Three months back I posted some early impressions on Reddit Max - the assisted campaign flavour, not a replacement for standard funnels. Since then we doubled the daily budget. no creative changes, no targeting tweaks. just more money into the machine.
The numbers tell an interesting story. CPM nearly doubled, CPC crept up by over half, view-content CPA rose 85%, and purchase CPA jumped 165%. of course, seasonality plays a role - our overall eCommerce revenue dropped about 30% in that window, typical for this time of year. so we can't pin everything on the algorithm.
Standard campaigns saw similar inflation: purchase CPA up 98%. The relative gap between Reddit Max and standard funnel actually held fairly steady. What caught my eye was how the performance profiles started to mirror each other. At lower budgets Reddit Max hummed, double the budget and it starts choking. It's behaving a lot like Google Performance Max - hoovering up conversions that may have already been in the pipeline through standard paths.
not a failure. But not a silver bullet either. The more I dig, the more I think Reddit Max suits advertisers who already understand the platform's nuance. For raw beginners, it could mask inefficiencies and lead to lazy spending.
Next step: shifting all top-of-funnel budget into Reddit Max and seeing how the Shopify data reacts. The algorithm's got a personality, and we're still learning its moods.
