12 things Reddit needs to make its ad platform more competitive

Channels outside of Google and Meta have struggled to get recent headlines in the paid advertising world. But my agency’s performance marketing team has seen one under-the-radar channel — Reddit — introduce a ton of new features and ad types in 2026, making it more viable for our clients.

Between new ad types and AI-powered functions, powerful integrations for shopping, video ad enhancements from late in 2025, and Reddit’s AEO and SEO clout making marketers more aware of the need to engage on the platform, we’ve got more clients active on, or curious about, Reddit than I’ve ever seen.

That said, Reddit’s ad platform — though much further along than it was a couple of years ago — still needs more features and improvements to existing ones to draw a bigger share of advertising budgets.

My Reddit targeting and audience wishlist

A huge part of Reddit’s influence comes from the extremely candid and opinionated content its users provide — and users are enabled to be exactly that, in large part, because accounts use usernames rather than real names.

Redditors can be as anonymous as they want, and I don’t wish to change that. Instead, I’d like Reddit to offer the following.

1. Expand reach without sacrificing privacy

Better identity targeting for anonymous or logged-out users in a privacy-safe way would expand our targetable reach, which is a big deal given Reddit’s niche status compared to Google and Meta.

2. Bring B2B intent to Reddit

B2B and firmographic targeting that includes: 

• Job title, function, and seniority.
• Industry and company size.
• Named-company and account-list targeting.
• Tech usage and/or professional-interest segments.
• Decision-maker and buying-committee audiences.

Reddit offers communities, interests, keywords, customer lists, and lookalikes. Adding privacy-safe firmographic data would make the platform more competitive with LinkedIn while preserving Reddit’s differentiated behavioral signals.

3. Make purchase intent easier to target

Reddit should turn its strongest advantage — people actively researching and discussing decisions — into understandable, scalable “in-market” and journey-stage audiences, including:

• Recently researched a category.
• Asked a question about a product or problem.
• Engaged with comparison or recommendation threads.
• Evaluated alternatives.
• Repeated recent engagement.

4. Make existing audience signals more reliable

As for what we can do on Reddit with the reach we have, I’d like to request stronger retargeting depth, lookalike audiences, CRM integrations, and cross-subreddit behavioral signals. Reddit introduced all those targeting options, but they’re still patchy and unreliable, further eroding scale and performance.

5. Give advertisers more control over who they reach

Reddit advertisers need greater confidence that their strategies are hitting the right people. Adding exclusions would help ensure we can eliminate some irrelevant eyeballs, so I’d like to ask for:

• Negative keyword and community exclusions.
• Current-customer and existing-lead suppression.
• Clear control over AND versus OR targeting logic.

6. Make audience planning more predictable

Last in the audience and targeting category, advertisers need better audience planning and forecasting. Before spending budget, they need to see:

• Realistic audience sizes (Reddit currently has ranges that can seem wildly unrealistic).
• Demographic and device composition.
• Top associated communities and topics.
• Estimated CPM, conversion volume, and audience saturation based on budget.

My Reddit measurement and attribution wishlist

With the releases of Brand Lift, Conversion Lift, and CAPI, Reddit measurement took a huge step forward in 2023. 

Today, Reddit’s role in the user research and consideration phase is increasingly important as AI search minimizes clicks and pushes performance marketers to focus further up the funnel. 

That means Reddit’s value is increasingly measured through analyses like MMM and MTA rather than through a persistent reliance on last-click attribution.

All of that is to say that it’s easier to measure Reddit ads’ impact than it was a few years ago. Yet, indicative of a platform that’s still more of a challenger than a powerhouse, it’s falling short on some basics. 

There’s one specific (and persistent) gap that should be table stakes for a serious ad platform: more third-party integrations for dynamic UTM tracking. Beyond that, I’d love to see Reddit introduce the following.

7. Prove incremental value without leaving the platform

Reddit is generally considered a test channel, so self-serve incrementality testing — which larger competitors offer — would help demonstrate the incremental value it drives. Specifically, I’d like to see Reddit provide:

• Conversion-lift studies.
• Randomized audience holdouts.
• Geo experiments.
• Self-serve brand-lift studies.
• Incremental reach and frequency measurement.

In aggregate, these tests would help Reddit advertisers defend upper- and mid-funnel investment when last-click reporting underrepresents its influence.

8. Connect ad delivery to revenue outcomes

Reddit has Pixel, CAPI, and omnichannel attribution capabilities. The larger opportunity is to make it easier to pull in offline data from CRMs and other sources, so advertisers can lean into down-funnel and revenue-based optimization.

Native HubSpot, Salesforce, and other CRM integrations would be particularly valuable. Advertisers need to tell Reddit which leads became valuable customers, then allow its delivery system to find more people with similar signals.

My Reddit ad formats and creatives wishlist

More than on most platforms, it’s critical to make sure your ads appear as native as possible to their context. Redditors turn up their noses at anything inauthentic.

In 2024, Reddit made some updates to Conversation ads that gave advertisers a useful option in a native setting, but there are many more native formats they could introduce. I’ll list some of my recommendations below.

9. Give advertisers more ways to fit into the conversation

Polls, product carousels, and Q&A ad units designed to fit within the Reddit environment would all be good formats for advertisers to test.

10. Bring short-form video up to speed

Another area of opportunity for Reddit is more competitive short-form video. Yes, they do have short-form video, but introducing vertical formats and optimizing for autoplay would make that format a lot more viable for advertisers (this is kind of in the “table stakes” category).

11. Put ads where high-intent Reddit research happens

Reddit Answers was integrated into the broader Reddit search experience in May 2026. Reddit Answers ads in high-intent searches and recommendation questions, with clear sponsorship labeling and strict relevance requirements, would give advertisers another way to reach users close to the purchase decision.

12. Let advertisers learn from past campaigns

The last big item on my creative list is an ad library that expands to show historical ads, much like Meta’s, where you can see both paused and active ads. That kind of archival reference would be super helpful to have on the back end.

Reddit could earn more of the ad budget

If it’s not obvious, Reddit has taken some significant strides forward over the last few years, to the point where it can be surprising when it hasn’t checked some of the more basic boxes.

These requests shouldn’t be considered pipe dreams, either. The above list was compiled from situations where my team and I have butted up against limits when running real Reddit campaigns.

Given the way AI search engines have eaten into clicks and made awareness more of a paid media play, and given Google’s heavy-handed move away from control and toward mass automation, we’re very willing to divert budget to Reddit if we can make a solid business case for it. 

Reddit’s unique community and research signals would be powerful if the platform figured out how to turn them into targetable audiences using ad formats that enable real conversations throughout the buying journey.