Choose a Reddit campaign objective: traffic, conversions or awareness

What each objective optimizes

Reddit’s main objectives map to familiar goals: awareness (impressions, billed per thousand impressions), traffic (clicks to your site, billed per click), video views, conversions (valuable actions on your site), app installs, catalog sales and lead generation, the last in beta. Reddit has introduced updated objective names, such as brand awareness and sales, and states that older values keep working. Names in your Ads Manager may differ slightly from the ones used here.

Traffic is the simplest place to begin. It needs no conversion history, it works with a well-built landing page, and it gives you early signals about which communities and messages attract clicks. Its weakness is that clicks are not outcomes: a cheap click from an audience that never converts is not a win. Pair it with a pixel event so you can see what the visitors did.

Conversions asks Reddit to find people likely to complete a specific event, such as a lead or a purchase. It requires the Reddit Pixel or the Conversions API with that event; when neither is set up, clicks is the only eligible goal. It is the better fit once your tracking is reliable and the event occurs often enough to learn from. Optimizing for a rare event with a small budget starves the system of signal.

Awareness and video views suit launches and brand work, where the goal is reach and attention rather than an immediate action. Video views campaigns can serve only video ads. For a small business that must justify every dollar, awareness is rarely the first test; consider it when you have a message that earns attention and a way to measure its later effect.

Why the choice matters

• A goal that matches your evidence: you pick an objective your tracking can verify.
• Fewer rebuilds: the irreversible choice is made once, deliberately.
• A progression you can defend: traffic to learn, conversions to scale what has proven itself.

Choose in six steps

1. Write the business result in one sentence and decide which pixel or server event stands for it.
2. Check that the event fires, using the pixel health view in Ads Manager, before choosing a conversion goal.
3. If the event is new or rare, start with traffic and collect events for a couple of weeks.
4. Create the campaign paused with the chosen objective and name it for the objective and the audience.
5. When the optimization event occurs regularly, add a conversions campaign beside the traffic one, rather than editing the first.
6. Compare cost per meaningful result across both and keep the one that earns its budget.

Cautions

Sources and further reading

• Reddit Ads API: campaign objective matrix
• Reddit Ads API: campaign objective migration
• Reddit Ads API: set up a Standard campaign