Reddit Ads for SaaS: £150 Spend, Zero Conversions, Three Lessons

A founder's four-week Reddit ad experiment for an AI content tool yielded zero direct conversions. The detailed iteration on targeting and landing pages offers specific insights into cold traffic acquisition for niche problems.

Glittering-Pie6039 spent £150 on Reddit ads over four weeks to promote an AI content tool, generating 400+ clicks but zero direct conversions from the paid channel. The experiment, targeting seven subreddits like r/freelanceWriters and r/copywriting, aimed to acquire users for a product enforcing voice consistency in AI-generated text. While the founder recorded three total sign-ups during the experiment period, zero of those were attributable to the Reddit ad spend, prompting a detailed analysis of the campaign's iterative failures and a strategic pivot.

WHAT THEY DID

Initial Campaign Setup and Metrics

The Reddit ad campaign ran for four weeks with a daily budget of £5, totaling £150 in spend. The founder targeted seven subreddits: r/freelanceWriters, r/copywriting, r/Entrepreneur, r/ContentCreators, r/content_marketing, r/startups, and r/smallbusiness. Over this period, the ads generated 11,753 impressions and over 400 clicks, resulting in an average Cost Per Click (CPC) of £0.29. Despite the traffic, initial tracking confirmed zero account creations directly from ad clicks. The founder verified this by cross-referencing pixel data with their database, ruling out technical tracking errors as the cause of the conversion deficit.

Iterating on Device Targeting

During the first week, a critical observation emerged: 70% of the ad traffic originated from mobile devices. The AI content tool, however, was designed as a desktop-first product. Reddit ads open within the app's in-app browser, presenting mobile users with a landing page where the product was functionally unusable. This created a high-friction experience with no immediate low-friction action available. Recognizing this mismatch, the founder duplicated the campaign, implementing desktop-only targeting, and paused the original mobile-heavy campaign. This change aimed to align the user experience with the product's technical requirements.

Refining Landing Page Content

Following the device targeting adjustment, the campaign ran for a second week, generating 96 desktop-only clicks, yet still yielding zero conversions. This indicated that device compatibility alone was not the sole barrier. The founder then shifted focus to the landing page content. The page was updated to include a live interactive demo, allowing visitors to experience the product's functionality without requiring a sign-up. This demo explicitly showed how the tool enforced specific constraints, caught violations, and rewrote content in real-time. A third week of advertising with this revised landing page generated 212 additional desktop clicks, but again, no conversions were attributed to the ads.

Strategic Pivot from Cold Traffic

The founder concluded that cold ad traffic was ineffective for a product addressing a problem users might not immediately recognize. The AI content tool enforces voice consistency, a pain point that resonates primarily with individuals who have already experienced generic or inconsistent AI output. This specific problem, the founder noted, is not easily advertised to someone who has not yet felt the urgency of it. Curiosity-driven clicks did not translate into sign-ups because the perceived problem was not urgent enough. Consequently, the founder paused all ad campaigns, determining that the £150 spend provided a clear answer about the channel's viability at that stage. Future user acquisition efforts would pivot to content marketing, community engagement, and direct conversations with regular content creators.

WHAT WE'D CHANGE

The founder's conclusion regarding

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