation. You can install it two ways: client-side tagging through Google Tag Manager, or, for ecommerce brands, a direct Shopify integration that installs the pixel and syncs your product catalog without touching code.

Once the pixel is live, you define Conversion Events (purchase, sign-up, lead, page view, and so on, listed in full under supported conversion events) and then a Conversion Goal at the ad group level, which tells Reddit's bidding system what to optimize toward, per Reddit's conversion goals documentation. Skip this step and a Conversions-objective campaign is functionally just guessing, because the algorithm has nothing concrete to optimize against.

Reading the dashboard and reporting

After a campaign is live, performance data shows up in the Ads Manager Dashboard, which surfaces top-line metrics (spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, CPA) with filtering by date range, campaign, and ad group, per Reddit's dashboard documentation. For deeper cuts, the Report Center lets you break results out by dimension (date, placement, device, location) and export or schedule recurring reports, documented under Reddit Ads reporting.

If you set a conversion goal on the ad group, that specific conversion type is what shows up as the primary result metric on the dashboard for that ad group, and it's also what the automated bidding system is quietly optimizing toward in the background. Check that the goal you selected is actually the outcome you care about (a demo booking, not a generic page view) before you spend a real budget against it.

Where Reddit Ads Manager fits next to organic Reddit work

Everything above is the mechanical layer: how to build a campaign that Reddit's system will actually deliver correctly. It says nothing about whether paid is the right lever for your brand in the first place. Some of the strongest Reddit results we've seen weren't paid at all. A Series B fintech client of ours sourced $4.2M in pipeline across 14 subreddits over nine months, at a cost-per-SQL six times cheaper than their prior LinkedIn spend, entirely through organic participation, not ads. A DTC brand hit 38x week-one ROAS off an organic Reddit launch with zero paid spend behind it. Those are different muscles than Ads Manager, and they're not always a substitute for paid, but if you're evaluating Reddit as a channel and pricing out an ad budget, it's worth knowing the organic side exists as an option before you commit spend.

FAQ

How do I get started with Reddit Ads Manager?

Go to ads.reddit.com, log in with a Reddit account, and complete the advertiser setup (business name, billing, currency). Reddit's own account setup guide puts the whole process at five to ten minutes, and you can build a campaign right after.

What's the minimum budget in Reddit Ads Manager?

$5 per day per campaign, with no minimum lifetime spend requirement, which makes it possible to run a real test before committing a larger budget.

Do I need the Reddit Pixel to use Reddit Ads Manager?

Only if you're running a Conversions-objective campaign or want to build retargeting and lookalike audiences from site behavior. Traffic, Awareness, and Video Views campaigns can run without it, though you'll have less visibility into what happened after the click.

What's the difference between Simple Create and Advanced Create in Reddit Ads Manager?

Simple Create is a faster, guided setup flow with fewer manual settings, aimed at advertisers who want Reddit's defaults. Advanced Create exposes full manual control over targeting, bidding, and placements at the ad group level, which is what most of this walkthrough covers.

Related reading

• Reddit ad specs 2026
• Reddit ads cost data
• Reddit SEO agency

Ads Manager gets a campaign live. It doesn't tell you whether paid is the right channel investment for a funded B2B SaaS, fintech, or DTC brand versus building organic Reddit presence alongside it, or instead of it. If you want a second opinion on that channel mix before you commit budget, book a call with Subreddit Marketing.