Reddit Ads Case Study: $19.67 to $3.63 per Signup
Updated: Oct 13
European ecommerce print-on-demand platform. Same platform, same lead definition, different campaign build.
At a glance
3.8x the spend. 20x the signups. 81% lower cost per signup.
The client
A print-on-demand platform serving ecommerce sellers across Europe. Sellers create an account, upload designs, and the platform handles printing and fulfilment.
The goal on Reddit was leads: account signups.
What was happening before
The client ran Reddit ads themselves from late December through January. Traffic objective. About $1,000 spent.
On paper it looked fine. 675,620 impressions. 2,265 clicks at $0.45 each. Cheap by any standard.
Then they checked GA4 and found 1,046 sessions.
More than half the clicks they paid for never reached the site. December produced zero signups. January produced 52. That works out to $19.67 for every account created, and that number only exists because January salvaged something — December on its own returned nothing at all.
They stopped in February and ran nothing until July.
What we found
Three things, in order of how much they mattered.
The objective was wrong
A traffic campaign optimises for clicks. Reddit will happily find you the cheapest clicks on the platform, and the cheapest clicks on any platform are the ones least likely to convert. The $0.45 CPC wasn't a win. It was the bill for buying the worst inventory available.
Nobody was checking delivery
The gap between 2,265 billed clicks and 1,046 recorded sessions is the entire story of the first attempt. Cheap clicks are only cheap if they land. Half of that $1,000 bought nothing that ever touched the website.
Targeting was too broad for the audience
675,620 impressions against an audience of European ecommerce sellers meant most of the budget was reaching people with no reason to care.
What changed
After a few strategy sessions with us, the client made these changes:
Moved from the traffic objective to conversions, with the signup event as the optimisation target
Rebuilt targeting around the subreddits where ecommerce sellers, dropshippers and print-on-demand operators actually spend time, instead of broad interest categories
Rewrote creative to read like a post rather than an ad — Reddit punishes anything that looks like it was written for Meta
Verified the signup event was firing correctly before scaling anything
Scaled spend 3.8x once cost per signup held
Results
Reddit charged more for everything and the client paid less for what mattered.
Impressions dropped 71%. eCPM went from $1.51 to $20.36 — more than 13x. CPC went from $0.45 to $2.18, nearly 5x.
Every input got more expensive. Cost per signup fell 81%.
CTR nearly tripled, from 0.335% to 0.935%. And the delivery gap closed completely: 1,803 clicks reported, 1,803 sessions recorded.
The conversion rate on the landing experience tells the same story from the other side. Before, 5% of Reddit sessions ended in a signup. After, 60% did. The signup definition never changed. The people arriving did.
Reddit is now the client's highest-volume paid traffic source. They also consider it their highest-quality — they estimate a 30–40% quality gap in Reddit's favour compared to Google Ads. That is their assessment based on how the accounts behave after signup, not a number we measured, and we're presenting it as exactly that.
What's still being fixed
August recorded 457 signups against July's 623, on higher spend. That is a tracking problem, not a performance drop. A measurement issue on the client's side is undercounting conversions and hasn't been fully resolved yet. The real August figure is higher than what GA4 shows.
Why this worked
Nothing here was clever. The client wasn't missing a secret targeting trick or a creative format nobody knows about.
They were running the wrong objective, buying clicks that didn't arrive, and had no reason to suspect either — because the dashboard showed cheap traffic and cheap traffic looks like success until you check what happened to it.
Reddit rewards specificity and punishes broad. Most accounts that fail on Reddit fail for the same two reasons this one did.
Client name withheld at their request.
Think your Reddit account has the same problem? Check the gap between the clicks Reddit reports and the sessions your analytics records. If it's wide, you already have your answer.
Cost per signup case study: FAQ
Why were the Reddit clicks cheap but not converting?
The campaign used the traffic objective, which tells Reddit to find the cheapest clicks. Cheap clicks are the least likely to convert, and more than half of them never reached the website.
How do you check if your Reddit clicks actually reach your site?
Compare the clicks Reddit reports with the sessions your analytics tool records for the same period. If the gap is wide, you're paying for clicks that never land.
Which Reddit campaign objective should you use for signups?
Use the conversions objective with your signup event as the goal, and check that the event fires correctly before you scale spend.
How much did cost per signup drop?
From $19.67 to $3.63, an 81% drop, while spend grew 3.8x and signups grew 20x. The price of every click went up, but the clicks were from the right people.
About the author
Written by Dāvis Lejnieks, CEO of Undecided Agency and a Redditor for 15+ years. He plans and runs Reddit ad campaigns for DTC, gaming and app brands, and shares what the data shows here.
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Undecided Agency is a Reddit ads agency for DTC, gaming and app brands. See all our Reddit ads case studies.
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