Reddit Ads for B2B: target specific subreddits or broad interest keywords?

Say you sell a mid-priced project tool to agencies and want to test Reddit Ads. You've got two main ways to aim: pick specific subreddits, or go broad with interest and keyword targeting. Subreddits feel safer because you know the context, but the audiences in r/marketing or r/PPC are small, and plenty of those people run ad blockers. Broad targeting reaches more people, but it also pulls in students and hobbyists who click and never buy. For a first test, I'd go with subreddit targeting on a tight budget. You get a cleaner read, and the goal at this stage is finding out whether the message lands at all, not hitting volume. Has anyone seen the keyword side produce qualified B2B clicks, or does it usually end up looking like consumer traffic?

I wouldn't blame ad blockers for small subreddit audiences. Reddit ads run as native posts in the feed, so blockers catch far fewer of them than display banners. The real limit is volume: r/PPC has a few hundred thousand members, and only a slice of them are buying anything at a given moment.

On the keyword side, I think the creative filters more than the targeting does. A generic SaaS banner pulls hobbyists who click out of curiosity. A headline that names the exact pain, like "Client reporting still eating your Monday?", pulls the people who actually have that problem. It works the same way on TikTok, where the first line decides who stays.

So for the test, run subreddit targeting to validate the message, then reuse the winning hook on broad keywords. Compare cost per qualified click, not raw CTR.

I don't think the creative does most of the filtering. A pain headline gets clicked by anyone who relates to the pain, and a student with no budget relates just as well as a buyer does. On broad interests, targeting decides who sees the ad in the first place, so that's where most of the filtering happens.

Partly agree, but Reddit keyword targeting mostly matches the content of the thread someone is reading, not a profile of their interests. So the keyword sets the context and the headline still does the sorting. Naming the buyer right in the copy helps a lot, something like "for agency owners running 10+ clients", because a student with no budget will just skip past it.