Redditors are researchers: set your attribution windows accordingly

TL;DR for performance advertisers:

• Reddit is a strong performance platform, showing greater incremental reach among prospects, per dollar spent, than many other social partners and delivering conversions more efficiently than many other online channels.
• Setting short attribution windows will under-value your Reddit campaign’s impact as redditors are researchers. They convert in strong numbers and return more revenue per conversion but take their time to do so.
• The optimal attribution windows for Reddit are likely to be between 1 and 7 days for clicks and 7 and 14 days for views.

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Redditors are researchers. This is a story we see consistently in our surveys and those of others. Over the last few years we have seen redditors and Reddit being the top-ranked platform for:

• Searching for brand information¹.
• Researching a product online before buying².
• Being open to seeing ads or content from brands³.
• Being the best platform to help users make an informed decision about a brand or product⁴.

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While this data reflects that Reddit presents a great opportunity for advertisers of all kinds, it also lays out a challenge for advertisers: if Reddit has a uniquely different content consumption to other platforms, should it be measured the same?

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To help answer this question, we commissioned a meta-analysis from a leading Multi-touch Attribution (MTA) partner, TransUnion⁵. TransUnion also has a pixel-less server-to-server integration with Reddit, meaning any advertiser can work with them to get accurate results for Reddit.

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Before answering our main question, TransUnion was able to share valuable insights about how Reddit performed in the MTA models.

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To start with, they found that Reddit drove oversized results, delivering 15% more incremental revenue than the ad spend budget would suggest (5.4% versus 4.7%).

Looking at Reddit’s performance against other platforms in the campaigns, we found equally positive results, placing Reddit in the top 3 social channels for incrementally attributed conversion and incrementally attributed revenue, and finding that Reddit delivered more prospects, per dollar spent, than any other channel outside of paid search.

• 4% more than online video.
• 22% more than online audio.
• 52% more than other social.
• 93% more than display.

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This led TransUnion to suggest, in a same-spend scenario, that the advertisers in the evaluation should increase their average monthly media spend on Reddit by 20% if they are optimizing the budgets for performance.

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Knowing that redditors are researchers and that Reddit is a strong platform for performance advertising, we then asked TransUnion to tell us more about the conversion period, to help us see what length attribution windows should be set to measure Reddit and reveal the total impact of advertiser media.

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TransUnion found that the vast majority of attributed conversions came more than one week after ad exposure: only 7.5% of Reddit’s attributed conversions happened on the same day of ad exposure - below the majority of other media elements. Furthermore, over 65% came after one week, meaning that windows shorter than 7 days would be misattributing almost three-quarters of the conversions driven by marketers’ Reddit campaigns.

Wanting to understand more about this, we built a product to help consult with advertisers on their attribution windows called the Conversion Attribution Toolkit. With this, we can study Reddit Pixel behavior and provide deep insights into redditors’ purchasing behavior for a given advertiser.

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Looking at the data from 138 advertisers across the world⁶, we found that attributed conversions for viewing a Reddit ad plateaus around 10 days whereas the plateau for clicking an ad occurred around 3 days.

Previous research has shown that views need to be included in an attribution model to value Reddit correctly (in one study, we saw that 96% of people who engaged in post-ad down-funnel activities from Reddit ads didn’t click on the ads at all⁷). This analysis reinforces the importance of including views to measure Reddit correctly and it expands on TransUnion’s findings, helping us recommend that advertisers should set longer attribution windows and work with your Reddit representatives to determine what should work best for your brand.

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TransUnion is a global information and insights company and a Reddit measurement partner. To learn more about their TruAudience Marketing Attribution solution, please visit their website.