Meet the Retailer: A Global Fashion House Scaling Across Europe

Our Client Partner is a global lifestyle and apparel retailer with a strong Gen Z and millennial following, known for a distinctive aesthetic that blends trend-led fashion with home, beauty, and lifestyle products. While the brand's largest market remains North America, Europe has become an increasingly important growth engine: the retailer has been steadily expanding its European store footprint, opening new locations across markets like Spain and the UK even as parts of the broader retail sector have pulled back from physical retail.

Alongside store expansion, digital channels have been a key part of the brand's European growth strategy, with online and app-based sales contributing meaningfully to comparable sales growth. As the brand's EMEA presence matures, marketing leadership has prioritized diversifying media investment beyond the usual paid social and paid search mix, testing newer channels that reach engaged, culturally-plugged-in audiences before they've fully committed to a search or shopping journey.

Reddit, with its highly engaged, interest-based communities, emerged as one such channel, particularly for reaching audiences discussing fashion, home decor, and lifestyle trends in dedicated subreddits.

The Growth Challenge: Scaling a New Channel Without Sacrificing Efficiency

Our Client Partner's EMEA team faced a familiar challenge for a maturing e-commerce brand: growth on established channels was starting to plateau, and the marketing mix was becoming overly reliant on a small number of platforms. Leadership wanted to test Reddit Ads as an incremental growth channel, but with two conditions:

1. New audience acquisition had to be additive, not cannibalistic: any Reddit investment needed to reach shoppers who weren't already being efficiently served by existing channels. ‍

2. Performance had to hold up against existing benchmarks: a new channel test only earns a larger budget if it can demonstrate purchase volume and return on ad spend (ROAS) comparable to, or better than, the incumbent mix.

This meant the campaign structure and creative approach couldn't simply mirror what was working on Meta or Google. Reddit's audience behaves differently: communities are skeptical of anything that reads as a traditional ad, and content that feels native to the platform consistently outperforms polished, brand-forward creative.

Our Strategy: A Full-Funnel Reddit Ads Approach

We built the Reddit Ads program around two core principles: match campaign objective to funnel stage, and let creative format do the work each stage needs.

Campaign Structure: Awareness, Prospecting, and Conversion Working Together

Budget was allocated across four campaign types, each designed to answer a different question in the funnel:

· Awareness/Freeform: Used broad, unpolished creative to maximize qualified reach among new audiences who hadn't yet engaged with the brand.

· Prospecting Catalog: Dynamic product ads aimed at driving conversion from cold audiences, built to stay relevant as product sets change.

· Prospecting Conversion: The largest share of budget, optimized purely for purchases from audiences already showing intent.

· Prospecting Traffic: Focused on driving qualified clicks with curiosity-driven, native-feeling creative designed to earn attention without reading as a traditional ad.

A key structural decision, following Reddit's own platform guidance, was to combine ad sets targeting similar audiences rather than fragmenting budget across near-duplicate segments. This reduced internal competition for the same users and gave the algorithm cleaner signal to optimize against.

We also deliberately kept Traffic and Conversion creative distinct, rather than reusing the same assets across objectives. Traffic campaigns leaned into curiosity-driven, native-feeling content designed to earn a click; Conversion campaigns used clearer product and offer messaging designed to close the sale.

Creative Format Testing: Video for Reach, Static and Carousel for Conversion

In parallel with campaign structure, we tested four creative formats to understand which worked best at each funnel stage, following Reddit's best-practice guidance of running 3–7 ads per campaign to avoid fatigue while giving the algorithm enough variation to optimize:

· Static Image: Used as the primary conversion-driving format. It performed best when it looked native to a Reddit feed rather than like a polished ad, so we kept the creative pool rotating to avoid fatigue.

· Carousel: Used to showcase multiple products at a lower cost per click than static creative. We led with the strongest product on the first card and kept sets tight at 3–5 cards to maintain momentum through the swipe.

· Freeform Video: Tested as an upper-funnel reach and engagement format. Because content that reads as an ad tends to get skipped or downvoted on Reddit, we shifted freeform video toward a blog-post style format that blended into organic discussion threads rather than a traditional promotional cut.

· Collection Image: Used to display several products within a single unit, on the hypothesis that showing more of the range would raise the odds of matching a shopper's specific intent and support a higher order value.

Results: What the Full-Funnel Approach Delivered for Reddit Ads

Bringing campaign structure and creative testing together produced a media plan where every stage of the funnel had a clearly defined job. (Figures below are anonymized: absolute volumes have been withheld, while performance rates and relative shares, the metrics that demonstrate what worked, are reported as measured.)

By campaign type:

· Awareness/Freeform (19% of spend) delivered efficient qualified reach among new audiences at a 2.32% CTR and a £5.47 CPM.

· Prospecting Catalog (20% of spend) achieved a 6.32% conversion rate (CVR) at a low frequency of 1.13, a sign the audience wasn't oversaturated.

· Prospecting Conversion (42% of spend) delivered the highest purchase volume of any campaign type while maintaining a strong 14.15% CVR.

· Prospecting Traffic (19% of spend) achieved the platform's strongest CTR (3.03%) and lowest CPC (£0.51) of any campaign type, evidence of highly engaging creative and strong audience resonance.

By creative format:

The pattern that emerged was clear: video drove upper-funnel reach and engagement efficiently, while static and carousel formats converted best mid-to-lower funnel.

· Static Image drove the clear majority of purchases and the highest ROAS (3.96x) of any format tested.

· Carousel delivered solid returns (2.45x ROAS) at a CPC 21% lower than Static Image (£1.13 vs. £1.43).

· Freeform Video produced the lowest CPC (£0.24) and highest CTR (2.32%) of any format, though these clicks functioned more like post-opens than purchase intent.

· Collection Image returned a respectable 2.11x ROAS while producing the highest average order value (£65.24) of any format tested.

Reddit Ads ROI: Business Impact and Lessons for Fashion E-Commerce Brands

For Our Client Partner, the test validated Reddit Ads as a genuinely incremental channel for EMEA growth — one capable of reaching qualified new audiences at healthy efficiency, rather than simply competing with existing channels for the same shoppers.

The broader lessons apply well beyond this one brand and are relevant for any e-commerce marketer evaluating Reddit as a channel:

1. Match creative to objective, not just to brand guidelines. Traffic and Conversion creative should be built separately, each optimized for the action it's actually asking the audience to take.

2. Consolidate audiences before you fragment budget. Combining ad sets with overlapping audiences, per Reddit's own guidance, reduces internal competition and gives the algorithm cleaner signal.

3. Format has a funnel role. Video is an efficient reach and engagement tool; static image and carousel formats are the stronger converters. Treating all formats as interchangeable underuses the channel.

4. Native beats polished. Across every format tested, creative that read as native to Reddit's communities, rather than as a traditional ad, consistently outperformed more conventional brand advertising.

5. Rotate creative to manage fatigue. Running within Reddit's recommended 3–7 ads per campaign, and refreshing top-performing formats like Static Image regularly, protected performance over the life of the campaign.

Relevant insights

· Case study: How Diesel and Crealytics Scaled Search Through Smarter Automation

· Case study: Lands’ End Blends CLV With Google Smart Bidding

‍· Article: Aiming for high ROAS won’t help. Why?

About Crealytics

Crealytics is an award-winning full-funnel digital marketing agency fueling the profitable growth of over 100 well-known B2C and B2B businesses, including ASOS, The Hut Group, Staples and Urban Outfitters. A global company with an inclusive team of 100+ international employees, we operate from our hubs in Berlin, New York, Chicago, London, and Mumbai.