What Reddit's ad platform still lacks, according to the people buying it

Paid media conversation rarely strays far from Google and Meta. Reddit has been this year's exception: an agency writing in Search Engine Land reports more clients running campaigns there, or asking about it, than at any point it can remember — the result of a run of new ad types, AI-driven features, shopping tie-ins, video improvements shipped late in 2025, and the platform's growing weight in both search results and AI answers.

The same piece argues Reddit is still not built to take a serious share of budget, and sets out twelve things that would change that. What makes the list worth reading is where it came from. These are not wishes assembled in the abstract; they are the specific walls the author's team hit while spending money on live campaigns.

Six of the twelve concern who an advertiser can reach, and the author sets the constraint before the requests. Reddit's value to marketers comes from how bluntly people talk there, and people talk that way because they post under a handle rather than a name. Nothing on the list asks for that to be dismantled.

Within that limit, the first request is for privacy-safe ways to reach people who are logged out or anonymous — which matters far more on a platform of Reddit's size than it would on one with Google's reach.

The second is business targeting: seniority and job function, company size and sector, named accounts and uploaded account lists, segments built on what technology a firm runs or what its staff read professionally, and audiences drawn around the people who actually sign off on purchases. Reddit already sells communities, interests, keywords, uploaded customer lists and lookalikes. Adding firmographic data on top, the argument runs, would put it in the same conversation as LinkedIn while keeping a behavioural signal LinkedIn has no way to match.

Third is intent. Reddit's strongest asset is that its users research their decisions out loud, and almost none of that is currently packaged into audiences anyone can buy. The suggestion is to build them from the obvious signals: someone who has recently looked into a category, asked about a product or a problem, worked through comparison and recommendation threads, weighed alternatives, or simply kept coming back.

The remaining three are about the existing machinery working properly. Retargeting depth, lookalikes, CRM connections and behaviour tracked across subreddits have all been introduced, and are described as patchy and unreliable enough to cost both scale and performance. Advertisers want exclusions — negative keywords and communities, suppression of current customers and open leads, and a clear say over whether targeting layers combine as AND or as OR. And they want planning figures they can trust before committing budget: audience sizes that are not implausibly wide ranges, device and demographic composition, the communities a campaign would actually land in, and estimates for cost, conversion volume and saturation.

Reddit's measurement improved sharply with Brand Lift, Conversion Lift and its conversions API. The problem the article identifies is that the ground moved underneath afterwards. AI answers are absorbing clicks, which pushes performance marketers further up the funnel, which in turn means Reddit's contribution increasingly surfaces in mix modelling and multi-touch analysis rather than in a last click.

Against that backdrop some gaps look odd for a platform this far along. Dynamic UTM tracking still lacks the third-party hooks the author treats as a basic requirement.

The larger ask is incrementality testing that a buyer can run unaided: holdout groups, geo experiments, conversion and brand lift studies, and incremental reach and frequency figures. Competitors of Reddit's ambition already offer them. Since Reddit is nearly always bought as a test channel, being unable to demonstrate incremental value from inside the platform is a direct obstacle to ever being bought as anything else.

The related request is for offline data to flow in without friction — native connections to HubSpot, Salesforce and comparable systems, so a buyer can tell Reddit which leads turned into revenue and let the delivery system go looking for more people who resemble them.

The creative requests all follow from one observation: Reddit's audience is unusually quick to reject anything that reads as marketing. Conversation ads, added in 2024, were a step towards formats that sit naturally in that environment, and the article wants several more. Polls, product carousels and question-and-answer units are put forward as native-feeling placements worth testing.

Short-form video is filed under housekeeping rather than innovation. Reddit has it; what it lacks is vertical framing and tuning for autoplay, without which advertisers are unlikely to treat the format as competitive.

The most forward-looking item concerns Reddit Answers, folded into the platform's search experience in May 2026. Placing clearly labelled, tightly relevant ads against high-intent questions there would reach people close to a decision — which is exactly where Reddit's research behaviour is most valuable, and exactly where getting the labelling wrong would cost the most.

The final request is mundane and probably the easiest to grant: an ad library that shows historical as well as running ads, in the manner of Meta's, so buyers can learn from what has already been tried.

Running through all twelve is a claim about budget that Reddit ought to take seriously. The author's team says it is willing to move money over, and gives two reasons that have nothing to do with Reddit itself: AI search has eaten into organic clicks, turning awareness into a paid problem, and Google has been steadily taking control away from buyers in favour of automation. The demand is there. What is missing is the evidence a media buyer needs to defend the line item internally — and most of these twelve items are, one way or another, requests for exactly that evidence.