Reddit Ads Examples: All 9 Types, Specs & What Works

The 9 types of Reddit ads (with examples)

Reddit's official format list breaks down into self-serve formats anyone can buy in Ads Manager and managed formats that require a Reddit sales rep and a serious budget.

1. Promoted Posts

The original format: take an existing organic post and pay to push it into more feeds. Jack Daniel's ran native-style promoted content in r/cocktails and r/country, recipes and whiskey culture rather than product shots, and Recho's brand roundup credits the approach with $5 million in incremental holiday sales. One wrinkle from Reddit's own docs: they now recommend building free-form ads in Ads Manager instead of promoting posts directly, because promoted posts have thumbnail display issues. The upside they don't mention is that a promoted post keeps its existing upvotes and comment history, which no other format gets.

2. Image ads

Start here. Every account I've run began with image ads, and most never needed to graduate past them. The format itself: one image, one headline, one destination URL, optional comments. Alchemy, a streaming platform that tested formats relentlessly, found plain images beating their video creative, with Recho's roundup putting their acquisition cost about 50% below their other paid channels. Screenshots outperform studio photography here, mostly because a cropped product screenshot with a specific claim reads like a post while lifestyle photography spends its 3 MB saying nothing.

3. Video ads

Feed videos autoplay muted, so the first three seconds carry the whole ad. The reference campaign is OREO's Star Wars collaboration: snappy 6- and 15-second branded cuts that treated the fandom like an audience, not a target, driving a 10.2-point ad awareness lift per Reddit's success stories. For direct response, I'd validate the message with a cheap image ad before commissioning any video. Specs allow 2 seconds to 15 minutes; ignore the ceiling, since Reddit itself recommends 5–30 seconds and even that's generous for a muted feed.

4. Carousel ads

Two to six swipeable images under one headline, each card carrying its own destination URL and an optional 50-character caption. Static cards go up to 20 MB (GIFs cap at 3 MB), and Reddit strongly recommends one aspect ratio across every card.

5. Conversation ads

Technically a placement, not a creative type: your ad appears inside comment threads, where people land from their feed or straight from a Google search. Lenovo's conversation placement delivered, per Search Engine Land's coverage, a 40% lower CPA than its 2023 campaign average and a 30% year-over-year improvement. Reddit's own data in the same piece claims feed-plus-conversation campaigns see 83% higher brand awareness than feed alone. It's a checkbox in campaign setup, and I check it by default.

6. Dynamic Product Ads

Reddit's catalog format: upload a product feed, install the pixel, and Reddit assembles ads automatically for retargeting or prospecting. Tushbaby used DPA with AI-generated creative variants from Genus to retarget parenting-subreddit browsers, a campaign Reddit turned into an official case study (Genus AI writeup) alongside their reported +84% ROAS in Reddit's success stories. OnlineLabels hit 13x ROAS with retargeting on the same page. E-commerce only, and only useful once you've uploaded a catalog feed and the Reddit pixel has collected some browsing data.

7. Free-form ads

The format closest to an actual Reddit post: a headline plus up to 40,000 characters of rich body text, 20 images, and 5 videos, per Reddit's free-form specs. This is the one I'd push B2B advertisers toward, because a well-written free-form ad is functionally a promoted essay, and Reddit is among the last places on the internet where people voluntarily read. Brands almost never publish free-form case studies, so filter the Ads Inspiration Library by format to see live ones instead of trusting anyone's screenshots, mine included.

8. Takeover & Category Takeover

Managed placements where you own a surface for a day: the front page, or every community in a content category. OREO's Star Wars push combined auction ads with a Sci-Fi, Horror & Comic category takeover to own the exact fandom the cookie launch targeted, and it's the sharper way to buy this format, since a category is a self-selecting audience rather than a demographic guess. Skip, the Canadian food delivery service, went broader and bought the front page outright, pairing the takeover with carousel creative for a 9.8-point brand awareness lift per Superside's examples roundup. Pricing starts around $100K+ per day, according to Recho's pricing guide, and the banner components carry their own tight specs, 150 KB files at 300x600 or 300x250. If you have to ask whether it's worth it, it isn't yet.

9. First View

Reddit's premium reserve format: your brand gets the first ad impression of a user's session on the Home and Popular feeds, sold through the managed ad-types lineup. I couldn't find a single named, verifiable First View case study with public numbers, which tells you something about who buys it and how they measure it. It exists for movie premieres, console launches, and CMOs with awareness OKRs. Fine. Just don't benchmark your $2K test budget against it.

Where to find more Reddit ad examples: the inspiration library

Reddit quietly ships the thing people search "reddit ads library" hoping to find: the Ads Inspiration Library, a browsable collection of the platform's most successful active ads from the past year. It lives at Creative > Ads Inspiration Library inside Ads Manager, and anyone with a free Reddit Ads account can open it, per Reddit's documentation.

You can filter by industry (sixteen categories, from Tech B2B to Gambling), budget tier, format, and objective. Each ad shows its details plus AI-generated notes on the three tactics it used, and, the genuinely useful part, a live link to the actual post so you can read the comments and vote counts.

Two caveats. It only shows winners, so you'll learn nothing about what bombed. And "successful" is Reddit's label with no performance numbers attached — you can't tell a 2% CTR from a 0.2% one.

Reddit ads that failed (and why)

Three failure patterns, with receipts.

The minimum-bid trap. Two weeks and $100 at Reddit's $0.20 minimum CPC bought Moss Technologies exactly one conversion, a case documented in Zapier's Reddit ads review. Minimum bids buy leftover impressions from placements nobody else wanted. Compare Animoto in the same piece, paying $1.58 CPC at a $6.23 CPM and renewing the budget anyway.

Underfunded broad tests. A game developer's r/gamedev post-mortem of $250 spent over two weeks is required reading. Broad targeting spread a small budget across audiences that never got enough frequency to matter. Oddly, the write-up itself did fine; the post now ranks in Google for Reddit ads queries, ahead of several agency guides.

Corporate-speak creative. The most Reddit-specific failure. Ad copy that would be fine on LinkedIn gets downvoted, mocked in comments, or brigaded, and Reddit's ad system doesn't hide vote counts on promoted posts with comments enabled. When your ad's top comment is a takedown with 400 upvotes, you're paying CPM rates to distribute criticism.

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