Reddit expands ad products with app install push

Brief:

Social news platform Reddit rolled out an ad performance bundle that includes app installs as a campaign goal for the first time, per a blog post. The bundle also has campaign objectives such as reach, video view, traffic and conversions associated with bid types such as cost per mille (CPM), cost per view (CPV) and cost per click (CPC).
Marketers who pick "app install" as a campaign objective can now directly target users of Reddit's mobile app with native mobile ads, bid for each click, target iOS and Android users and direct clicks to the URL in an app store. Reddit integrated its reporting with app install attribution providers including Adjust, Tune, Appsflyer, Kochava, Tenjin, Singular and Branch.
Reddit expanded its pixel tracking to eight conversion events: page visit, view content, search, add to cart, add to wishlist, purchase, lead and sign up. Marketers can now see view-through and click-through conversions separately and look at 1-, 7- and 28-day attribution windows, per Reddit.

Insight:

Reddit's addition of app installs and improvements to its pixel tracking are the social news platform's latest steps to appeal to advertisers that demand better metrics, including direct actions from viewers. App installs are a key goal for the $101 billion global app industry, whose downloads rose 35% to 194 billion last year from 2016, according to researcher App Annie. Game developers are especially attuned to app install metrics, possibly even more so than usual this year as the videogame industry faces declining revenue amid stricter game approvals in China and player fatigue for battle-royale titles like "Fortnite," researcher Pelham Smithers told Bloomberg.

Reddit is ramping up its ad platform to take on bigger rivals like Google and Facebook following a fresh round of $300 million in financing from companies including Chinese internet giant Tencent. "We can now assure advertisers that you are going to have a positive experience on Reddit and potentially even a new experience, a new way of connecting with customers," Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told CNBC this week. Brands appear to be taking notice of Reddit's expanded advertising opportunities, with McDonald's staging a Reddit takeover recently while KFC introduced a Reddit contest for Valentine's Day.

Reddit last month began offering CPC inventory to lure more advertisers. Reddit's ad sales staff has grown to 100 from 59 people in 2016, when it started focusing on its ad business, according to AdAge. In July, Reddit said it would offer "top post takeover," allowing a brand’s content to appear on the site's front page for 24 hours with promoted ads and banner ads at the top and sides. The company also planned to launch special topics in relevant "subreddits," so ads can target more specific audiences. Reddit claims that it has more than 330 million monthly active users and 18 billion page views, in addition to high engagement levels among users who spend an average of 16 minutes a day on the site.

The social news network was founded in 2005 as a free-speech forum that almost inevitably drew trolling, piracy and abuse. Like other social platforms that depend on user-generated content — such as Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube — Reddit has had to contend with concerns about brand safety.