Reddit Acquires Audience Research Provider ‘Spiketrap’ to Help Evolve its Ad Targeting Tools

Reddit’s continues to refine its ad targeting and optimization tools, this time via the acquisition of ‘audience contextualization company’ Spiketrap, which will help to improve Reddit’s graph understanding and relevance matching processes, powering better ad results.

As explained by Reddit:

“Reddit is home to the most passionate and engaged conversations on the internet and as we continue to scale our business, we are constantly looking for ways our partners can tap into the unique power of Reddit and reach relevant and leaned-in audiences. We expect Spiketrap’s technology will help improve Reddit ad relevance and performance through upleveled targeting, quality scoring, and engagement prediction.”

Spiketrap uses AI-powered systems to maximize ad placement relevancy, based on a broad range of signals that factor into its process.

For example, Spiketrap’s Clair AI system monitors in real-time for trending stories, and then maps them against online community engagement to better map information flows.

As per Reddit:

“Spiketrap has a proven track record for empowering brands and platforms to better understand and engage their audiences through AI-powered contextual analysis and tools. Bringing the team and technology into Reddit will enhance our interest and contextual targeting capability, improve ad quality scoring, and boost prediction models for powering auto-bidding, with the aim of ultimately driving higher return on investment and improved solutions for our advertisers.”

The acquisition is Reddit’s latest integration designed to improve its ad systems, with the platform also buying machine learning platform Spell back in June and natural language processing company MeaningCloud in July.

In combination, these tools will help Reddit improve its understanding and targeting tools, which will facilitate more targeted ad campaigns, based on real-time engagement and activity.

And with over 100,000 active and engaged Reddit communities, focused on a wide range of topics, that could be very helpful in detecting the latest discussions of relevance for your brand and products.

It’ll be interesting to see how Reddit’s overall ad system evolves in the next few months, as it works to merge its acquisitions into a more focused process.