Manuel Meraz

Professor Kim
PRAD 393
13 November 2020
Using Reddit to Gauge the Success of a Campaign
One of the greatest issues we face as advertisers is finding an accurate way to evaluate

the effectiveness of our campaigns. We can do all this creative work in the form of graphics,

video advertisements, and social media outreach, but at the end of the day we need a way to

prove that our labor was impactful. This is where we must look towards technological

innovations. In this paper I will be analyzing Reddit comments and upvotes and downvotes, and

their effectiveness when it comes to analyzing how well a product is doing. What you will find

is that something as innocuous as a simple voting system has heavy handed ramifications on a

community and people’s perceptions.

Reddit is a website which hosts thousands of small forums which are dedicated to certain

interests. You are sure to find a community of like-minded individuals no matter what your

interests are, whether they be politics or model trains. Each of these smaller communities allow

users to make posts and have discussions surrounding these posts. The comments under posts

are not just sorted in chronological order, the more popular comments are the first things you see,

while the less popular ones are buried at the bottom of the page. This signal is a psychological

metric, as somebody’s decision to give a post an upvote or a downvote tells us how they are

feeling. If they like a post or comment enough, they will give it an upvote. If the opposite is

true, they will grace that piece of content with a downvote. Reddit votes are an effective metric

for gauging the success of an advertising campaign because of the nature of reddit itself. Due to

the specialization of Reddit communities, they tend to attract aficionados and experts in specific
fields. Instead of reading the opinions of people who are passive consumers, you will see what

the more hardcore consumers have to say. A lot of times, these more dedicated consumers have

a lot of sway when it comes to public discourse. People turn to these experienced users for

guidance, so it is important that they are happy. When the hardcore users are happy, they will

display their support and the less experienced users follow suite. According to a study done by

European researchers Adam J.L. Harris and Jordy Boekema, you would need many more

laypeople to hold an opinion to counter the sway that an expert’s opinion has. Their study was

centered around the British electorate’s decision to split from the European Union, but it is

applicable to this Reddit scenario. They found that the opinions of experts had a heavy influence

on common folk, but that it could be overturned if enough of these common people spoke out

against it. In their case, British politicians and political analysts spoke out against leaving the

European Union, but there were enough loud voices in the crowd to drown out these expert

opinions. In our case, we can see how influential a well known Reddit user can be, and maybe

also find out what it takes to topple them and install a new popular opinion in place.

This does not mean that Reddit votes are the end all when it comes to gauging how

successful your campaign was, it is important to step back and critique the system itself. People

tend to follow the popular opinion, and plenty of times the popular opinion is just the first

opinion thrown out there. There are circumstances where a post does poorly because the first

few people reacted to it negatively, which in turn caused the next few people to also look at it in

a negative light. If everybody else disliked this content, then there must be something wrong

with it. This is harmful for evaluating the effectiveness of a campaign, it makes it seem as if a

campaign did horribly, even though that might not be the case, and you just so happened to have

an encounter with the few people who disliked it enough to sway the public opinion on Reddit.
Another critique against Reddit is that there is a lot of emotion that cannot be captured with a

simple upvote or downvote. Whether somebody absolutely loved a post, or they just found it

slightly amusing, it can only be conveyed with an upvote. Researchers can then choose to

analyze the replies to that post, but that would be a lot more time consuming and difficult than

just looking at the vote totals. Finally, Reddit votes can be easily manipulated by outside parties.

People can go on the internet and purchase bots that can upvote or downvote posts to sway

people’s opinions. This can be down by consumers who feel wronged, competitors to the

product you are advertising, or people behind the campaign itself. No matter if the manipulation

results in a boost or burying of a post, we are not given an accurate look into how consumers

view an advertising campaign.

If I were given the chance to work with computer scientists to make a new metric to

accurately interpret opinions on Reddit, I would work towards a metric that takes multiple

factors into account instead of just vote tallies. I alluded to this previously, but I think there is a

lot of potential in analyzing Reddit comments as well as the vote totals. A lot of times popular

users will chime in under posts to give more detailed opinions. In our case, an expert on a

product might talk about how good or bad this product is performing, and then proceed to

recommend it to their audience. If there was a way to analyze how many people an expert’s

opinion reaches and how effective their opinion was at influencing others, it would prove to be

fruitful in understanding how important Reddit and other forums are for analyzing the success of

a product or the advertising campaign behind it. In this dream metric, I think it would also be

important to find a way to get rid of all of the votes that were manipulated by bots or other

outside sources. It seems like this is an issue on all kinds of platforms, but especially on Reddit

where downvotes and upvotes are so crucial, it would be amazing to be able to filter out all the
votes not done by actual human beings with opinions. Finally, there exists the issue of the sway

that early reactors to a post have. With the first few people who react to a post having such a

great effect on how future consumers of the content might see it, it is important to also be able to

discern how much of the public’s opinion is a result of this bandwagon effect. I think that

supplementing this metric with a way to see how people voted in different time intervals would

also give us a great amount of insight. We would be able to see how the first few people voted

and if that had an effect on how future people voted. We could also implement a feature that

hides vote counts on Reddit while a post is fresh, as to dissuade people from voting based on

how previous people voted.

Reddit as a platform is seeing an immense amount of growth. People are turning to

Reddit for advice from more knowledgeable people, and it is important as advertisers to

understand how much of an effect these people have on public opinions towards our campaigns

and the products we advertise. In particular, Reddit’s vote system has the potential to give us

information as to how effective a campaign was, but it is not a perfect metric. In order to gain

the full picture, it must be supplemented with a nuanced approach that takes various factors into

account.
 Works Cited

authors, All, and Jos Hornikx. “How Many Laypeople Holding a Popular Opinion Are Needed to

Counter an Expert Opinion?” Taylor & Francis,

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13546783.2017.1378721.