Reddit Ads for B2B: worth a test budget or a waste of time?

Reddit gets pitched in B2B threads as a cheap way to reach people who are already talking about a problem. My hunch is the cheap CPCs come with a catch: the audience is big but the targeting is coarse, so you end up paying mostly for curiosity clicks unless the offer is very specific.

A fair test could look like this. A SaaS company puts $1,500 a month into two or three ad groups aimed at subreddits where buyers actually argue about the tool category, with a demo booking or lead form as the goal. Judge it on cost per qualified lead against LinkedIn, not cost per click, because CPC is exactly where Reddit looks best and tells you least.

My guess is it works for narrow technical products and fails for broad ones. I'd like to see whether anyone has data that points the other way.

I'd push on how the qualified leads get counted. If you judge Reddit on the conversions Reddit reports, it's grading its own homework, and platform attribution can credit someone who saw an ad and then booked a demo days later after searching on Google. Tag every landing page with UTMs and match booked demos against the CRM, so each channel gets a cost per opportunity from the same source. B2B cycles are long, so run the test for at least one full sales cycle before deciding. Otherwise you're mostly measuring how fast the first call happens.

Agreed on the CRM match. The place the source usually gets lost is the CRM itself: most of them overwrite lead source when the form is submitted or when a rep edits the record, so a Reddit lead that books three weeks later can end up showing as direct or organic. The fix is to capture the first-touch UTMs in hidden form fields on the first visit and push them into the CRM along with the contact. Giving each Reddit ad group its own landing page helps too, because the URL alone then tells you which group sourced the lead.

Splitting landing pages per ad group only pays off if each group produces enough leads to read. At $1,500 a month across two or three groups, you might see a handful of demo requests per group in a quarter, and a single deal won or lost swings cost per opportunity a lot. So it comes down mostly to expected lead volume. If the math gives you fewer than about ten qualified leads per group, merge the groups and judge Reddit as one channel for the first cycle, then split once volume grows.