Ever felt that your AI-generated “perfect audience” is just a bunch of strangers?
The robots are learning to read the room: Reddit just launched Max campaigns, a new automated ad type designed to give you efficiency while still keeping your audience transparent.
If you’ve been burned by Google’s and Meta’s Performance Max’s black-box approach, Reddit’s hoping you’ll appreciate automation that still shows you who is engaging and why.
Early alpha tests showed 17% lower CPA and 27% more conversions, which is promising.
The bigger differentiator is Top Audience Personas, which surfaces conversation signals to guide your creative strategy instead of just giving you high-level metrics.
Meanwhile, the rest of PPC had its most chaotic year ever: According to a panel of experts at SMX Next, 2025 broke records for the sheer volume of platform updates. But what worked?
Google finally listened regarding channel reporting for Performance Max, but also kept rolling out AI features that advertisers can’t fully control.
The advertisers who won in 2025 weren’t the ones chasing every shiny new feature, but the ones who went back to basics.
Proper campaign structure, quality signals, and authentic user-generated content outperformed polished AI-generated assets.
No matter what launches this year, feeding high-quality signals into automated systems will always beat letting the machines guess.
