Reddit's Shopify Push Boosts Advertising Returns

Online buyer journeys are changing.

Social media platforms are beginning to play an increasingly important role in the purchasing decision process – with a survey from PwC finding that 31% of consumers surveyed use platforms such as Instagram, TikTok or Facebook as a top source of pre-purchase information.

One group particularly prone to online shopping is reddit users, with a study from Morning Consult finding that people on the platform are 62% more likely than the average American to be daily shoppers. 

With this in mind, Reddit has made its Shopify integration available to all advertisers globally, helping connect the company’s “high-intent conversations” to sales conversions. 

“This new integration makes it even easier for businesses of all sizes to unlock performance on Reddit with codeless pixel and catalogue syncing.” says Harish Balasubramanian, Director of Product, Ads Growth at Reddit. “For Shopify’s global network of small to medium businesses, Reddit is now an even more accessible part of the marketing mix.”

Reddit for retail

According to research from TransUnion, performance outcomes on Reddit in North America deliver more than two times the incremental return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to the media plan average. This translates to a return of US$12.52 for every dollar invested in North America. 

The same study also highlighted Reddit as the top-performing paid social channel for efficiency in the EMEA region – driving a 700% average return for ad spending for retail advertisers. 

These high returns can have an impact on a company’s wider marketing strategy, too. According to Reddit, the company has a “proven halo effect” – with 13% of its performance impact improving the effectiveness of other marketing channels. With these improvements in performance, Reddit says retail advertisers in EMEA have increased their investments in Reddit eight times over from 2023 to 2025. 

Social-first advertising

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Internet Advertising Revenue report, social media advertising grew 32.6% in 2025, reaching US$117.7bn, while search grew just 11%, to US$114.2bn.

Meta in particular has seen significant advertising growth, with projections from Emarketer suggesting that it will overtake Google in global net ad revenue in 2026. 

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, shared in January that ads would be “by far, the most important driver of growth in our business” over the next couple years – with the company’s ad revenue increasing 24% year-over-year to US$58.1bn in the fourth quarter of 2025.

The company has been investing in its AI enabled advertising capabilities to streamline the process for creating and targeting ads using the technology. 

This is largely focused through Meta Advantage+, which can automate e-commerce campaigns, enhance ad creative and automatically distribute budgets to the best-performing ad sets.

The company has also developed Andromeda, an AI ad retrieval system – which works by analysing ads in real-time to match them with user’s specific interests, looking at historic engagement to predict which ads will perform best.